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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert.
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I m Dan Markovits and I m joined by Lily Markovits.
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In this scenario, are we his brother and sister?
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Parents.
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Wow.
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Wouldn t you be proud if Daniel was your baby boy?
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So proud.
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I like this man so much.
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I don t know if he ll listen, but if he listens, I want him to hear right now.
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I so enjoyed meeting him.
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It s crazy.
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I want to go to his house as a dinner guest and I want him to come to my house as a dinner guest.
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I think that could happen.
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OK.
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If you re listening, Daniel, invite me to your house for dinner.
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And me!
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Yes, invite us to your dinner.
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Yeah.
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Daniel Markovits is a professor at Yale Law School, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Private Law, and a bestselling author.
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I know I ve referenced the meritocracy trap a bunch of times leading up to this.
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Yeah.
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I was inspired to read that from an article.
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We get into all that.
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And Daniel s just one of the most thoughtful, smart humans we ve ever talked to.
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His books include A Modern Legal Ethics, Contract Law and Legal Methods, and the book that we are here to talk about, The Meritocracy Trap.
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Really important subject.
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Yes.
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Once it gets in your head, it s not unlike the Sapolsky stuff.
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It s like, can t really unsee it.
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Can t unsee it.
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As I ve been telling you, I ve been listening to the Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson biography and it s just in there a bunch.
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This is very, very present everywhere.
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It is.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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Well, please enjoy Daniel Markovits.
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That was a flight killer.
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Oh, it was totally easy.
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I mean, among other things, I flew into Burbank.
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Oh, we love a Burbank flight.
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Right, like, I mean, on the one hand, when you re there, it s not, like, nice.
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But on the other hand, it s as easy as a bus station, right?
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And I m flying out of Burbank tonight, too.
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Oh, but it s so much easier.
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It s so much easier.
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Little airports are, like, the greatest thing.
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Exactly.
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Hello!
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How are you?
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Nice to meet you.
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Dax.
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Yes.
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Nice to meet you.
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Fellow tall guy club.
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Yeah.
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Well, sort of.
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6 3 ?
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6 4 , maybe.
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6 4 !
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But my brother s 6 6 1⁄2 , so I feel like... Oh!
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You know?
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So you re the little brother.
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He s my younger brother, too, so that s rough.
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And he s a much better basketball player than I am, too, so...
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Do you go by Dan or Daniel?
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Typically Daniel, but whatever you guys want is cool with me.
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Interestingly, I go by Dan and I m not even named Daniel or Dan.
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I love here.
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It s like Hogwarts.
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That s what I said.
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Did you?
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Yeah.
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It s very old school.
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It s very cool vintage.
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Yeah, I picture, well, a manuscript inside that was written on a typewriter.
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You know, it used to be.
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Now it s just got my running shoes.
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Oh, wonderful.
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Do you collect this kind of thing, like antique-y?
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No, I just use it till it wears out, and then I buy another one.
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You would agree this is an unconventional carrying case in 2023.
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Yes, but it is perfect.
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It exactly is carry-on size on every airline.
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Oh, wonderful.
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And you probably know this as a tall guy.
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It s nice to have the wheelie ones, but they re too short for me.
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Oh, yes, yes, yes, I do struggle with that a bit.
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If it s not that heavy, it s easier just to carry it.
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Yeah, I would agree with that.
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But you also have really nice leather boots on, because I m feeling like you actually love leather.
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Well, I like old things.
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I like things that last.
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OK, where do you think that comes from?
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That s a good question.
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My parents probably did.
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Okay.
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Were they antiquity type people?
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Yeah, kind of antiquity type people, but also we moved around a huge amount when I was a kid.
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Why?
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They were both academics, but my mother s from Germany.
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Oh, wonderful.
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Came to the US when she got married to my father.
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So we have sort of roots over there and she likes being over there.
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So we moved back and forth every year.
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Oh, really?
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Yeah.
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So I went to like 10 schools before going to college.
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Oh my goodness.
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What city in Germany would you be going to?
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Well, some in Germany.
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So in Germany, we went to Berlin, but also to Flensburg.
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But hold on, you went to Berlin pre-91, fall of the wall.
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Yes, totally.
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Wow.
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I lived in Berlin, 85, 86, when the Chernobyl disaster happened.
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No!
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Would you go to Checkpoint Charlie and just scope it out, or were you too young?
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No, I would go to the east a lot.
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Wait, you were allowed- So you were allowed over.
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Actually, as an American passport holder, because of the treaty that ended the Second World War, you had the freedom of the city.
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So the Russians couldn t keep you out.
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And so you could go over, but others could go over too.
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You had to change 25 Westmarks for 25 Eastmarks at a one-to-one exchange rate.
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Which was not one-to-one.
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rate was really like whatever, and then you could go over there.
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There was some cool stuff you could buy.
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Like?
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Depends on what kind of a person you were.
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So there was some old East German handicraft stuff that you could still buy.
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You could buy a lot of great American jazz music, which the East Germans had decided was correct ideologically.
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Well, that was one of their tactics against capitalism.
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We had these geniuses we treated like shit.
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Exactly.
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And then the other thing is the East got the center of the former German publishing industry.
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So you could get, if you cared about this, editions of some of the great reference works.
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Were you guys math students ever or physics students as kids?
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I was on the math team, something happened in high school, but once we got on that trajectory where I was in two classes at once, pre-calc and trig or something, I was like, what am I doing?
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But do you remember the CRC handbook of chemistry and physics?
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No.
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So it was this big reference book that had all the chemical formulas and all the integration tables before the internet.
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Oh, really?
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And it was like a hundred bucks in the West and you could buy it for like 20 marks.
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In the East, because it was published partly by East German press.
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Well, the Germans pre-World War II, right, they were the high watermark of pharmacological compounds.
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They invented methamphetamine, 100% coke.
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Bayer is aspirin, Bayer is Bayon.
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Yes, and they even had MDMA that we got as a part of war reparations.
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Huh, I did not know that.
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Yeah, we seized a bunch of their chemical compounds and MDMA was in there.
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Totally interesting.
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Yeah.
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Wow, what a fascinating childhood.
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Was it lonely moving around that much?
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Well, first of all, when you re a kid, your world is the only world.
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So you don t really think that way.
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I was one of five.
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Oh, okay.
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Well, that s helpful.
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So we had one another and we played together a lot.
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What order are you in?
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I m the oldest.
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Oh, a lot of responsibility.
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Well, maybe a lot of lame is maybe a better way to put it.
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But you got good at kind of making friends quickly.
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We either do or it kills you, right?
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Yeah.
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And you got good at staying in touch with people.
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That s another thing you kind of learned how to do.
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Did you have a preference between being in Germany and the States?
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Well, I was in Germany some, the other place I was that I haven t, we spent a lot of time in England.
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That kind of explains your matriculating there.
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That s right.
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It was also kind of a compromise.
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You know, my mother s German, my father s Jewish.
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Germany in the 1970s was maybe not the most popular place.
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So England was kind of a compromise.
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Well, these leather goods feel very English.
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They do, yeah.
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So maybe it s reminiscent of that.
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We both said, or I said Hogwarts.
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Hogwarts, you said Hogwarts.
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Where did you guys grow up?
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Atlanta, Detroit, automotive industry, professional parents.
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She s going to feed right into the meritocracy trap.
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A structural engineer and a computer programmer.
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Computer programmer, yeah.
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I like Atlanta.
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It s nice.
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I feel like it s gotten nicer and nicer, but really I think it s just that the older I get, the more I go into the city when I m home.
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Cause otherwise we just stayed in the suburbs.
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It s gotten better.
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I used to go there a lot in my teen years doing car shows for General Motors and that and Nashville have both made quantum leaps forward.
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Where would you be when you were in the States?
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Austin, Texas, first Palo Alto, California, then Austin, Texas.
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Oh, we love Austin.
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Did your dad have a tech bent?
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No.
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My father is a law professor.
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My mother, I guess her job is a law professor, but she was sort of a socialist legal theorist who then became a socialist legal historian.
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Oh, no kidding.
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Because, like, it ended.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
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That is one of my earmarks.
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I m going to earmark that question for you towards the end.
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But Austin s a lovely place.
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Austin is really great.
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When I was a kid there, it was one of the places where you could live well for cheap.
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And so that meant it attracted a whole bunch of people
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who liked doing interesting and fun things, but didn t care a lot about money.
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And that made it incredibly appealing.
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And there s five universities within that.
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There s a lot of universities around there.
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There s Texas Instruments, there s all kinds of stuff there.
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I think for a while it had the largest number of books bought per person of any city in America.
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I had also heard the highest percentage of doctorate degree holders in the country.
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That could be it.
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How do you choose Yale for undergrad?
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Not very intelligently.
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I apply to a bunch of places and I go on some college tours and I had spent, when I was a child, a couple very happy years in England at Oxford when my parents were there as visitors.
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And Yale kind of looked like Oxford.
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That makes sense.
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Likely modeled after or no?
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Yeah, it is modeled after.
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I mean, to a grown-up s eye, it doesn t really look like Oxford because the stone is different, the scale is different.
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But to me, it looked like that.
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Yeah.
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And I was like, this seems like a nice place.
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So you do mathematics.
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And at that point, are you aiming at a career in math in some capacity?
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I don t think so.
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When I start college, I think I want to be a physicist, maybe.
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Okay.
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Do you have idols at this age?
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Who are my idols at this age?
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So obviously- Steve McQueen.
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Athletes, right?
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Bart Starr, Michael Jordan.
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Artist Gilmore.
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I don t know artists.
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Not a basketball player.
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George Girvin.
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Do you remember the Iceman George Girvin?
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No, that s another basketball player?
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Yeah, I used to love the fact that his nickname was instead of George the Iceman Girvin, it was the Iceman George Girvin.
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Yeah, that is preferable.
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That made a big difference to me.
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Yeah, it s almost like a big-time wrestler.
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But then also there were a bunch of scientists I had sort of
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read a little bit in the history of physics.
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So you liked Einstein and stuff, I imagine.
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Yeah, but also Niels Bohr and Faraday and Millikan.
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It s funny how this has faded in the culture s memory, but in the 70s and early 80s, the point of time at the beginning of the 20th century, when like theoretical physics was just cracking open the universe, was almost still in people s memory.
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People like Richard Feynman, who was out here, but he knew those people.
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Oppenheimers over there.
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you could almost feel like it was still vivid and human and real.
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Yes.
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And they had proven themselves at their apex effectiveness with the atom bomb.
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Yeah.
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This isn t theoretical.
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This just won a war.
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And also there was this sense, I think it s kind of still the sense, although I don t really keep up with this stuff,
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that a lot of the theories they developed was, this is the way it actually is.
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Finally.
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Right.
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I think one of the problems, I m not a physicist, that physics is having right now, theoretical physics, is that people still think that that s the way it actually is.
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And so it s kind of hard for people to make deep, profound breakthroughs.
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There are some problems that no one can solve and people think if someone could solve them, then we could take a real leap forward.
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But right now it s just filling in gaps and doing little things a little bit better.
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Yeah, we ve reached the limit of our instruments.
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We can t really measure more or sample more.
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We are going to need a new idea, I think, but I don t really know, obviously.
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Right.
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Medicine has that problem a little bit, too, I think, where it s like, no, we already figured out cholesterol.
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We know what causes it.
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Too many egg yolks.
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And then people just refuse to hear any outside information.
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It s like, no, we already know.
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We already did that.
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We ve wasted enough time.
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And we understand about DNA, and we ve mapped the genome.
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The other book that I remember reading as a kid, The Double Helix, the book about how partly they steal the idea from a woman who doesn t get credit.
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As it should be.
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Setting that part aside, there was this idea, oh my God.
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We now understand how life reproduces itself.
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This thing that seems like it s different from everything else, we now have a sense that it s kind of on a continuum with everything else.
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And it s just amazing.
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Yep.
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But we also then get myopically focused on this thing, DNA, and we re kind of ignoring the epigenome or ignoring everything that now we re starting to look at.
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Turns out to be really a big deal.
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Now, I have no business having this theory because I m not smart enough to have it and I m not a physicist, but I do wonder out loud sometimes if the essential flaw of it all is that we are still singularly focused on a truth.
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or a law, we re looking for that one unifying thing that will allow us to predict everything.
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And I find that to be the problem in almost any academic pursuit, which is there s the belief that there s one thing as opposed to maybe everything s on a continuum of some sort.
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I don t know, I don t know if we re chasing the wrong thing.
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Does that make any sense, what I m saying?
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Yeah, you know, there s the natural world and then there s the human world.
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And I think you might even be right about the natural world, but in the natural world,
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There s some reason to be attracted to the idea that a good explanation is a simple explanation.
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Right.
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Occam s razor.
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Exactly.
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But in the human world, not sure that s attractive at all.
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Or useful, right?
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Yeah, right.
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So think about morality or ethics.
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The Greeks had this idea, the unity of the virtues, that the virtues should all fit together.
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If you have one virtue, you have to have them all.
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Otherwise, you can t have even that one.
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There s a structure to them.
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Does that mean that they weren t making room for contradiction within the virtues?
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They weren t making room for contradiction.
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They weren t making room for the fact that you could be really good in one way and really bad in other ways.
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And even more than that, they weren t making room for the possibility that to have one virtue is to foreclose others.
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I have a very dear friend who for a while was a prosecutor, an unbelievably just and upright man.
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But he could also be merciless.
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And to be just requires you sometimes to be merciless.
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And if you re too merciful, then you re going to feel for someone and not do what justice requires.
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And it s not that one is more important than the other.
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They re both important.
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You can t have them at once.
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That s a little bit what s maddening about the left-right political debate is simply both virtues need to be explored and at best it s going to be some ratio that we like in that day, which will also evolve.
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We re trying to service a couple of ideals in this country that are contradictory in some way.
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Equality, happiness for all, yet liberty.
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Liberty and equality are so often at odds.
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I think liberty and equality are often deeply at odds.
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In the academic tradition, there was a philosopher named Ronald Dworkin who thought they all fit together.
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Really quick, Monica, if you haven t already figured out, not did he just do mathematics, but he ended up picking up some philosophy PhD.
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So we ve transitioned into philosophy.
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I know, which I prefer over math, just personally.
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Well, me too.
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Okay.
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Okay, sorry I interrupted you.
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I know, but so he thought they all fit together, and he thought he had an account of how they all fit together.
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And I just think that can t possibly be true.
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If you live in the world, you see that when you give people freedom, including even things like this hot button issue right now, freedom of speech, you give people freedom of speech,
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they re going to start saying things that are going to be both immoral and deeply offensive and also harmful to some other people.
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And if they get to say them too loudly and too often, it s going to exclude those other people in some meaningful way.
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And there s going to be a tension now between liberty and equality.
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And my view is reasonable people can disagree about how to resolve that tension.
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Well, they re very hard to weigh.
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It s like, even if you committed to a utilitarian approach to it, to even measure what harm will be prevented by having free speech against what is now currently known as harm that it s causing, the future is so unknown.
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Everything that we now, I say this all the time when my wife and I are talking about it, it s like, any ideal you have currently, at some point, was an anthem to what the state wanted.
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The notion that we re going to come to some
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set of ideals and morality that are going to stand the test of time is preposterous.
1
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And we have to have a door open for you to come out and go, hey, gay people aren t actually spawn of Satan.
1
SPEAKER_02
But that at one time would have been so dangerous.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think it also goes the other way around, which is that when we look at people in the past who held views and expressed views that we today rightly regard as not just offensive, but cruel and malign and depraved, there are still lots of reasons to pay attention to what those people said and did.
1
SPEAKER_01
They had a lot of other wisdom, a lot of other skill, even greatness.
1
SPEAKER_01
And the future will look on us as we look on them.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s so arrogant for us to be like, oh my God, look at them.
1
SPEAKER_00
We shouldn t listen.
1
SPEAKER_00
The same thing s going to happen.
1
SPEAKER_02
And to throw out everything they said.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_02
That just happened recently where it was like,
1
SPEAKER_02
Well, hold on.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yes, this person s a scumbag, but additionally, they were brilliant at this.
1
SPEAKER_02
That s what I think is interesting.
1
SPEAKER_02
This is a total sidebar, but I think we ve already spoken and I don t know that it s the right verdict.
1
SPEAKER_02
So we have decided.
1
SPEAKER_02
that art should be thrown out and that scientific breakthroughs should be upheld.
1
SPEAKER_02
If we find out Einstein was molesting children, we re keeping the theory of relativity, but if Cosby s a rapist, that shows gone forever.
1
SPEAKER_02
And I m not arguing that we should keep it, but I m just observing that one thing we think you can overlook the creator of it.
1
SPEAKER_02
And another thing was a really, we re just saying we value science more than art, in my opinion.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, maybe.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think Cosby is a hard case for the following reason.
1
SPEAKER_01
So much of his arts appeal was connected to Bill Cosby s personal appeal.
1
SPEAKER_01
Totally agree.
1
SPEAKER_02
He s a bad example.
1
SPEAKER_02
I would say Picasso would be a better example.
1
SPEAKER_01
Picasso I think was terrible to women.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I don t think we re going to throw Picasso out.
1
SPEAKER_01
And Shakespeare was an anti-Semite and I m sure was a racist.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I don t think we re going to throw Shakespeare out.
1
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_01
These are great counters.
1
SPEAKER_01
Do you agree, though, that art is- Much more vulnerable.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s partly because we re much more, both rightly and wrongly, insecure about the humanities.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_02
We don t really know if we think it s a worthy pursuit.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think the way in which we re rightly insecure
1
SPEAKER_01
is that because the humanities are so deeply entwined with our culture and our tradition, valuing the conventional humanities does mean that we re going to continue to exclude all kinds of other cultures and traditions that the dominant tradition just oppressed.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so we have good reason for a kind of a skepticism about the inherited wisdom in the humanities, because we want to open ourselves up
1
SPEAKER_01
to a whole series of voices that that wisdom was keeping out.
1
SPEAKER_01
Surely, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
But on the other hand, that doesn t mean they re not vital and central, and it doesn t mean that the inherited tradition isn t great.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it s very hard, I think, to balance those things.
1
SPEAKER_02
Well, but you find out the inventor of penicillin was, again, a serial killer.
1
SPEAKER_02
We re still going to use penicillin.
1
SPEAKER_02
I would argue Michael Jackson s making a billion people happy a day.
1
SPEAKER_02
I hate what he did, but it s to me as impactful on this planet as penicillin might be.
1
SPEAKER_01
I had a friend years ago who used to talk about different kinds of art and his view was that there s certain kind of art that just has an immediate happiness impact.
1
SPEAKER_01
So Michael Jackson s music is like that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_01
Often music is like that.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so for that kind of art, it s a little bit like penicillin in that it just undeniably
2
SPEAKER_02
reliably works.
2
SPEAKER_02
You don t need training, you don t need to develop your taste, and that s hard to throw out.
2
SPEAKER_02
But there s other kind of art, which I think is just as profound and great, that you really do have to teach yourself to understand and like.
2
SPEAKER_02
And if that kind of art is produced by somebody who is in some way or other depraved,
2
SPEAKER_02
And the depravity is somehow connected to the art.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s the Cosby example.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s hard to watch that man be joyful.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can t like it anymore.
2
SPEAKER_01
Agreed.
2
SPEAKER_01
He is the piece of art.
2
SPEAKER_01
It just becomes much harder.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, because it s not like you re watching and you re like, oh, I feel bad watching.
2
SPEAKER_00
You actually feel bad watching.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like your body doesn t like it anymore.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then it becomes easy.
2
SPEAKER_00
I would say I also think part of it is
2
SPEAKER_00
ego.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think when we see a painting, and this is so wrong, I don t know why our brains do this, we think, I bet there s a world in which I could do something like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re always a little suspicious that we might all have been fooled by this.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s just lines.
2
SPEAKER_00
I could do that maybe, but I definitely can t create penicillin.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like we re smart enough to know that we have limitations in science, but we think we can make art.
2
SPEAKER_02
Is that maybe because you re just good at art?
2
SPEAKER_00
No, I m horrible at art.
2
SPEAKER_00
So actually I don t, I look at things and I don t understand.
2
SPEAKER_00
I see it.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m like, I could never do that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right, but I m guilty of this.
2
SPEAKER_01
Until I had gone to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and stood in the room where he had made an exact replica of a very realist painting and then morphed it over the series of six paintings into cubism, until that moment I was like, I don t know, cubism is just kids fucking drawing.
2
SPEAKER_01
I guess that s a side of a face, but.
2
SPEAKER_01
It took me actually seeing that to give it up.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I ve been guilty.
2
SPEAKER_01
I can see that.
2
SPEAKER_00
And with art versus I m on the same page, but if I m going to step in the shoes of someone who s like, no, no more Michael Jackson to them, it s because we have so many other options of things to listen to.
2
SPEAKER_00
Whereas in science, you wouldn t say, I guess we re throwing out penicillin because there isn t an equal to that.
2
SPEAKER_00
We have to have it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I also, for the record, understand when the artist is still alive and profiting and you re potentially fueling their abuse.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s like a side, like if Michael Jackson was still alive, I think I might have a different opinion.
2
SPEAKER_01
But at this point in Picasso and all these flawed people.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, you take a very circuitous route.
2
SPEAKER_01
After Yale, you go to the London School of Economics, and then you do find your way to Oxford, and you pick up all these different degrees.
2
SPEAKER_01
You have a master s in economics, and then philosophy hits you, and then you end up going back to Yale and studying law.
2
SPEAKER_01
and then clerking for somebody, which then results with you becoming a law professor of all things.
2
SPEAKER_01
Do you feel like you re tying in all these things?
2
SPEAKER_02
So this is a little embarrassing, but that was the plan.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s wonderful.
2
SPEAKER_02
Getting an academic job can t be a plan.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s a hope, but the market is rough and irrational.
2
SPEAKER_02
So it couldn t have been a plan to end up with the particular job that I have.
2
SPEAKER_02
But I had this sense, so you asked me about math and science, like I was interested in it, but two things happened.
2
SPEAKER_02
One is I had a conversation with somebody whom I just kind of like knew through a chain of things, who was a physicist who had won a Nobel Prize.
2
SPEAKER_02
And he told this story about being at a dinner next to Linus Pauling, who is like one of the great physicists of all time.
2
SPEAKER_02
And Pauling says to him, so what are you working on?
2
SPEAKER_02
And he starts describing the problem he s working on.
2
SPEAKER_02
And Pauling turns to him and says, you know, I thought about that problem for an afternoon about 20 years ago.
2
SPEAKER_02
And it seemed to me that what you needed to do was this and this, and everybody had been thinking about it wrong.
2
SPEAKER_02
And the guy who was telling the story said, you know, it had taken me a year to get to the point that Pauling just described as thinking through in an afternoon and then setting aside because it wasn t interesting enough.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, is that totally demoralizing?
2
SPEAKER_02
And that was just demoralizing to me because I was like, I m not any Nobel Prize winning physicist.
2
SPEAKER_02
And the idea that you could be one of the great physicists and then an even greater physicist could like do your life s work in an afternoon.
2
SPEAKER_02
I was like, I m out.
2
SPEAKER_02
And the other thing, and this I think depends on your character, if you re a mathematician or a physicist.
2
SPEAKER_02
your work life and the rest of your life are totally separate.
2
SPEAKER_02
So the things that you think about on your job have no relationship or bearing.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, like at a dinner party, you re a drag.
2
SPEAKER_02
At a dinner party, yeah, unless you re otherwise very interesting, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
But also just the kind of things that I do now.
2
SPEAKER_02
So I write, for example, about contract law and the nature of promises.
2
SPEAKER_02
I have kids and they ask me to make them promises.
2
SPEAKER_02
And it s sort of interesting to me, like, when do they ask for promises?
2
SPEAKER_02
When do they not?
2
SPEAKER_02
How do I feel when I make a promise?
2
SPEAKER_02
And so the thing that you do in your life is connected and it gives you ideas what to think.
2
SPEAKER_02
It all fits together.
2
SPEAKER_02
And that was also important to me.
2
SPEAKER_01
Do you have the protocol in your house?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because it is developed in ours, which is.
2
SPEAKER_01
Let me be clear, I m not promising we re going to that restaurant tomorrow.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m saying, yes, that s an option.
2
SPEAKER_01
We ll explore it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like, I have to really delineate when I m- All the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
All the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they lie.
2
SPEAKER_01
They also go, you promised.
2
SPEAKER_01
Especially when they were younger.
2
SPEAKER_01
All the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes, yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
We re in that stage right now, 8 and 10.
2
SPEAKER_02
Kids love promises.
2
SPEAKER_01
They love promises.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, they know it s a mortal sin to break.
2
SPEAKER_01
They leverage it.
2
SPEAKER_02
So I think it s not just that, I think it s actually really profound in the following sense.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re the parent, and so you re going to determine what happens.
2
SPEAKER_02
And even if you promise, you re still going to determine what happens.
2
SPEAKER_02
And they know that.
2
SPEAKER_02
But if you promise, they can t determine what happens, but it s up to them what should happen.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so they have a kind of authority over you.
2
SPEAKER_02
And as kids grow up, they want to
2
SPEAKER_02
Be like the authority figure.
2
SPEAKER_02
Control.
2
SPEAKER_02
And not just control about what will happen, but control about what s right and wrong.
2
SPEAKER_02
When you promise, you give them that kind of respect.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_02
So you re entering into a contract, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
And they care about the respect, not just the ice cream that you promised.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I think that s why they really care about promises.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s a good thing to remind yourself as a parent.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re not actually flipping out about the ice cream, they re flipping out about the injustice that you broke this contract.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we all have a deep sense of justice.
2
SPEAKER_00
You hope your kids have a sense of justice.
2
SPEAKER_01
I only have one measly degree in anthropology, but I know about justice.
2
SPEAKER_02
What kind of anthropology did you do?
2
SPEAKER_01
Cultural, unfortunately.
2
SPEAKER_01
I did so many electives in physical and I probably just should have done physical.
2
SPEAKER_02
I m getting totally interested in anthropology these days and sociology.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s having a real moment.
2
SPEAKER_01
One of the things that annoyed me about anthropology, I ve said it on here before, is there wasn t in 2000 when I graduated much application for it.
2
SPEAKER_01
You could go and be culturally relative and understand how a system works and that was about it.
2
SPEAKER_01
You couldn t advise.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I think there s a host of people that are starting to synthesize many different disciplines.
2
SPEAKER_01
And somehow when that happens, Anthro is really required.
2
SPEAKER_01
We go back to like, what were we designed to do?
2
SPEAKER_01
And how is this matching up with what we re doing?
2
SPEAKER_01
I think it becomes a really quintessential ingredient into this.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, also it feels like, and you ll know this better than I do, but for a long time anthropology was connected in a certain way to colonialism, and it was the study of the exotic other.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s increasingly becoming the study of us.
2
SPEAKER_02
And in the study of us, it both has less baggage, but also it s a really powerful way of understanding what the hell s going on around here.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, why are we doing all this stuff we do?
2
SPEAKER_01
What is the vestigial thing that we re being driven by still?
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so how does all this lead to studying meritocracy?
2
SPEAKER_02
in three ways.
2
SPEAKER_02
The first is, whenever we moved around when I was a kid, I always went to whatever school the local state assigned me to.
2
SPEAKER_02
And in Austin, I graduated from a high school, which was a public high school inside Austin, was not the fancy public high school.
2
SPEAKER_02
And the kids I went to high school with were just as smart and interesting and creative as the kids I went to law school with, but they didn t get as good jobs and they didn t end up as rich and they didn t have the same amount of status.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I was trying to figure out, that s obvious in some sense, but what s not obvious is understanding exactly why and how.
2
SPEAKER_01
All the mechanisms.
2
SPEAKER_02
And also why the gap has grown and is growing.
2
SPEAKER_01
So survivor s guilt, number one.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, or maybe also just the fact that when you study promising and your kids make promises, you find that interesting.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so also reflecting on your own experience.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_02
The only reason I m resisting survivor s guilt is that my friends from high school are doing fine.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, because it sounds pitying and you don t want to do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s not the view I have of them.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it s fair, I think, because I have tremendous survivor s guilt of my friends all growing up
2
SPEAKER_01
So many of them had enormous potential, equal to mine.
2
SPEAKER_01
For numerous reasons, they didn t realize any of that.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s okay for me to not assess where their station in life is and feel compassion, but rather what they wanted.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, if everyone you went to school with in Austin is exactly where they wanted to be, great.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s not true.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the other side of this is also true.
2
SPEAKER_02
There are lots of ways in which my friends from high school, you know, they re not as rich.
2
SPEAKER_02
They don t get as much respect from strangers.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re not an armchair expert.
2
SPEAKER_02
There you are.
2
SPEAKER_02
There you are.
2
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yet.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yet.
2
SPEAKER_01
We don t know.
2
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_02
But if I think about the people I went to law school with or my students now, there are a bunch of ways in which my friends from high school are doing better.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right.
2
SPEAKER_01
Joke s on us often.
2
SPEAKER_02
They re not as stressed.
2
SPEAKER_02
They have hobbies.
2
SPEAKER_01
They might be closer with their children.
2
SPEAKER_02
They live close to their parents.
2
SPEAKER_02
So I wanted to understand that side of it too.
2
SPEAKER_01
Maybe questioning your own destination or where you landed and is this everything I thought?
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I should be very clear.
2
SPEAKER_02
In my case, although I did not go to a particularly fancy or privileged high school, my parents were both professors, and so I did not come from a hardscrabble background.
2
SPEAKER_02
So it s not a question of like my own journey.
2
SPEAKER_02
My own journey is pretty boring.
2
SPEAKER_02
Child of professors becomes a professor.
2
SPEAKER_02
Pretty standard.
2
SPEAKER_02
Nobody s writing a novel about that.
3
SPEAKER_02
satire.
3
SPEAKER_01
Only a satire.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
But in your own mind, you had fantasies of what a law professor at Yale would be.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then you arrive there and you go, I m grateful for this.
3
SPEAKER_01
I enjoy this.
3
SPEAKER_01
But you evaluate a little bit, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_02
I wonder if this is something, especially when I was younger, I was a great admirer of certain thinkers.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I had this feeling that when they had finished their great book, they sort of had this sense,
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I ve done it.
3
SPEAKER_02
This is what it s like.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I would tell this to my wife and say, you know, I bet you the next morning they got up and they were kind of confused and they kind of thought, ah, I don t think that s quite right.
3
SPEAKER_02
Or I didn t really understand what I was doing.
3
SPEAKER_02
Your wife would say that?
3
SPEAKER_01
Or you would say that?
3
SPEAKER_01
She would say that.
3
SPEAKER_01
She would say that.
3
SPEAKER_02
You re wrong.
3
SPEAKER_02
They don t have this moment of purity and epiphany.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, they look in the mirror and they re like, fuck, is that tooth rot?
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, all that thing, right?
3
SPEAKER_02
Their back hurts.
3
SPEAKER_02
They got indigestion.
3
SPEAKER_02
Their wife s pissed.
3
SPEAKER_02
Plus they read back on their book and like, oh man, I screwed that up.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so I think that may be just the human condition.
3
SPEAKER_02
Very much so.
3
SPEAKER_02
Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
3
SPEAKER_02
What was the third thing that you think?
3
SPEAKER_02
Oh, the third was much more academic, which is that I had written some papers in a particular philosophical tradition about economic inequality.
3
SPEAKER_01
Have you read The Broken Ladder by chance?
3
SPEAKER_01
No.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sounds like I should have.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s an incredible book about income inequality that I probably would have rejected before I read it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s one of my favorite books I ve ever read.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I will get it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s really, really good.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m embarrassed I don t know the fucking author.
3
SPEAKER_01
Keith Payne.
3
SPEAKER_01
Keith Payne?
3
SPEAKER_01
Keith Payne.
3
SPEAKER_01
Fuck!
3
SPEAKER_01
Boom!
3
SPEAKER_01
I ll get that on my Kindle for the flight home.
3
SPEAKER_01
Can I tempt your palate for one second?
3
SPEAKER_01
It talks about all this flight data.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m going to mess these numbers up, but you ll get the gist of it.
3
SPEAKER_01
In airplanes where people board and walk through first class on their way to coach, those flights have like a 5x incident rate of physical violence on the plane.
3
SPEAKER_01
If they enter in the middle and you can see first class had left, but you turn right and go, it s like two X. And if there s no class, it s just like, this is just black and white data.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the point he makes, which I love is you would be tempted to frame this as a case of the haves versus the have nots, but it s important to recognize these are all haves.
3
SPEAKER_01
These are people that are already on an airplane.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
And also flying coach,
3
SPEAKER_02
is actually fine.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yes, if you don t know about first, it s great.
3
SPEAKER_02
If you don t know about first class, you know, it s kind of annoying and your feet hurt.
3
SPEAKER_02
If you re tall, you re kind of jammed in.
3
SPEAKER_02
But nobody would call this suffering.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not horseback across the dust bowl.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s just relative.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just relative.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the book makes a great case.
3
SPEAKER_01
It says that relativity is so important in this mix that people who are above the poverty line but live right next to great wealth have lower health outcomes, lower educational attainment,
3
SPEAKER_01
than people who are objectively below the poverty line, but surrounded by other people.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s like, well, that s a head fuck, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
There are these two books by Pickett and someone else, The Spirit Level and The Inner Level, which are also books about the effect of inequality in itself.
3
SPEAKER_02
both on individual lives and consciousnesses and on social organizations.
3
SPEAKER_02
Inequality is bad, it turns out.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s almost maddening to me.
3
SPEAKER_01
What I hate about it is, largely, it s in our minds.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s what s so frustrating, because it s like, how do you combat something like that?
3
SPEAKER_01
You could give someone a $300,000 income, and they d be less happy living next to a billionaire than someone living on a... That s maddening to me.
3
SPEAKER_02
In some sense, it sounds like a banality to say inequality is bad.
3
SPEAKER_02
But another way to think about it is this.
3
SPEAKER_02
Imagine you have a society in which there are a bunch of people who make $50,000 a year, and there are a bunch of people who make $100,000 a year.
3
SPEAKER_02
And now you ve got an extra million dollars to give out.
3
SPEAKER_02
It seems as though there may be lots of reasons to give it to the people with $50,000.
3
SPEAKER_02
But supposing you can t do that.
3
SPEAKER_02
Supposing your only choice is give it to the people with $100,000 or burn it.
3
SPEAKER_02
It seems like it s obvious you should give it to the people with $100,000.
3
SPEAKER_02
Because you re helping somebody, you re hurting nobody, but it turns out maybe you should burn it.
3
SPEAKER_02
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_02
Really?
3
SPEAKER_02
Because maybe if you give it to the people with $100,000, it ll make the people with $50,000 miserable.
3
SPEAKER_02
And maybe also in the medium run, and certainly the long run, it won t even be good for the people who get rich.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wait, we have to talk about my white elephant.
3
SPEAKER_02
Oh yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sure, sure, sure.
3
SPEAKER_00
Last year I went to a white elephant party with a bunch of our friends, close friends.
3
SPEAKER_01
The 12th time you ve been to it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Been to it a million times.
3
SPEAKER_00
All of our friends, people who know each other well, respect each other.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s all kinds of gifts happening at this party.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can steal gifts, that s really important.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you have to bring something?
3
SPEAKER_00
Everyone brings something.
3
SPEAKER_01
You bring something and everybody takes something.
3
SPEAKER_01
You pull a number, you go pick up, you go third, you open this thing, it s a dildo, you don t want that, you pray someone will steal that.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the next person, they can either choose to open up a new present under the tree or they can steal one they ve already seen.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you want to be last.
3
SPEAKER_01
Virtually, yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
Although you can only be stolen twice and it gets locked.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s like strategic, it s fun.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s really complicated.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s really funny and fun.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s so fun and funny.
3
SPEAKER_00
And should be noted, there s no cap on price.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there s a wide range of gifts happening here.
3
SPEAKER_00
And over the course of the 12 years, these gifts have gotten crazy.
3
SPEAKER_00
There was a Dell tickets once.
3
SPEAKER_00
So
3
SPEAKER_00
It s my turn and I never want to go for a package under the tree.
3
SPEAKER_01
You prefer the known to the unknown.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I like to pick from what I ve seen out there and there were two presents out there that were cash and I took one.
3
SPEAKER_01
She also makes the most amount of money of anyone there.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s not true.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s not true.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_01
But you re in the top half of the distribution.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m in, correct.
3
SPEAKER_01
Top one percent.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, I m in the top percentage of earners, I guess, but also should be said, everyone there has money.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is doing fine.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is doing fine.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is middle class and above.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I took the money and there was an audible sound that flew across and I wanted to just throw the money back.
3
SPEAKER_01
People were repulsed.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s crazy.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then crazy stuff starts happening in your head where you re like, well, I brought this and that s more than this amount of money.
3
SPEAKER_02
I m not coming out ahead here.
3
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_00
And why is everyone so mad?
3
SPEAKER_00
I m so generous.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then you feel disgusting for having all those feelings.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it is crazy.
3
SPEAKER_01
We worked through it, and she had a right to be bummed that everyone s so mad at her for doing what she should have done strategically.
3
SPEAKER_01
But then we were like, no, just imagine Jeff Bezos is at the party and he takes the money.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re like, fuck you, Bezos.
3
SPEAKER_01
Take the dog food.
3
SPEAKER_00
You are, but also then I just don t want to go to the party because then I can t play the game like everyone else.
3
SPEAKER_02
Because you want to be able to get in the spirit.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, and the other funny thing about this, you say everybody in the party is doing fine.
3
SPEAKER_02
One of the really striking things about the kind of society that we ve built is that, by and large, for most people, there s a sense in which everybody has the same stuff.
3
SPEAKER_02
It used to be that the rich people had windows, the poor people did not.
3
SPEAKER_02
The rich people had light.
3
SPEAKER_02
Even when we were kids still, if you had a big TV, you had a TV.
3
SPEAKER_02
Everybody s got a 50-inch TV.
3
SPEAKER_02
If you look at things like the penetration of air conditioners or cars or washing machines.
3
SPEAKER_02
Cell phones.
3
SPEAKER_02
Right, all this stuff.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s not that people who don t have a lot of money or who are even poor aren t suffering.
3
SPEAKER_02
They are suffering.
3
SPEAKER_02
And the gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor is enormous and growing.
3
SPEAKER_02
But the thing that people are suffering from is no longer mostly straight material deprivation.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s so true.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s something that s like constructed by our forms of respect, our forms of power, the way in which people treat each other.
3
SPEAKER_01
Social primates, our status.
3
SPEAKER_02
Right, all these things.
3
SPEAKER_02
Whereas it used to be what the poor died of is starvation and overwork.
3
SPEAKER_02
Right.
3
SPEAKER_02
They just led totally different lives in that way.
3
SPEAKER_02
And to try to understand how that happened and what to make of it and how to respond to it is really complicated.
3
SPEAKER_01
So let s talk about the system that existed before.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let me back up.
3
SPEAKER_01
Just so you know, my father-in-law sent me the David Brooks article.
3
SPEAKER_01
I loved it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I then got your book.
3
SPEAKER_01
I listened to it on tape.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s so much data in it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was sitting down to try to remember my favorite stats.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was like, there s so much data.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s so well researched, but I was interested to learn that even this word meritocracy is only from the forties or sixties or something.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s relatively early sixties.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
relatively new, which is interesting because the country was based on a foundation of merit.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because I want to talk about what system existed before we have a meritocracy, and I just think it s even interesting we didn t even have that word until the 60s.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
In Europe, and in much of the world, we had an aristocracy.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so that was a hereditary form of privilege.
3
SPEAKER_01
in which rich people didn t work.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was gross to you, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
We watch these historical period pieces and you come to find out it s actually distasteful to work.
3
SPEAKER_02
Work was a degraded occupation.
3
SPEAKER_02
To work was to be humiliated.
3
SPEAKER_02
So when in Europe there are parties like the English Labour Party, that was like a reclaiming of a word in the same way in which, say, in our society, queer is the reclaiming of a word.
3
SPEAKER_02
It was the reclaiming of a word that was a term of degradation into a source of pride.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh right, so you would be called a laborer and that would be a slurrish.
3
SPEAKER_02
Right, or it used to be even if you were a little bit above a laborer, think about the great houses, they had the tradesman s entrance.
3
SPEAKER_02
Because if you were in trade, you couldn t go in the front door.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, you d make a mess.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think the U.S.
3
SPEAKER_02
was a lot more complicated.
3
SPEAKER_01
Wait, can we just put a couple of finer points on that?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because we re there.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so you didn t work and your wealth
4
SPEAKER_01
was predominantly land holdings.
4
SPEAKER_00
Land holdings and then at some point, eventually, it would be factories and machines and maybe certain kinds of financial instruments.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
But you would have virtually nothing to do with any of those things.
4
SPEAKER_00
Nothing to do with any of it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s really important to realize, and this is a contrast I hope we come to at some point, if you hold your wealth in that form,
4
SPEAKER_00
your wealth makes you free.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because what you can do is you can take your wealth, you mix it with other people s labor, you exploit those people, you don t pay them quite as much as they produce.
4
SPEAKER_01
You give them 10 acres of your thing, you can keep what you grow, but you gotta grow all my shit.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you just take whatever surplus they produce, and you keep it for yourself.
4
SPEAKER_00
So then you use it for whatever you feel like.
4
SPEAKER_00
That kind of wealth frees the rich person.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s really important.
4
SPEAKER_00
And the contrast to, in some ways, the wealth we have now is important.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, am I wrong in thinking that the founding fathers were kind of explicit about they didn t want a class system, they didn t want nobility, they hated aristocrats?
4
SPEAKER_01
It was intentionally set up as a merit.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_00
So, Jefferson talks about an aristocracy of talent, by which he means that people who have capacity, and he presumably also would have meant virtue and hard work, would therefore rise.
4
SPEAKER_00
Of course, you had to be male.
4
SPEAKER_00
you had to be white.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes, of course.
4
SPEAKER_00
So they didn t really believe in equality.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s just they thought all white people were aristocrats.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s actually a totally interesting way in which in that society, the relative equality among the white people was deeply connected both causally, but also imaginatively and morally to the race hierarchy.
4
SPEAKER_01
So is it true then that when slaves existed, most white people could just go, well, but I m not that.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think that there was that part of it.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was also the case that enslaved people, the opportunity for extraction was so great that white people could be relatively richer because they had the slack that they got by sucking it out of enslaved people.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they almost were landowners in a sense.
4
SPEAKER_00
In a sense.
4
SPEAKER_00
A lot of the wealth in the United States in 1820 was held in the form of enslaved people.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the South had all the money.
4
SPEAKER_00
So two points here.
4
SPEAKER_00
One, U.S.
4
SPEAKER_00
slavery gives slavery a bad name.
4
SPEAKER_00
The kind of slavery that existed in ancient Rome, for example.
4
SPEAKER_00
was much less malign than U.S.
4
SPEAKER_00
slavery.
4
SPEAKER_00
I didn t know that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because in ancient slavery, slave was a status a person could have.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you were a slave, you were a person.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that meant there were limits to what could be done to you.
4
SPEAKER_00
It meant you could buy yourself freedom, you could acquire freedom.
4
SPEAKER_00
There were slaves who were extremely wealthy.
4
SPEAKER_00
in ancient Rome, whereas in the U.S.
4
SPEAKER_00
regime, to be an enslaved person was not to be a person at all.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was to be a thing that could be owned, right, which was particularly both degrading and brutal.
4
SPEAKER_00
But it s interesting that the metropole, England, became anti-slave sooner than the United States, even though among the white population, there was much more hierarchy and inequality in England than there was in the United States.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was more of a caste system, yet they rejected that part.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a guy who s written a great book on this called Aziz Rana, who s a professor at Boston College.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s written a great book about the way in which the enslavement of imported African people was the condition of the relative equality among the white population in America.
4
SPEAKER_01
Interesting.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so we have this premise for white men.
4
SPEAKER_01
How does it evolve between 1776 and, let s say, turn of the century, 1900s?
4
SPEAKER_00
In the early years of the Republic, there s a relatively high degree of economic equality among the white population.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, when I read all these books about the tycoons and the patrician class, most of them came from nothing.
4
SPEAKER_00
So many of them came from nothing.
4
SPEAKER_00
And in the early years, they weren t that rich.
4
SPEAKER_00
By the end of the 19th century, in the Gilded Age, because they get so rich, their privilege starts getting hereditary in a certain way.
4
SPEAKER_01
OK, so that s when we find our way back into hereditary.
4
SPEAKER_00
Into something that looks a little bit like an aristocracy, which is broken in America by the stock market crash of 1929.
4
SPEAKER_00
The U.S.
4
SPEAKER_00
in the 20s actually looks a lot like the U.S.
4
SPEAKER_00
in the aughts.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s incredibly high inequality.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the concentration of income and wealth in the 1% in 1929 looks a lot like it did in 2007.
4
SPEAKER_00
And in between, it s much lower.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s highly financialized.
4
SPEAKER_00
So Wall Street is a big deal in the 20s.
4
SPEAKER_00
By the 1950s, Wall Street is not a big deal.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then in the 80s, 90s, and aughts, it becomes a big deal again.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we get that kind of U-shaped story.
4
SPEAKER_00
OK.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, some other interesting things start happening.
4
SPEAKER_01
Tell me if there s one worth mentioning before the 60s and the Vietnam draft.
4
SPEAKER_00
In a sense, the end of the Second World War and the challenge of communism is worth emphasizing in two ways.
4
SPEAKER_00
The first is, in Europe, the Second World War is really important because it destroys all the wealth.
4
SPEAKER_00
So one way in which the Second World War produces economic equality in Europe is all the rich people had all their shit destroyed.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, right.
4
SPEAKER_00
Just wiped out wealth.
4
SPEAKER_00
Destruction makes equality.
4
SPEAKER_00
In the U.S., that doesn t happen.
4
SPEAKER_00
But what happens in the U.S.
4
SPEAKER_00
is that the ideological needs of resisting communism
4
SPEAKER_00
Also coupled with the, as we said earlier on when we talked about jazz and East Berlin, the need to do something about Jim Crow produces a series of ideological shifts that start measuring people based on their accomplishments and start being a little bit more inclusive.
4
SPEAKER_00
because it s really hard to resist communism if you are, for the white population, a hereditary aristocracy, and the white population are just oppressing the black population completely.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then you have this ideology out there that s saying, wait, everybody s equal.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s not a good position for the US to be in.
4
SPEAKER_01
Is this, I ve never even thought of this, but does the narrative get propagated?
4
SPEAKER_01
Do we start selling our system more and more because we have to, because there s an alternative afoot?
4
SPEAKER_01
Like pre-Cold War and threat of communism,
4
SPEAKER_01
Was the American dream as present in media and as propagandized, or do we have any reaction to this threat where we ve got a double down on the virtues of our system?
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think, you know, Horatio Alger.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the Rags to Riches stories are present in the U.S.
4
SPEAKER_00
prior to this.
4
SPEAKER_00
But there s a certain kind of law-based, constitution-based patriotism that comes only really after the First World War.
4
SPEAKER_00
And after the Second World War, it does become important for us to start doing some things about it, to do something about race relations, partly because it was the right thing to do, but also it was felt, I think, by the elites that they had to do something.
4
SPEAKER_00
Also, the Holocaust made it hard to keep excluding Jews, who were excluded also.
4
SPEAKER_00
The need also to compete with the Soviets made it important to have a sort of hyper-capable, competent, and energetic elite.
4
SPEAKER_00
So Khrushchev says, we will bury you.
4
SPEAKER_00
And in the early years, actually, the Soviet Union, Stalin, it was not clear which economic system would prove to be dominant.
4
SPEAKER_00
Stalin brings Russia, the Soviet Union, from an agrarian
4
SPEAKER_00
peasant society into an industrial powerhouse.
4
SPEAKER_00
Into space.
4
SPEAKER_00
In one lifetime, which took capitalism a long time.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so there were serious people who thought, uh-oh, they might out-compete us.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if we re going to fight back, we need an elite that is not inbred, is not lazy.
4
SPEAKER_00
We need the best elite we can get.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so meritocracy starts producing that, too.
4
SPEAKER_01
We ve also just learned from World War II, we imported the mines we needed to win the war.
4
SPEAKER_01
We also had some very tangible proof of what that can do to have that brain trust here.
4
SPEAKER_01
They stay in Germany, we lose.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there s something to that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, now 60s come along.
4
SPEAKER_01
And Vietnam comes along and there are deferments issued for boys attending college.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I would imagine at the time, the argument would have been, we need those minds for America to compete.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right now, looking back, it s like, well, that s fucking nuts.
4
SPEAKER_01
You just basically said people that aren t smart enough to go to college or didn t have the opportunity to go to college are expendable.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s rough.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now it s pretty black and white.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, that s actually a really good point.
4
SPEAKER_00
One of the things in the Meritocracy Trap book that I underplay is the importance of the Vietnam War and of those deferments in structuring this system.
4
SPEAKER_00
Partly because one thing those deferments meant, it was suddenly incredibly valuable to go to college.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, it would save your life.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
Beforehand, you would go to college if you wanted to go because you wanted to study.
4
SPEAKER_00
You might go to college if you wanted certain jobs.
4
SPEAKER_00
But Detroit, you could get a job at GM straight out of high school.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you d worked hard and did well, you d be a tool and die maker by the time you were 45.
4
SPEAKER_00
You d have the equivalent of $100,000, maybe a little more income in today s money.
4
SPEAKER_00
You d buy yourself a house on Lake St.
4
SPEAKER_00
Clair.
4
SPEAKER_00
You would be basically doing as well as a college professor.
4
SPEAKER_01
Even when my family was a vendor of General Motors in the 80s and 90s, the people at eighth level and above,
4
SPEAKER_01
They weren t elite college grads.
4
SPEAKER_01
They had gone to Michigan State, and they had proved a great aptitude while working there, and they did move up.
4
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so it wasn t obvious, I think, in 1955 that if you were ambitious, you needed to go to college.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s hard for us in modern society to imagine that, that it was almost a fucking hobby to go do that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, it should be said, even today, I don t have the numbers right now.
4
SPEAKER_00
I did once, but if you look at, say, big Swiss companies, a large number of big Swiss companies are run by people who didn t go to college because they have an apprenticeship system, as we used to have.
4
SPEAKER_00
You finish high school, you go join, you know, Ciba Geigy or whatever the chemical
5
SPEAKER_01
company is or the pharmaceutical company, and you work your way up, and by the time you re 55, you re the person who runs the company.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
5
SPEAKER_01
But the Vietnam War, so two things happened.
5
SPEAKER_01
One is this change in the training and the rewards to certain kind of training became much, much greater.
5
SPEAKER_01
I also think, and I think you re totally right about this, I m a little embarrassed I hadn t seen it before, getting the deferment suddenly made college really attractive.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
5
SPEAKER_02
like a vaccine.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s right.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
5
SPEAKER_01
Totally.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
Totally right.
5
SPEAKER_01
That makes it much more competitive to get in.
5
SPEAKER_01
I wonder if anybody, it d be totally interesting to do a study about like college application rates, but of course it didn t matter where you went to college.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
5
SPEAKER_02
Our college system at this point is still- Is much more egalitarian.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
5
SPEAKER_02
And when does that start changing?
5
SPEAKER_01
In the sixties and seventies.
5
SPEAKER_01
It changes partly in response to deliberate policy.
5
SPEAKER_01
So at Harvard, it changes earlier, for example, than at Yale and Princeton.
5
SPEAKER_01
At Berkeley, it changes early.
5
SPEAKER_01
So in the 50s, these changes are starting to happen, say, at Harvard and Berkeley.
5
SPEAKER_02
Because it s fair to say that plenty of deadbeats went to Harvard back then, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
In the 50s, the language was you didn t apply, you put yourself down for the college your father attended.
5
SPEAKER_01
Right.
5
SPEAKER_01
And Harvard was very interested in the happy bottom quarter of the class.
5
SPEAKER_01
And these were rich young men who never went to class, did not expect to get a job when they graduated, and were there just as a social club.
5
SPEAKER_01
They were going to inherit their father s company or their jobs or whatever it was that they needed.
5
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, there wasn t that much inequality.
5
SPEAKER_01
You didn t have to be that rich to be at the top.
5
SPEAKER_01
You could inherit your father s wealth and you would not be nearly as rich as a really rich person is today, even relative to others.
5
SPEAKER_01
But there wouldn t be people above you.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then this changed, and partly it changed in response to policies of seeking more competitive, hardworking, academically inclined, academically accomplished students.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s almost as if they were ahead of the curve and started recognizing they re a brand, and that the brand itself needed to be protected.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and also that their own social legitimacy in the system that we had, in competition with communism, in the shadow of American racism, depended on their being able to tell themselves a story and tell others a story about why the people who were there deserved to be there.
5
SPEAKER_01
So at Yale, Kingman Brewster becomes the president and he transforms this.
5
SPEAKER_01
He says at some point, I do not intend to preside over a finishing school on the Long Island Sound.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s what Yale had been.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so he transforms it into a modern...
5
SPEAKER_02
If you and I are alive in that moment, this sounds good to me.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
I don t think it should be a fucking country club for rich kids.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think that s right.
5
SPEAKER_01
What happens is, I ve just done the research, so I know the history best at Yale.
5
SPEAKER_01
He hires this guy, Inky Clark, who has like this waspy name, but turns out to be an immigrant s kid from Long Island.
5
SPEAKER_01
And he becomes the director of admissions.
5
SPEAKER_01
He basically completely turns over the admissions office.
5
SPEAKER_01
And the first year he s the director of admissions, the percentage of alumni kids who are admitted gets cut in half.
5
SPEAKER_01
The average grades of the kids who get in goes way up.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I think the son of the head of the Yale Corporation or something like that gets rejected.
5
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
5
SPEAKER_01
Right.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so he s like, there s a new regime in town.
5
SPEAKER_00
Is it still expensive?
5
SPEAKER_01
It is still expensive, but it s a lot less expensive.
5
SPEAKER_00
Okay, relatively.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and eventually what happens at a small number of the most elite universities, and this starts happening in the 60s, is they start getting proud of having need-blind admissions.
5
SPEAKER_01
Even today, I think that this is something many Americans don t fully get.
5
SPEAKER_01
There are very few colleges that are really truly need-blind.
5
SPEAKER_01
In other words, when you apply, you do not in your application include any information about your ability to pay.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I didn t know what that meant.
5
SPEAKER_01
At Yale, at Harvard, at Princeton, at Stanford, at a handful of schools, you have to be super rich to be able to afford to do this.
5
SPEAKER_01
they admit people without even looking at whether they can pay.
5
SPEAKER_01
Right.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then they put together financial aid packages.
5
SPEAKER_01
Again, sounds great.
5
SPEAKER_01
Right, sounds great.
5
SPEAKER_01
At most colleges, even at most pretty good colleges, if you can pay, you re more likely to get in.
5
SPEAKER_01
So that starts happening.
5
SPEAKER_01
So these places transform the kind of thing that they are.
5
SPEAKER_01
And initially, you re right, it s like totally great.
5
SPEAKER_01
Excluded people start getting in.
5
SPEAKER_01
People start getting in who are hard at working.
5
SPEAKER_01
They re not just partying all the time.
5
SPEAKER_01
They re trying to do what they re there to do.
5
SPEAKER_01
They try to get a set of skills that maybe when they go out and work will make society better for everybody else, as opposed to just being layabouts.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it looks pretty good for a while.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then the worm turns.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it turns in two ways that are really important.
5
SPEAKER_01
One is the reason this worked initially at opening up the elite.
5
SPEAKER_01
is that the old aristocrats, if you re being blunt about it, weren t that hardworking, they weren t that smart.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so when colleges started saying, we re going to admit the kids who do best in school, it wasn t going to be those kids.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, like the best high schools in America in 1960 were all public high schools, not private schools.
5
SPEAKER_01
Private schools were full of lazy, dumb people.
5
SPEAKER_02
Right, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
The people who got ahead through this system, then when in the 70s and 80s they start having kids, well, they are smart, they are hardworking, and they have an enormous talent for educating their children and an infinite appetite for doing so.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so the system that in the first couple generations opened up the elite
5
SPEAKER_01
By the time it gets entrenched, the people who won in that competition are now able to dominate it for their kids.
5
SPEAKER_02
Right.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so I think now would be a great time to talk about the mechanism by which that happens.
5
SPEAKER_02
And this is just the investment that those people who graduated on a merit-based level
5
SPEAKER_02
their investment, what they can make.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is hard to quantify.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s partly a money investment.
5
SPEAKER_01
It even begins before they start investing money.
5
SPEAKER_01
So, for example, in 1970, women, regardless of their income or education, had about 10% of their children outside of marriage.
5
SPEAKER_01
Today, women with a college degree or more have only about 5% of their children outside of marriage.
5
SPEAKER_01
Women with a graduate or professional degree, I think, have only about 3% of their children outside of marriage.
5
SPEAKER_01
But women with a high school education have over half of their children outside of marriage.
5
SPEAKER_01
Holy smokes.
5
SPEAKER_02
So a 15x difference.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it turns out that for a host of reasons, it doesn t really matter whether they re married or not, but of course, if you have it outside of marriage, you re more likely also to actually be a single parent household.
5
SPEAKER_01
Having two adults who are both earning money, who are bringing resources into the household, makes a big difference to the opportunities that kids have.
5
SPEAKER_01
So this starts even before kids go to school.
5
SPEAKER_02
We just had Robert Sapolsky on.
5
SPEAKER_02
Stuff s happening in the womb.
5
SPEAKER_02
if there s scarcity or there s trauma.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes, all this trauma really harms kids.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, there s a woman named Florencia Torche, who s a sociologist at Stanford, who did this incredible dark natural experiment.
5
SPEAKER_01
But she looked at women who were pregnant during the great earthquake in Chile recently.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wow.
5
SPEAKER_01
but not physically harmed while they were pregnant.
5
SPEAKER_01
So these were women who had an enormously stressful event while they had a pregnancy, but no physical damage.
5
SPEAKER_01
And she looked at what happened to the kids.
5
SPEAKER_01
And two things are interesting about this.
5
SPEAKER_01
The first is that the kids who were in utero during the stress event,
5
SPEAKER_01
had a whole series of disadvantages from birth relative to kids who were not subjected to this stress.
5
SPEAKER_01
But the second thing is that educated and professional mothers, by the time the kids were six or eight, had compensated for and overcome those disadvantages.
5
SPEAKER_01
because they had the access to the additional support, to the training, to whatever they needed, whereas less educated, less wealthy mothers could not overcome it.
5
SPEAKER_01
So this like starts before you re conceived.
5
SPEAKER_01
It happens as soon as you re conceived.
5
SPEAKER_01
Then it continues on, you know, when you re born, kids of
5
SPEAKER_01
Parents with college degrees hear many millions more words before they re two or three than kids of parents without college degrees.
5
SPEAKER_01
Then they go to preschool.
5
SPEAKER_01
The really rich kids, there are preschools in New York City that cost $50,000, $60,000 a year.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, they re heroes.
5
SPEAKER_01
Right.
5
SPEAKER_01
That have departments.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
They re full of specialists and training kids.
5
SPEAKER_01
They have very low acceptance rates.
5
SPEAKER_01
They have like 10% admission rates.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it turns out, you know, that kind of education is ridiculous, but it s effective.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it gives you an advantage.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then the kids go to elementary school, and then to high school, and then, you know, there are high schools that send 25% of their kids to Ivy Plus colleges.
5
SPEAKER_01
And just to give you a sense of the scale of this, a very poor public school district in America spends probably between $8,000 and $10,000 per pupil per year educating the kids who go there.
5
SPEAKER_01
A middle class district spends maybe $12,000 to $15,000.
5
SPEAKER_01
The most elite private schools spend over $75,000.
5
SPEAKER_00
A kid.
5
SPEAKER_01
A kid.
5
SPEAKER_00
A year.
5
SPEAKER_01
A year.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
5
SPEAKER_01
And notice that the gap between the rich and the middle class is 15 times bigger than the gap between the middle class and the poor.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
And what this produces is enormous gaps between the rich and the middle class when they apply to college.
5
SPEAKER_01
The average kid whose parents make maybe more than $200,000 a year scores about 250 points higher on the SAT than the average kid whose parents are right in the middle of the income distribution.
5
SPEAKER_01
Whereas the average kid with the middle class parents scores only about 125 points higher than a kid whose parents are at or below the poverty line.
5
SPEAKER_01
So the rich middle class gap is twice as big as the middle class poor gap.
5
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
5
SPEAKER_01
And of course, when you have that, and then you have meritocratic college admissions, it s no surprise that the most elite colleges are filled with rich kids.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Tune for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m gonna add two things.
6
SPEAKER_01
I just brought up Sapolsky.
6
SPEAKER_01
You will be the second person I ve invited here that I hate your opinion.
6
SPEAKER_01
But respect you enormously.
6
SPEAKER_01
Sapolsky s most recent book is about determinism and a lack of free will.
6
SPEAKER_01
Fucking hate it.
6
SPEAKER_01
But God, I worship the guy.
6
SPEAKER_02
And you ve been turned a little bit.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I move, I move.
6
SPEAKER_01
Obviously, I hate your book.
6
SPEAKER_01
I hate the premise of your book, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
Because my personal story is one of coming from single mother, lower middle class, and then
6
SPEAKER_01
and buying the house that we re at.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so for me, the American dream works big time.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I was able to go to UCLA without good grades in high school.
6
SPEAKER_01
I went to a community college.
6
SPEAKER_01
For me, this system has been incredible.
6
SPEAKER_01
I ve been able to become educated at a great place, having fucked up many times along the way.
6
SPEAKER_01
So it threatens my story.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I m curious, what percentage of these elite schools is made up by these kids we re talking about, children of the elite?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so good.
6
SPEAKER_00
So let me answer that question, and then I want to talk about your story, if that s OK.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
So the answer is that right now, there are lots of really elite colleges where there are more kids from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom half.
6
SPEAKER_02
Wow.
6
SPEAKER_00
So the majority... Well, I don t know because there s also the middle.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now, one thing that these colleges have been trying to do is to get better about that.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t yet have systematic data on this.
6
SPEAKER_00
I have anecdotal data and just having been swimming in the water.
6
SPEAKER_00
What they re doing is they re trying to admit more kids who come from real lack of privilege.
6
SPEAKER_00
And they re doing a creditable job at that, but mostly these kids are squeezing out middle-class kids.
6
SPEAKER_00
And you can see how this works, because if you come from real hardship, you can write a story about yourself that says, I don t speak Mandarin, I haven t taken 11 APs, I haven t founded a company.
6
SPEAKER_01
I ve had three jobs throughout high school.
6
SPEAKER_00
I had a really hard time and I ve overcome a lot and I m a really good bet.
6
SPEAKER_00
And on the other hand, you know, if you go to Harvard Westlake and your parents are partners at Munger Tolls or run Warner Brothers, you can t tell a hardship story.
6
SPEAKER_00
But you do speak Chinese and you do have 11 APs and you did join an archaeological dig and discover something new.
6
SPEAKER_00
You raised $10 million.
6
SPEAKER_02
You probably have an app.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so you re impressive.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
The person who gets screwed in this is the person who s the child of a firefighter and a nurse in Akron, Ohio, who doesn t really have hardship.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
But also is not squeezed full of accomplishments because they went to the Akron public schools and they did well.
6
SPEAKER_00
So there s a real problem there.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s also in the long run a political problem because that means that the middle of the country starts correctly perceiving these institutions as hostile.
6
SPEAKER_00
More than half of the Republican Party now thinks colleges are bad for America.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s a sense in which they re not wrong.
6
SPEAKER_00
The sense in which they are wrong.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s not a baseless opinion.
6
SPEAKER_00
If you talk about public schools, I was talking to somebody recently who was on the faculty at UCLA.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you went to UCLA.
6
SPEAKER_00
UCLA s acceptance rate is now under 10%.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m not shocked.
6
SPEAKER_01
The starting grade point average was 4.03 when I went there.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so if I m a middle class Californian, my kids probably aren t getting into UCLA.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, well, what the hell?
6
SPEAKER_00
I ve got this public university.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
My taxes are funding it.
6
SPEAKER_00
So what s going on there?
6
SPEAKER_00
So that s a structural problem.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it s gotten worse.
6
SPEAKER_01
Let s add in now.
6
SPEAKER_01
the debt forgiveness, which I ve weirdly fallen on the side of the people that are kind of against it, because I think who s ultimately paying to relieve the debt of the people that will ultimately make more money than them and have more status?
6
SPEAKER_00
There s a total argument against it.
6
SPEAKER_00
For what it s worth, my own view is that if I had that amount of money to distribute from the federal government, I would not distribute it in that way.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
If the choice is between doing it and doing nothing, that s a closer call.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_01
but bang for the buck, these people are gonna mostly dig themselves out of it.
6
SPEAKER_02
It s so highly regarded.
6
SPEAKER_02
I mean, I wouldn t have got into Harvard.
6
SPEAKER_02
I feel like I m more in that middle class-y section.
6
SPEAKER_02
No Mandarin or whatever.
6
SPEAKER_02
A couple AP classes did well, but couldn t compete with a private school person.
6
SPEAKER_02
And I went to the public university and got a great education there.
6
SPEAKER_00
And are doing great.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_02
So part of it is this overall mindset
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think it s really hard.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of data that show that a very small number of colleges and universities have their graduates dominate the narrow American elite.
6
SPEAKER_01
I memorized one figure coming into this conversation, which is of the 9,200 or 9,600 sent to millionaires, people with $100 million or more.
6
SPEAKER_01
of those 9,000 plus, 35% are from eight universities.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so part of you could go, well, that s a bummer.
6
SPEAKER_01
But also for me, who likes my story, I m like, well, but 65% didn t.
6
SPEAKER_02
I mean, that s looking at such a specific group, calling that success.
6
SPEAKER_00
And partly the 100 millionaires are going to be people who either are
6
SPEAKER_00
crazy capable, have a crazy high tolerance for risk, or are crazy lucky.
6
SPEAKER_00
Maybe all three.
6
SPEAKER_00
But if you look at like the partnerships of say the five most profitable law firms, over half of those partners went to only 10 law schools.
6
SPEAKER_00
If you look at who is a managing director or partner or whatever the relevant title is now at Goldman Sachs, dominated by a very small number of colleges.
6
SPEAKER_00
If you look at who is at McKinsey,
6
SPEAKER_00
or who is increasingly running the biggest companies.
6
SPEAKER_00
These are people who ve gone through a very small number of institutions.
6
SPEAKER_01
And there s compounding forces, which is the gap between the incomes at that strata have also 10xed what they were in the 80s.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
The other part of this is that there are fewer and fewer just good jobs.
6
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
There used to be just a whole army of jobs where, you know, like there are 15 rungs on the ladder, you get to rung nine.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s great.
6
SPEAKER_00
11 is a little better, but it s not clear depending on how much you value life versus work.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t know what the trade-off is.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right, if you re picking between 170 and 240 grand a year and it s 30% more work.
6
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
6
SPEAKER_00
But what started to happen instead is that all the rungs from like six to 13 are gone.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so you re either stuck at five, where you re really precarious, or you re at 14 or 15, and that s a huge problem for a society and a civilization.
6
SPEAKER_00
I do want to get back though, because like the other part of this, and this is hard, it feels like it s almost an un-American thing to say, but I think it s really important, which is that we want an academic system, an educational system, and a form of work, a labor market,
6
SPEAKER_00
in which ordinarily talented people can do well.
6
SPEAKER_00
It is always going to be the case that exceptional people will find a way.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
This is the best thing about Letterman.
6
SPEAKER_01
When we interviewed Letterman, he has a scholarship at Indiana University or wherever he went for average students.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right.
6
SPEAKER_01
You got to have like a 2.0 scholarship because he s like, I was average.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because you re a decent, not just morally decent, but also well-functioning society.
6
SPEAKER_00
Most of us are ordinary.
6
SPEAKER_00
You want a way of living in which if you re ordinary, your life is good.
6
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
And this is where I also think science is helping us right now.
6
SPEAKER_01
We re shining a light on these.
6
SPEAKER_01
We re starting to acknowledge the pride that someone should have for being smart.
6
SPEAKER_01
We re recognizing like you were born with it.
6
SPEAKER_01
So it s like being born hot.
6
SPEAKER_01
No one should feel super proud of themselves for turning out attractive.
6
SPEAKER_01
And likewise, we re learning a lot about the Sapolsky stuff is that your environment and your genetics, some people are starting on second base or third.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the environment also is a huge part of this.
6
SPEAKER_00
We see this physically.
6
SPEAKER_00
The American elite is thin and fit and healthy, good skin, well-dressed.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, money turns out to play a role in all that.
6
SPEAKER_00
To do a lot.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yes, it does.
6
SPEAKER_01
So this is what I really like about the book is I think you re fair to everybody.
6
SPEAKER_01
So the nobility of 1700s England where they went duck hunting for a living and went on Fox hunts or whatever they did to entertain themselves.
6
SPEAKER_01
Pretty groovy life.
6
SPEAKER_01
You point out no one s really winning in this.
6
SPEAKER_01
If you look at what this elite that everyone s jealous of, what their actual life is like,
6
SPEAKER_01
As opposed to work being repugnant and the goal being a life of leisure, these people are working far more hours than anyone else, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
Right.
6
SPEAKER_01
You ve got a lot of data in here about how miserable these people s lives actually are.
6
SPEAKER_00
The place where the data is strongest is with the kids, because the kind of training that you need
6
SPEAKER_00
in order reliably to get into Harvard these days, coupled with the fact that Harvard admits three to four percent of its applicants.
6
SPEAKER_01
You just read 3.1 last year or something.
6
SPEAKER_00
It means that if you re a junior in high school, you fall in love and your partner dumps you and you can t concentrate for six months and you get a bunch of Cs, you re not going to Harvard.
6
SPEAKER_00
Fucking nuts.
6
SPEAKER_00
You get in a car accident.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right, exactly.
6
SPEAKER_00
You get mono at the wrong time.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like you smoke a little too much pot for a few months before you realize, hey, maybe this isn t for me.
6
SPEAKER_00
Whatever these things are.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s no allowance for that.
6
SPEAKER_00
So that s really tough.
7
SPEAKER_02
There s lots of data that kids in hyper-competitive, hyper-performing high schools are now, in the public health jargon, for things like anxiety, depression, and substance abuse, at-risk kids.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s been a rash of suicides at these super elite schools around here that I certainly didn t see on the same level at my middle-class school.
7
SPEAKER_00
Right.
7
SPEAKER_02
The kids I went to high school with, we were pretty happy.
7
SPEAKER_02
Some of us were more ambitious than others, and we figured we ll be seniors, we ll sit down, take these tests.
7
SPEAKER_02
Somebody bought me one of those books, and I read the SAT prep book.
7
SPEAKER_02
And that marked me out as like somebody who was doing extra.
7
SPEAKER_00
Neurotically obsessed, yeah, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_02
And then you graduate, and here s this thing to go back.
7
SPEAKER_02
We talked earlier about the form of wealth the old aristocrats had.
7
SPEAKER_02
If you hold your wealth in land and factories, you mix it with other people s labor, extract surplus, and live a good, happy life.
7
SPEAKER_02
But if you hold your wealth in the form of your own training, or what might be called your human capital, the only way to extract income is to mix it with your own labor.
7
SPEAKER_02
We don t yet have a technology through which I can mix my skill and training with some poor other person s labor.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you need a neural link into a robot that executes everything you ve gathered in your head.
7
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
7
SPEAKER_00
But we don t have that.
7
SPEAKER_00
We have it a little bit.
7
SPEAKER_02
So I always tell my law students, that s called associates.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_02
Right, right, right.
7
SPEAKER_02
What the partner does is they mix their skill, their human capital with the associate s labor, and they take a cut.
7
SPEAKER_02
And that s why the associates, they still make a lot.
7
SPEAKER_02
They make $200,000, $400,000 a year.
7
SPEAKER_02
But the partner makes $4 million to $6 million a year.
7
SPEAKER_02
Because they re taking a cut from every associate.
7
SPEAKER_02
But most of us can t run our affairs that way.
7
SPEAKER_02
And even the partners, to be a successful manager of associates, you have to work all the time.
7
SPEAKER_00
So let s just be clear, too.
7
SPEAKER_00
So 200 years ago, if you would have lined up the 100 richest people on the planet, certainly 90 plus would have been landowners.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and zero would have worked.
7
SPEAKER_00
And now, generally all the people in that upper strata have actually worked and made that money.
7
SPEAKER_02
with their own talent, skill.
7
SPEAKER_02
I mean, they ve had luck, they ve had help.
7
SPEAKER_02
But you know, think about Zuckerberg, Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m reading Elon Musk s biography right now.
7
SPEAKER_00
This person has not stopped working for more than 20 minutes in the last 30 years.
7
SPEAKER_00
Right.
7
SPEAKER_02
All these people, nobody s self-made, but they re more self-made than inherited.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes, yes.
7
SPEAKER_00
They re not trust fund.
7
SPEAKER_00
Right.
7
SPEAKER_02
Now, many of those people, because they re entrepreneurs, they got to work on the thing they cared about.
7
SPEAKER_02
But if you don t have the knack or you don t have the guts or you don t have the skill or whatever combination, you work as a trader or an investment banker or a partner at a law firm and you re working 80 hours a week.
7
SPEAKER_00
You re not building anything.
7
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You re hoping to sustain Goldman Sachs as dominant.
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And not only that, part of what it is to be that kind of worker is you have to work at whatever task the market tells you to work at.
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Whatever other people tell you you need to do, that s what you need to do.
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And it doesn t matter whether you like it or not.
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It doesn t matter whether you think your clients are good or not.
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It doesn t matter whether this is the business that you care about or not.
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Or that it s giving you purpose or not.
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None of that.
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This is what you do.
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And in the 1960s, I think the American Bar Association issued a report that said, very quietly and confidently, there are about 1,300 billable hours available in a lawyer s work year.
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Today, there are lots of law firms that have a minimum billable of 2,400 or 2,500 hours.
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I know lawyers that have billed 3,000 or 4,000 hours.
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These are people who you get to the office, you get there at 8 or 9 in the morning, you work till midnight, six and a half days a week, 365 days a year.
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Because you re hourly, ultimately.
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Because you re hourly.
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I ve had friends who are lawyers who left that to be in-house counsel somewhere just to go down to 55 hours a week was worth cutting their salary in half.
7
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Exactly.
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Do you know off the top of your head there s tons of great numbers in the book about hours worked by this class of people versus... If you compare today to say 1950, the top 1% of the income distribution
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is working four to eight hours a week more.
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And the bottom 60% is working 12 hours a week less.
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And if you go into not just the top 1%, but the top half of 1%, at that stage, there s no systematic data.
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That s the first thing.
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Because all the mass data sets, they top-coded incomes.
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And so it s really hard to separate out the super high earners from just the high earners.
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But there s lots of work if you just look at what law firm minimum billables are, if you look at what Goldman Sachs requires, if you look at studies in the Harvard Business Review.
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Those people are now working 30, 40 hours a week more than they used to.
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Yeah, like 60s average.
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Some people are going to 80.
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60s average, 80, 90.
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And you see this in sort of the lore.
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You know, it used to be banker s hours were like nine to three.
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Today, there s something called the banker nine to five, which begins at 9 a.m.
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one day and ends at 5 a.m.
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the next day.
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Oh my god.
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Oh my god.
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That s confusing.
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So 20 hours.
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That s what junior bankers do.
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Wow.
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And if you look at, say, Amazon s instruction to its employees about how hard you have to work or what you should do when you burn out, Amazon says when you hit the wall, the only thing you can do is climb the wall.
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Okay.
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Wow.
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Well, that s one way to live.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Others may disagree, but my view is that all this is dictated by the economic logic of this kind of wealth.
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Again, if I hold my wealth in my own education, the only way I can get income out of it is by working it.
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Okay, so we ve transitioned greatly into the elite class being overly employed.
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And they are experiencing all kinds of consequences because of this.
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When these people are polled, they regularly wish they had a different relationship with their children.
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They re missing life.
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So as enviable as their bank account is, I don t think most people, if they lived a week in the life of these people, they would choose it.
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So it s like, weirdly, they re suffering.
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And then the middle class is evaporating.
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They have no role in it.
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The lower working class is increasingly less unionized than everything else, so you wonder, I guess, who s winning.
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SPEAKER_00
Nobody s winning, in a certain sense.
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I mean, I don t think that if you re a working person who s struggling to get by, the sufferings of the elite are going to move you very much.
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Oh, I don t think you ll ever have any compassion for them.
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But on the other hand, that doesn t mean they re not real to the elite.
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It s also the case, it s not just that the middle class and the working class are suffering stagnant wages, greater precarity in various ways.
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It s also that one thing about the old aristocracy is that it was obvious that if you didn t get ahead, it wasn t your fault because you didn t have the right parents, you weren t the right race, you weren t the right gender.
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The people who lived back then, they understood that this wasn t fair in a certain way.
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They knew it was a rigged game.
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So they re not going to blame themselves too much over the outcome.
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Whereas our story is, if you re not a millionaire, that s on you, partner.
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Like if you had worked a little harder, if you were a little smarter, a little more virtuous, a little more self-disciplined.
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So there s a kind of moral insult that s added to the economic injury.
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And that insult is extremely destructive.
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It s destructive to the individual person.
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Set aside COVID.
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But if you look at the other causes of falling life expectancy,
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in the sort of bottom half of the U.S.
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distribution.
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The other causes are opioid addiction, alcoholism, diabetes, suicide.
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These are all forms of direct or indirect self-harm.
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You have to ask, why is there an epidemic of this kind of self-harm?
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now, and a good part of the answer is because people are cut off from opportunity and are then blamed for it.
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And that s just a terrible place to be.
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And then at the same time, collectively, this system makes you alienated from, angry at,
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the institutions of your society, resentful, inclined to try to find someone to blame.
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And so the rise of a kind of right-wing authoritarianism and populism, it won t probably surprise you.
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I m no fan of Donald Trump s.
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I m shocked.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
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But one thing that he s not wrong about
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When he says that the institutions and the elite of this country are excluding middle class and working people from advantage, well, that s true.
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The stuff about immigrants and people, that s not true.
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That s dark and brutal and malign.
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But the stuff about these institutions not being, well, that is true.
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This syndrome gives people like him an opening.
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Yes, I m curious how you feel about David Brooks s article because it takes your work as a kind of a foundational component, but clearly then David goes into some political areas that probably you personally want it.
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This is from the article.
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Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others.
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Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx, and intersectional is a sure sign that you ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears.
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Meanwhile, members of the less educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.
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You re probably uncomfortable with that part of it, I have no idea, but I will say that
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This is also what Trump s right about and people are fucking pissed about it.
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I would formulate it slightly differently I wonder what you think of this formulation.
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Okay.
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I am less inclined than David Brooks is to think that sort of the thought police are
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totally present and dominant inside elite institutions.
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So my experience inside these institutions is, yes, there is a right way of speaking and a wrong way of speaking, and there is some censorship, and the situation is not ideal.
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Of course, the situation has never been ideal.
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But it s not the case that one slip of the tongue gets you fired.
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In my experience, if you re trying and if you re decent and have an honorable motive, people will adjust.
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They might call you out and then you say, hey, yeah, I shouldn t have said it that way.
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And then they re like, okay, it s not perfect.
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And there are some people who really get mistreated by this system.
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But I think what he s right about is this.
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One of the things that this form of hierarchy and exclusion needs in order to be legitimate is it needs to cast itself, explain itself as open.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, and can we add morally righteous?
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Morally righteous, both of those things.
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And so what elite institutions do is they say, no, no, we re not unfair.
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We accept everybody.
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We don t care what your background is or what your sexuality is or what your race is or what your religion is.
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We are accepting you on the merits.
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And it is proof that we are so fair.
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that we have such enormous diversity and such a commitment to diversity.
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SPEAKER_00
And that commitment to diversity is one of the things these institutions use to justify their exclusion of working in middle-class people.
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SPEAKER_00
And that part of the analysis, notice that doesn t go through the question whether they re internally too woke or not, but that part of the analysis I think is right.
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SPEAKER_00
The problem is, another reason why these institutions do it, is it would be wrong not to.
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Yeah, this is a tricky thing.
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It s not as easy as they re doing it wrong.
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I want underprivileged kids.
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They re just not digging deep enough of what diversity means.
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Yes.
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As much as the left is wonderfully supportive and defensive of marginalized groups, they seem very reluctant to include socioeconomic strata as a group.
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And that s what s frustrating to me.
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Well, partly, and here s where Brooks and I might disagree because he s more conservative than I am, and he s more of a cultural thinker and less of an economic thinker than I am.
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But I just know this institution best, so I ll talk about Yale Law School.
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Over half of our students are now people of color.
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And that is, in my view,
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right.
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That is to say, the country is almost half people of color.
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We should not be 90% white in a country that s 50% white.
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And so whether the right number is 52% or 46%, whatever, it basically is the right way for us to be.
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SPEAKER_00
But here s the thing, we could do that and basically remain the same institution that we are because it wasn t essential to Yale Law School s economic or social function that it be a white institution.
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And
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We cannot do that with respect to class.
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If our graduates stopped being rich, our economic model would fall apart.
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Yeah, that s hard.
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We don t need to make our graduates men.
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We don t need to make our graduates white.
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But they have to be rich.
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Or why go there?
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Right.
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We can t make our budget if we don t have rich alumni.
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Then it also needs to be on the people hiring people in America to maybe take a chance on a kid not from Harvard.
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It requires everyone to participate in evening this out.
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Because once you get out of school, you re just someone who just graduated college.
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And if you re at Goldman Sachs, maybe there s an imperative to hire a more diverse crowd there.
8
SPEAKER_00
Beautiful segue into solutions.
8
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Yes.
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Well, I think places are starting to try to do that.
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And I think it s exactly the right thing to do.
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At some point, it also becomes a self-interested thing to do because there is an enormous amount of natural talent that is excluded by this system.
8
SPEAKER_00
And it s a very striking thing, and this will get to one of the solutions, that the number of places at the most elite colleges and universities in the United States has not grown a lot in the past 50 or 100 years.
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SPEAKER_00
And if you look at the list of those schools, it s the same damn schools that were on it 50 years ago.
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They don t have a lot more students.
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The country is many times bigger.
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It has not kept pace at all.
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But again, they re incentivized to keep it small because the odds of a graduating class of 3000 reaching $10 million.
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Much lower.
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But I think one thing they have to do is they have to get bigger and they have to be forced to get bigger.
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that would be policy, because they all have charity status.
8
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Right.
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So they re all tax exempt.
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A WAG once said Princeton is a hedge fund with a university attached.
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And the university gives the hedge fund certain advantages.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s not just, by the way, the elite universities, it s also elite high schools, elite middle schools and elementary schools, elite kindergartens.
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You know, these are incredibly well endowed.
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Elite kindergartens.
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The craziest oxymoron I ve ever heard.
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SPEAKER_00
But also these schools, you know, Phillips Exeter Academy, I think has an endowment above a billion dollars.
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Oh my God.
8
SPEAKER_00
So these are, these are large institutions, right?
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And so one thing to do is to say to these places through policy, look, if you don t start admitting a lot more people and a lot more middle class and working class people, we re going to take away your tax exemption because clubs for rich people are not charities.
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SPEAKER_01
I like this.
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It s not a crazy view and not requires a massive departure from our traditions.
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SPEAKER_00
It s not creeping socialism or regulation.
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SPEAKER_01
It s still gonna be hard as hell to get in there.
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It s still gonna be hard to get in.
8
SPEAKER_00
But imagine if all those places took three times as many students.
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First of all,
8
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the returns to going there would go down.
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SPEAKER_00
They wouldn t be zero, it would still be a good place to go.
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Second of all, there d be more resources per student at the next tier down and the next tier down.
8
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So the education at other places would get better.
8
SPEAKER_00
Explain that to me.
8
SPEAKER_00
Right now, Yale Law School has such a low student to teacher ratio that the amount of attention that I can pay to my students individually
8
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is just much bigger than the amount of attention that people at even good state law schools can pay to their students, because they have bigger classes.
8
SPEAKER_00
And that means that my students get all kinds of legs up.
8
SPEAKER_00
They get training and teaching that other people can t give, but they also get very personal letters of reference.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s hard to get lost in that system.
8
SPEAKER_00
You would know.
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SPEAKER_00
I would know.
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SPEAKER_00
And next semester, I will have students in my house every week.
8
SPEAKER_01
Can we be students?
8
SPEAKER_01
I want to go to your house.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
We re students today.
8
SPEAKER_00
Listen, if you guys bring right elephant parties and if you promise not to take the money.
8
SPEAKER_00
She s going to take the money.
8
SPEAKER_00
No, I will be taking the money.
8
SPEAKER_00
I ve decided.
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SPEAKER_00
That will be good.
8
SPEAKER_00
But look, that kind of training is both effective and valuable.
8
SPEAKER_00
And if there were more people, I couldn t provide it in quite that way.
8
SPEAKER_00
And that actually would not be bad.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because, first of all, it would reduce the gap between the elite and everybody else.
8
SPEAKER_00
Second of all, it would make it much less important where you go to school, and so the stress of applications would get much lower.
8
SPEAKER_00
And it would make the system more equal and better for everybody.
8
SPEAKER_01
This goes counter to your book, but there is a chapter in a Malcolm Gladwell book, and I wish I could remember the details, but he
8
SPEAKER_01
looks at a study of what colleges lawyers graduated and their rate of becoming partner.
8
SPEAKER_01
And at least in this chapter, he s like, they re kind of unrelated.
8
SPEAKER_01
We re putting a value on this that in practice isn t really useful.
8
SPEAKER_00
Right.
8
SPEAKER_00
So first of all, it probably doesn t dictate who s a good lawyer or not.
8
SPEAKER_00
Now, there s a question about whether it dictates how much money you make.
8
SPEAKER_00
True.
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SPEAKER_00
But second of all, there are a bunch of studies like this.
8
SPEAKER_00
There was just a study done by Purdue and Department of Education or something.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s a method problem with a lot of these studies, which is that they have as their conception of what s an elite college, and the most recent study, the top 100 colleges, for example.
8
SPEAKER_01
This is a little too broad of a narrative.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s too broad given, as you said before, you know, eight colleges produce 35 billionaires.
8
SPEAKER_00
So if you re looking at 100 colleges, you re not going to see the effect.
8
SPEAKER_00
Correct.
8
SPEAKER_00
Right.
8
SPEAKER_00
So there s that problem.
8
SPEAKER_00
The other problem is the system that we have now is so incredibly intense at sorting.
8
SPEAKER_00
So I called around to a bunch of admissions officers at one point and tried to figure out how many in law school applicants who were accepted to a top five law school ended up attending a law school outside of the top 10.
8
SPEAKER_00
And in the year I was calling around, the answer was fewer than five.
8
SPEAKER_00
Five total or 5%?
8
SPEAKER_00
Five total.
8
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
8
SPEAKER_00
All right.
8
SPEAKER_00
So basically everybody goes to the highest rank school they can get into.
8
SPEAKER_00
And now in that world, if you are one of the people who doesn t, that means you re exceptional and it means you know something about yourself.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so the fact that you do really well, you re an outlier to begin with, doesn t tell you a whole lot.
8
SPEAKER_00
So I m much more skeptical of those studies than other people are for that reason.
8
SPEAKER_01
And if you dilute, which seems healthy, dilute Harvard with more students and less financial achievement post-graduation, I do think people s analysis of their choices would dramatically change.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s so many people that would prefer to stay in their hometown.
8
SPEAKER_00
Can I tell you a story about this?
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, please.
8
SPEAKER_00
Going back to my German connections, I know a young woman, well, she s now an adult, but I knew her when she just finished high school in Germany.
8
SPEAKER_00
She had wanted to be a doctor.
8
SPEAKER_00
She applied to German medical school.
8
SPEAKER_00
So German universities are very egalitarian.
8
SPEAKER_00
There aren t more competitive ones.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s not quite right.
8
SPEAKER_00
Everybody wants to live in Berlin.
8
SPEAKER_00
So universities in Berlin are hard to get into, but not because they re fancy, but because everyone wants to live in Berlin.
8
SPEAKER_00
The medical school she got into was an eight hour drive from the town she grew up in.
8
SPEAKER_00
And she decided, I don t really want to move that far from home.
8
SPEAKER_00
So she abandoned being a doctor, decided to become a pharmacist and went to pharmacy school nearby.
8
SPEAKER_00
In the US, that s kind of a crazy choice.
8
SPEAKER_01
You d make character assessments of her.
8
SPEAKER_01
She had a fear of success.
8
SPEAKER_00
But here s the thing about Germany.
8
SPEAKER_01
German doctors are relatively.
9
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a lot less than American doctors.
9
SPEAKER_00
German pharmacists are relatively paid a lot more and higher status.
9
SPEAKER_00
I can go to a German pharmacist, they can prescribe simple medicines for me.
9
SPEAKER_00
So the difference between being a pharmacist and a doctor in Germany, it s not zero, but it s not like here.
9
SPEAKER_00
Might not be worth an eight-hour drive.
9
SPEAKER_00
Right.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so what that does is it made her free because she got to have her life without throwing her career off a cliff.
9
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Right.
9
SPEAKER_03
And her status.
9
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
9
SPEAKER_03
Huh, that s heavy.
9
SPEAKER_01
We ve had so much of your time and I appreciate it.
9
SPEAKER_01
This is really fun.
9
SPEAKER_01
My last thought was, I see how that could be enacted at these universities.
9
SPEAKER_01
That makes sense.
9
SPEAKER_01
When we get into the marketplace, have I drank the Kool-Aid so much to suggest that the marketplace is the marketplace.
9
SPEAKER_01
The best product will be the one that sells.
9
SPEAKER_01
And you re ultimately trying to implement something where the end result is the marketplace.
9
SPEAKER_01
Does that make any sense?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like you can t ask people to be average and do average things and then win in the marketplace, which ultimately reverse engineers every decision we make.
9
SPEAKER_00
Here s the pushback and see whether you find it persuasive or not.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
All right.
9
SPEAKER_00
So the narrower pushback is the marketplace right now isn t really the marketplace.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s governed by policy a lot.
9
SPEAKER_00
For example, right now, mid-skilled labor is the highest taxed factor of production in the American economy.
9
SPEAKER_00
You know, we all have an income tax, but we also have a social security wage tax, about 14, 15%.
9
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t matter exactly.
9
SPEAKER_00
Some paid by the employee, some paid by the employer, but economists think it all falls on the employee.
9
SPEAKER_00
That tax has a base cap.
9
SPEAKER_00
So above about $130,000, you pay zero social security wages.
9
SPEAKER_00
That means that somebody who is making $120,000 a year
9
SPEAKER_00
is paying a total tax rate.
9
SPEAKER_00
If they live in a city, close to 50% on the margin, because they re paying their income tax rate, plus their social security wage tax rate, plus their city and other tax rates.
9
SPEAKER_00
Now, here s the thing.
9
SPEAKER_00
If you replace $20,000, $100,000 a year workers with robots and algorithms and one $2 million a year worker,
9
SPEAKER_00
and you make that $2 million a year worker work in venture capital or finance so that they get carried interest, they get a capital gains treatment for their labor income, you re reducing that tax rate to about 15 or 20%.
9
SPEAKER_00
So the total tax burden on the super skilled worker, set aside the fact you can depreciate the robots, the total tax burden on a form of production that uses super skilled labor plus robots and algorithms is much lower.
9
SPEAKER_00
than the total tax burden on a form of production that uses mid-skilled labor.
9
SPEAKER_01
Which is just policy.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s tax policy.
9
SPEAKER_00
Which is just policy.
9
SPEAKER_01
And if we change that- This is Warren Buffett s legendary claim that is, receptionist pays a higher tax rate.
9
SPEAKER_00
Higher tax rate than he does.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s not just him.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s a lot of people.
9
SPEAKER_00
And the people who pay the highest taxes are middle class working people.
9
SPEAKER_00
And if we change that, we could create incentives
9
SPEAKER_00
to shift the form of production back.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s the first part of this.
9
SPEAKER_00
The other part of this, which is broader, is it is not coincidence that we are inventing technologies right now that help super-educated people be really productive.
9
SPEAKER_00
and deprive middle-educated people of their jobs.
9
SPEAKER_00
There have been previous times of high technological innovation when new technologies actually helped mid-skilled people and hurt super-skilled people.
9
SPEAKER_00
One of the reasons why is that in the olden days, there was no point in inventing technologies to help super-skilled people because elites wouldn t work.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so what we re doing now is because we have this class of super-trained people,
9
SPEAKER_00
who are also willing to work 100 hours a week, they are creating technologies that benefit them and use their skills and kick everybody else out of their jobs.
9
SPEAKER_00
And if instead we had a large army of mid-skilled people, we d change the technologies we use.
9
SPEAKER_00
We d invent different stuff.
9
SPEAKER_01
The products in the marketplace would change.
9
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, would change.
9
SPEAKER_00
So we can imagine a future that s more equal, even in a market economy.
9
SPEAKER_00
This is not a recommendation for governments taking over.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s a recommendation for changing the way in which government influences things, so that instead of influencing things towards inequality, we influence things towards equality.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, despite walking into it going, I don t want to hear that this isn t a very good meritocracy that I ve benefited from and earned.
9
SPEAKER_01
Despite that, I love your book.
9
SPEAKER_01
I love it so much.
9
SPEAKER_01
Every night when I turn it on, I can t wait to hear more bad news about the elite.
9
SPEAKER_01
So I feel better for not having a billion dollars.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s just beautifully researched.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s very well written.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it s a very powerful and provocative question you re asking.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, thank you all so much.
9
SPEAKER_00
Thanks for having me on.
9
SPEAKER_00
This was great.
9
SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
9
SPEAKER_00
Really, really great.
9
SPEAKER_00
I got to say, I ve done a bunch of these.
9
SPEAKER_00
You guys know this.
9
SPEAKER_00
You guys are good at this.
9
SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
9
SPEAKER_01
So thank you.
9
SPEAKER_01
We ll keep going.
9
SPEAKER_01
Our goal will be to outlive this briefcase you have, which is going to be a challenge.
9
SPEAKER_01
This suitcase is 120 years old.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, fuck.
9
SPEAKER_01
I can t commit to that.
9
SPEAKER_00
I wish I could commit to that.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yes, well, maybe with these breakthroughs.
9
SPEAKER_00
We ll see.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
9
SPEAKER_00
You ve got to get your doctors on it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, Daniel, this has been so incredible.
9
SPEAKER_01
I hope everyone checks out The Meritocracy Trap.
9
SPEAKER_01
And also, you re nearing completion of a different book?
9
SPEAKER_00
I am in the middle of a different book called The Good Life After the Age of Growth.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s about how we should all live to live well after economic growth stops.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s great.
9
SPEAKER_01
Interesting.
9
SPEAKER_01
I need that book right now.
9
SPEAKER_03
We ll have you back, obviously, when you re done with that.
9
SPEAKER_01
I would love that.
9
SPEAKER_01
I want to get Daniel over to the White Elephant and see how he plays it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, me too.
9
SPEAKER_01
All right.
9
SPEAKER_00
I got a brother-in-law who s a game theorist, so I ll describe it to him, and he ll figure out the algorithm to optimize it.
9
SPEAKER_00
Amazing.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wow.
9
SPEAKER_01
This is a dumb family here.
9
SPEAKER_01
You got a game theorist.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m so sorry for all you.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, Daniel, thanks.
9
SPEAKER_01
Good luck with everything, and it s been a pleasure.
9
SPEAKER_01
Stay tuned for the fact check so you can hear all the facts that were wrong.
9
SPEAKER_01
I know we re not, but we re in a weird way matching.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, not any longer because I took off my top, but my piece.
9
SPEAKER_02
When you were wearing your piece, we were a little more matching.
9
SPEAKER_01
Because you have like a thick gabardine.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m going to use a lot of words.
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what they are.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s a thick tweed.
9
SPEAKER_01
You look up gabardine.
9
SPEAKER_03
Do you mean aubergine?
9
SPEAKER_01
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy.
9
SPEAKER_01
I said be careful his bowtie is really a camera.
9
SPEAKER_03
I don t know that.
9
SPEAKER_01
Simon and Garfunkel.
9
SPEAKER_03
Oh.
9
SPEAKER_01
Laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a durable twill woven cloth.
9
SPEAKER_01
That sounds exactly like what you re wearing.
9
SPEAKER_01
It does.
9
SPEAKER_03
I wonder if it s a gag routine.
9
SPEAKER_01
Twill is what I wanted to use as another word I wanted to use, but I don t know what it means.
9
SPEAKER_01
But I was like, yeah, it s kind of a tweed, a twill.
9
SPEAKER_01
A gabardine, but it s a thick fabric.
9
SPEAKER_01
It is.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it looks very English.
9
SPEAKER_03
Thank you.
9
SPEAKER_01
Maybe like haberdashers or something.
9
SPEAKER_01
That was the look.
9
SPEAKER_03
I was a haberdasher, my first acting role ever.
9
SPEAKER_03
In what play was it?
9
SPEAKER_03
Taming of the Shrew.
9
SPEAKER_01
Taming of the Shrew.
9
SPEAKER_03
Fifth grade.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s a very prestigious school.
9
SPEAKER_03
And I said, here s the hat your worship ordered.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, it was specifically a hat.
9
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh my gosh.
9
SPEAKER_03
So for a long time, I thought haberdashers were hat makers.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think a haberdasher is all clothing, no?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
9
SPEAKER_03
So I was, because of my role.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
9
SPEAKER_03
I was confused about the nature of a haberdasher.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think we ve had this conversation already before in our life.
9
SPEAKER_03
Maybe you taught me it was a full clothing.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think so, and I think.
9
Dang.
9
SPEAKER_01
very understandably why you used context clues to think that they made hats is in your mind probably right yeah you made like a cobbler for hats yeah i was too afraid to ask because people would point at me and say you re stupid and brown if you asked what a haberdasher was yeah they probably would have
9
SPEAKER_01
This brown girl doesn t know shit.
9
SPEAKER_01
Brown girls are supposed to know everything.
9
SPEAKER_03
She s dumb, she s dumb and brown, oh no.
9
SPEAKER_01
Double whammy.
9
SPEAKER_01
I have a lot to report.
9
SPEAKER_02
Oh, I can t wait to hear.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s been a while and I just feel my integrity demands I always report these to you.
9
SPEAKER_03
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_01
Let s start with when I took my morning poop yesterday.
9
SPEAKER_03
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_01
It was like, what s a good analogy?
9
SPEAKER_01
All I know is I took the biggest poop
9
SPEAKER_03
Of your life?
9
SPEAKER_01
One of the bigger poops in my life.
9
SPEAKER_01
No!
9
SPEAKER_01
And in .02 seconds.
9
SPEAKER_03
Oh, wow.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I do have an image of maybe if an enormous fire hose, the last third of it froze with ice, and then you took the cap off and then you turned the water on, the speed at which it would come.
9
SPEAKER_01
It shot out.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes, it was incredible.
9
SPEAKER_03
It was one log?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and it was impossibly long.
9
SPEAKER_01
Wow!
9
SPEAKER_01
And malleable.
9
SPEAKER_03
Did you poop the day before?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, this is what, this is starting to happen to me like monthly where I m regular and then I have a day where I m certain my body s eating its own organs or something.
9
SPEAKER_01
Because I had that in the morning and I thought, well, wow, that was a clean 100% EVAC, I m gonna be.
9
SPEAKER_03
And you felt good?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I felt footloose and fancy free.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, good.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, like I m just kind of tip tapping around.
9
SPEAKER_01
And then an hour later,
9
SPEAKER_01
I had to go back in and that was a very sizable experience.
9
SPEAKER_03
Really?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it s getting less firm.
9
SPEAKER_01
Let s just say that.
9
SPEAKER_03
Sure.
9
SPEAKER_03
As the, as, oh, I just did this on my spit cup at the same time.
9
SPEAKER_01
I know.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I wouldn t want people, cause they were probably already throwing, gagging right now to hear that.
10
SPEAKER_00
And you farted, because it s all coming out.
10
SPEAKER_01
Are those new jeans?
10
SPEAKER_01
Or I ve seen them.
10
SPEAKER_00
You ve seen them, but they are my favorite of my new Levi s.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s funny, because you told me you had another favorite, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but I think these are my favorite.
10
SPEAKER_01
And then I get to see them, I ve only seen these.
10
SPEAKER_00
No, on Thanksgiving.
10
SPEAKER_01
You wore them?
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
I thought you wore these.
10
SPEAKER_00
Mm-mm, no.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, shoot.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s all right, it s fine.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m really sorry.
10
SPEAKER_00
You re in a gabardine twill tweed.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m really sorry.
10
SPEAKER_00
You got your hands full with your own look.
10
SPEAKER_01
I like them, I like these.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh, thank you, me too.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay, back to your poops, okay, so.
10
SPEAKER_00
We went and got Christmas trees.
10
SPEAKER_00
and I had to put the stands on three.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m embarrassed to admit that, but we did.
10
SPEAKER_00
We have one for the kitchen, one for the living room.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I was like, what are you embarrassed?
10
SPEAKER_00
The girls have a little one.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s so cute.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s my three Christmas trees, so indulgent.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s a lot.
10
SPEAKER_00
I did, I love it.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna get six.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay, good, that ll make me feel less indulgent.
10
SPEAKER_00
So I m having to like stop in between putting the stand on the first tree and the second tree to go inside.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s poop!
10
SPEAKER_00
Yes, it s getting mildly.
10
SPEAKER_01
So you re a little sick.
10
SPEAKER_01
I guess, I guess.
10
SPEAKER_00
You know what I kept, I kept reminding myself of the marathoner, the woman running the half marathon.
10
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
10
SPEAKER_00
Who was like, well, there can t be anything left, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
Remember she thought that twice.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, there can t be anything left.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
10
SPEAKER_00
I was certainly at that point at five o clock p.m.
10
SPEAKER_00
I had gone, I bet you had gone nine times.
10
SPEAKER_00
No.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Not nine.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, for sure.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, what?
10
SPEAKER_00
Again, where is, what is, where is all this stored?
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
God, I hate to have to report this story.
10
SPEAKER_00
So then Matt arrives for us to watch the Formula One race.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I go, yeah, let s go.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m just going to pee and grab something from upstairs.
10
SPEAKER_00
I don t even know what I was going to grab.
10
SPEAKER_00
I should be gone for 38 seconds.
10
SPEAKER_00
I go up there.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m peeing.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m standing up.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh, man.
10
SPEAKER_00
I wouldn t even say I tooted.
10
SPEAKER_00
I just, all of a sudden, you know, when you activate, well, I don t know what it s like for a girl.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, I do know, because you say sometimes a fart comes out on accident when you re peeing.
10
SPEAKER_01
Sure, it can happen.
10
SPEAKER_00
When you push.
10
SPEAKER_01
It can happen.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
10
SPEAKER_00
So I, I wasn t even like, I didn t feel like I had to, and I was just peeing, but maybe the force of the peeing all of a sudden.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, okay, and I already forgot about your anatomy, because you re facing, you re standing up.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m standing.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God, okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
Facing the toilet.
10
SPEAKER_01
Sure, sure, and what happened?
10
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, oh, oops, and then I was like, oh, and I m trying to now pull my pants down really quick and sit on the toilet, but this, I already.
10
SPEAKER_01
It got on the floor?
10
SPEAKER_00
No, well, okay.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh.
10
SPEAKER_00
So I m wearing boxers.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
The last couple times this has happened to me, I was wearing MeUndies.
10
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
10
SPEAKER_00
So it s gonna be contained.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
But I was in boxies.
10
SPEAKER_01
Hold on, so when you peed, you didn t pull your boxers, you just pull your dick out.
10
SPEAKER_00
Like a second grader?
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean.
10
SPEAKER_00
Like around my ankles, just standing in front of the toilet with my.
10
SPEAKER_00
That feels.
10
SPEAKER_00
Cute, really.
10
SPEAKER_01
It feels like you guys should be doing that.
10
SPEAKER_00
Pulling our pants all the way down to our ankles.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, like girls.
10
SPEAKER_00
Like little boys.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, not all the way, but maybe like,
10
SPEAKER_00
below our butt cheeks?
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
But why?
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you re right, why?
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Only at like a public bathroom, I had to stand up urinal.
10
SPEAKER_00
Will you do that?
10
SPEAKER_00
To be funny.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you do?
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, once in a while.
10
SPEAKER_00
You know your buddies are coming in, that s kind of a funny thing to do.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wow.
10
SPEAKER_00
Because no one pees like that other than four-year-olds.
10
SPEAKER_01
I m so glad I m a girl.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay, go ahead.
10
SPEAKER_00
Four-year-old boys.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so it was up and then the poop got on your boxers.
10
SPEAKER_00
And the floor.
10
SPEAKER_00
And some tumbled into my,
10
SPEAKER_00
Like, my pants I was wearing.
10
SPEAKER_00
What do you mean?
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, listen, they were baggy.
10
SPEAKER_00
Everything was baggy.
10
SPEAKER_01
But your pants are around your ankles.
10
SPEAKER_00
Nothing s around my ankles.
10
SPEAKER_01
Where are the pants?
10
SPEAKER_00
Look, you can imagine I just, I unbutton, and I m sitting here like this, and the pants are open, and I m peeing, and then, and then, oh, and then, and then, so, and then.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
10
SPEAKER_00
It was so disheartening.
10
SPEAKER_00
It was so disheartening, and,
10
SPEAKER_00
Then I had to... Then you had to take a shower?
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, okay, great.
10
SPEAKER_00
So then you re on a cold case, like you re on a mystery.
10
SPEAKER_00
I get everything off, I go home, Jenny, and then I take everything over to the bathtub.
10
SPEAKER_01
Do you have to scoop it out of your pants with a tissue or do you use your regular hand?
10
SPEAKER_00
I use tissue for what I ve found.
10
SPEAKER_00
And then I go into, I can t just leave that, nor can I throw it in the dirty clothes.
10
SPEAKER_00
It needs to be dealt with right now.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
So I take the boxers and the pants to the bathtub.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I get the wand out.
10
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
10
SPEAKER_00
But I m flustered, of course, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
So like when I turn it on.
10
SPEAKER_01
Are you wearing clothes when you are doing this or you re moody?
10
SPEAKER_00
No, I m just a top.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Like a Winnie the Pooh.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, now I look like the four-year-old you were picturing.
10
SPEAKER_00
And when I turn the water on in the tub and I m holding the wand, of course, I m so frazzled, it s pointing right up and at my face.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh my god.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so I turn the water on and I get blasted in the face with the wand and it s going all over the floor, so now I ve got water everywhere.
10
SPEAKER_00
And now here s where the mystery, like I have to go through every square inch of these pants, the inside of the pants and the boxers to clean everything thoroughly.
10
SPEAKER_00
And then hop in and from the waist down, give myself a wand.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you do?
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
All this to say, I ran upstairs to pee and Matt s waiting at the staircase to watch the, I m probably gone for 11 minutes.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I come down in sweatpants.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Do you explain yourself or no?
10
SPEAKER_00
I did.
10
SPEAKER_00
I had to.
10
SPEAKER_00
It was insane.
10
SPEAKER_00
You love to.
10
SPEAKER_00
I didn t this one.
10
SPEAKER_00
You didn t?
10
SPEAKER_00
I didn t.
10
SPEAKER_00
Because often I ve tooted and I feel a little more responsible, you know?
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh.
10
SPEAKER_00
And like that marathoner, I thought it was all gone.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think you re not drinking enough electrolytes.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_01
Because sometimes your body is so dehydrated.
10
SPEAKER_01
It is real that the more dehydrated you are, it can be worse for diarrhea, which makes no sense.
10
SPEAKER_00
But I ve also always heard that if you re dehydrated, your poop will get really firm.
10
SPEAKER_00
Like, they ll tell kids who have hard poops, you gotta drink more water.
10
SPEAKER_00
Now, I don t know if that s scientific.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think it s both, but if- It can go either way.
10
SPEAKER_01
It can go either way and it can be a sign of dehydration.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay, I had drank a lot of fluid that day, but who knows?
10
SPEAKER_01
No electrolytes.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, I ve had some tummy troubles.
10
SPEAKER_00
You have?
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Poop your pants?
10
SPEAKER_01
I haven t pooped my pants yet.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I think I m on the other side of the troubles.
10
SPEAKER_00
Now listen, I m just going to point out something that kind of shows your arrogance because you didn t ask me to knock on wood and you asked me to knock on wood about everything.
10
SPEAKER_00
So you just said, no, I haven t pooped my pants yet.
10
SPEAKER_00
If you thought it was a real possibility, you d go knock on wood.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that means I don t think it s a real possibility.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you re positive.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I am positive.
10
SPEAKER_01
I am positive.
10
SPEAKER_01
I know myself.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
I know, I know.
10
SPEAKER_00
See, when I tell- You can t know what you don t know though.
10
SPEAKER_01
When I tell you to knock on wood, it s because it s something out of my control.
10
SPEAKER_01
The pooping in my pants is in my control, so I don t need you to do that.
10
SPEAKER_00
You think?
10
SPEAKER_01
I know.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay, well, it s clearly not in my control, and it s in- I m sorry that happened.
10
SPEAKER_00
Also, when it happens, I m like, I m gonna have to tell everyone.
10
SPEAKER_01
See, okay, so, okay, exactly.
10
SPEAKER_00
Hold on.
10
SPEAKER_00
Some of them are good and funny.
10
SPEAKER_00
This one was just sad.
10
SPEAKER_00
I was already melancholy, and then it was just sad.
10
SPEAKER_00
And then I felt like the world was conspiring against me.
10
SPEAKER_00
And then I remembered that was also a sign of megalomania.
10
SPEAKER_00
And then not to get into self-pity, because that s also like self-indulgence and aggrandizement.
10
SPEAKER_00
So I had so much going on before I walked downstairs in now sweatpants to watch the race.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I m really sorry that you pooped in your panties and got it all over your pants.
10
SPEAKER_00
Now had I been peeing the way you suggested.
10
SPEAKER_00
What jeans were they?
10
SPEAKER_00
Both?
10
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no, no, no, no.
10
SPEAKER_01
Were they new Beckhams?
10
SPEAKER_00
Although if I m being honest, if this had happened in high school on Sunday, and these are my favorite jeans.
10
SPEAKER_00
You would have.
10
SPEAKER_00
After the bathtub, I ve been like, that s good enough.
10
SPEAKER_00
Really?
10
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I probably would ve thrown it in the washer.
10
SPEAKER_00
But I m just saying if we were up against the wire and I got it out with the wand the day before and I needed my favorite pants.
10
SPEAKER_01
You d pick aesthetics over poop smell.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s interesting.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, no, I would sniff around and make sure it didn t smell.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay, you could ve added some soap.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I should have, I was, I felt in a hurry.
10
SPEAKER_01
It was too much, I know, it was too much.
10
SPEAKER_00
Also, the pants were black, they re not these.
10
SPEAKER_00
I know that s confusing, because these are also black, but they re my linen, black linen pants.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh, loose.
10
SPEAKER_00
Uh-huh, yeah, very, very loose.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that s hard, yeah, that s tricky, that s tricky, wow.
10
SPEAKER_01
When it was happening.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Cause I know you re like, you re really back and forth about whether you are upset to tell people or excited to tell people.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
When it was happening and you were like, it was spraying in your face and you were washing it down.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I just wanted to die at that point.
10
SPEAKER_01
How excited were you to tell me?
10
SPEAKER_00
I m telling you, sometimes I am, I wasn t.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yes, you were.
10
SPEAKER_01
To tell me.
10
SPEAKER_00
To tell you, yes, yes, not America per se.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but this is the opportunity.
10
SPEAKER_00
Comes with the territory.
10
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, that s precisely it.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m never proud of myself.
10
SPEAKER_00
Over time, they get
11
SPEAKER_01
funny enough that they are great stories, but it s still tender.
11
SPEAKER_00
I know.
11
SPEAKER_01
Like in two weeks, I ll love the story.
11
SPEAKER_01
I ll probably tell anyone they ll listen.
11
SPEAKER_01
I ll be at 7-Eleven.
11
SPEAKER_00
I know, I feel like I wanna hug the story.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay, okay.
11
SPEAKER_00
Okay, but something weird is between us.
11
SPEAKER_00
There s something weird with, well, I ll just, I ll speak for myself, I guess.
11
SPEAKER_00
I pooped on Thanksgiving.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I don t like doing that.
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh, at our house?
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh, okay, great.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I hate that, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
Right, yes.
11
SPEAKER_00
I almost left instead.
11
SPEAKER_00
I was like, maybe I should just go home.
11
SPEAKER_00
I know this poop is coming.
11
SPEAKER_00
But I wanted to stay and I didn t know if we were gonna keep playing spades.
11
SPEAKER_01
Is this before or after the sauna?
11
SPEAKER_00
After the sauna.
11
SPEAKER_01
After the sauna?
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
Interesting, okay.
11
SPEAKER_01
Was it uncomfortable in the sauna?
11
SPEAKER_00
No.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay, it didn t hit you yet.
11
SPEAKER_00
No.
11
SPEAKER_00
All right.
11
SPEAKER_00
And then,
11
SPEAKER_00
So then I had to go find the furthest bathroom.
11
SPEAKER_01
Middle bathroom, did you choose, upstairs?
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I was going to the bathroom and I was so bummed that it was all happening this way.
11
SPEAKER_01
Right.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I hated it.
11
SPEAKER_01
Really quick, did you lock the door to the hallway?
11
SPEAKER_00
Of course.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and then lock the door.
11
SPEAKER_00
The bedroom door and then also the bathroom door, just in case.
11
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
11
SPEAKER_00
Something gets penetrated.
11
SPEAKER_01
Double, what do they call that, double authentication?
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
And even though I hated it, I was like, oh, I gotta, I gotta like go tell Dax that I pooped.
11
SPEAKER_01
Pooped in his house.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
But then you were never alone.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I didn t, I did not want to tell everyone else.
11
SPEAKER_01
Right.
11
SPEAKER_00
So it is interesting.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s a bond.
11
SPEAKER_01
Because I did, I was on the F1 podcast this morning and I didn t tell that story.
11
SPEAKER_01
And Matt was there.
11
SPEAKER_00
Okay, I like that.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I was like, if I m gonna tell it, this is where it.
11
SPEAKER_00
I appreciate that.
11
SPEAKER_00
But this is kind of interesting.
11
SPEAKER_01
Really quick, was it enormous, the one you took at my house?
11
SPEAKER_00
It was full water.
11
SPEAKER_00
Oh, it was?
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
So something you ate mixed with something.
11
SPEAKER_01
I didn t feel great, I guess.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay, great.
11
SPEAKER_01
And was it, were you nervous about the...
11
SPEAKER_00
Smell, yeah, of course.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, okay.
11
SPEAKER_01
Did you open a window or anything?
11
SPEAKER_01
Or just let the fan do its work?
11
SPEAKER_00
No, because, okay, I got kind of worried about the window, because I was like, well, if they re outside.
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you thought we might smell it?
11
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, there s so much fear.
11
SPEAKER_01
Like a cartoon, like green gas just coming out of the window and then floating down into the party.
11
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, exactly.
11
SPEAKER_00
Also, I have a grievance.
11
SPEAKER_00
You guys need matches in every bathroom.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s a fair.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
11
SPEAKER_01
And that s solvable.
11
SPEAKER_00
Can you do that?
11
SPEAKER_01
But let me just say, none of us think of that, like there s so much privacy there.
11
SPEAKER_00
Not at a huge party, though.
11
SPEAKER_01
It makes me wonder how many people pooped in that bathroom during Thanksgiving.
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, I know one other person who pooped.
11
SPEAKER_00
You do?
11
SPEAKER_00
But I don t know if it was in that bathroom or not.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
11
SPEAKER_00
But they pooped.
11
SPEAKER_01
Matt.
11
SPEAKER_01
Nope.
11
SPEAKER_01
Laura.
11
SPEAKER_00
No, it was a boy.
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh, Orion.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
How d you find that out?
11
SPEAKER_00
He told me.
11
SPEAKER_01
I think I just took a dump.
11
SPEAKER_01
Well, presumably all the guests took dumps, I guess.
11
SPEAKER_00
No.
11
SPEAKER_01
Because everyone ate a ton of food and they were there all day.
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, right.
11
SPEAKER_00
And it s like rich food and.
11
SPEAKER_01
Well, don t out me.
11
SPEAKER_00
Not expensive food.
11
SPEAKER_01
I m already uncomfortable about the amount of trees I bought.
11
SPEAKER_00
So we were talking about this the other day, and I ve been thinking about it a lot, like levels of intimacy with people and how it s so different for each individual person.
11
SPEAKER_01
Sure, like a computer could give it a rating.
11
SPEAKER_01
out of 10, and if you looked at any two people talking, it would say like 3.8, 4.9.
11
SPEAKER_01
Is that what you mean?
11
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no, no, no.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean like there s rungs, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
Like I was saying to you, I think holding hands is the most intimate act on earth.
11
SPEAKER_00
And Kristen was like, well, no, like anal.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, I m serious.
11
SPEAKER_00
I would put that as less intimate.
11
SPEAKER_00
I think holding hands is so intimate.
11
SPEAKER_00
And then I was thinking about why, like why to me, because that s probably most people would say anal s more intimate.
11
SPEAKER_01
Sure, I think most people would say that.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think anal s a little more intimate than holding hands.
11
SPEAKER_01
Gay dudes might not.
11
SPEAKER_00
Right.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I actually think it s tied to that.
11
SPEAKER_01
I think part of it is, you re not doing anal on the sidewalk.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
And you re holding hands generally in public.
11
SPEAKER_01
You re not holding hands in the house.
11
SPEAKER_01
You re somewhere, there s a sidewalk, there s something.
11
SPEAKER_01
And it is this weird declaration, we re together.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
Because I ve had gay friends who have had lots of sex with a certain person.
11
SPEAKER_01
And when someone has tried to hold their hand in public, it s like a panic for all the obvious reasons.
11
SPEAKER_01
They re not a target and whatever else.
11
SPEAKER_00
Right.
11
SPEAKER_01
But it just immediately tells everyone in your vicinity, we are romantically involved.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yes, it does.
11
SPEAKER_00
And for me, it s not just like we re romantically involved.
11
SPEAKER_00
For me, you can have sex of all the varieties with someone you re not in love with.
11
SPEAKER_00
In fact, most of the time, that s the case.
11
SPEAKER_00
But to me, hand-holding is- You re reserving math.
11
SPEAKER_00
You do that with someone you love.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I then, and this is kind of sad, but I think it s just cultural and just the way, I ve never in my entire life- No, I don t even want to hear the end of this.
11
SPEAKER_00
I ve never seen my parents hold hands ever.
11
SPEAKER_01
No, I don t like that.
11
SPEAKER_00
I know, but it s the truth.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I think they ve held mine when like I was a baby.
11
SPEAKER_00
You re about to run into a- Exactly, but not, there s no hand holding.
11
SPEAKER_01
I was just somewhere and I held my mom s hand for a while.
11
SPEAKER_01
Intentionally, I forget where I was.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s really nice.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s sweet.
11
SPEAKER_01
I think it brings you back to childhood.
11
SPEAKER_01
Like I hold my girl s hands.
11
SPEAKER_00
All the time.
11
SPEAKER_01
All the time.
11
SPEAKER_01
Anytime we re walking, hopefully I m holding their hand.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
Well that s what I mean.
11
SPEAKER_00
Like for the kids, I think they held my hand when we walked down the street and stuff so cars don t hit me.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
But the only people who held your hand loved you and you loved them.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it wasn t really an affection thing.
11
SPEAKER_00
It was like a protection thing.
11
SPEAKER_01
Sure, but it s a very privileged, no one s doing that.
11
SPEAKER_00
No.
11
SPEAKER_01
I like this hand-holding thing.
11
SPEAKER_01
So Aaron and I hold hands a lot.
11
SPEAKER_00
Ugh.
11
SPEAKER_01
You know?
11
SPEAKER_00
That s really sweet.
11
SPEAKER_01
But no other friend of mine have I held their hand.
11
SPEAKER_01
But I ll hold Aaron s all the time.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s nice.
11
SPEAKER_00
When you re walking down the street you do?
11
SPEAKER_01
No, but like,
11
SPEAKER_00
You just hug him sometimes.
11
SPEAKER_01
Or we ll be sitting in a booth.
11
SPEAKER_00
And you ll hold his hand?
11
SPEAKER_01
And we re both talking with our hands, and I ll just put my hand, like I m gonna arm wrestle him, and I ll just hold his hand a little bit, and then I ll squeeze it and stuff.
11
SPEAKER_01
Like, I just like to touch him.
11
SPEAKER_00
Like it s a water weenie?
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I just like to touch him and connect with him and let him know.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s so...
11
SPEAKER_00
Really nice.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s so nice.
11
SPEAKER_01
I feel like you ve seen a picture of us holding hands.
11
SPEAKER_01
I know.
11
SPEAKER_01
I think the one I ve sent you long ago is like him leaning on my shoulder in a booth at a restaurant we were caught.
11
SPEAKER_01
We lived at.
11
SPEAKER_01
Well, we live specifically at a place called Country.
11
SPEAKER_00
Crackle barrel.
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
11
SPEAKER_01
Well, the equivalent, it was like a no-name Denny s in my town.
11
SPEAKER_01
It was like a one-off Country Boy.
11
SPEAKER_00
Oh.
11
SPEAKER_01
Triggering, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Country Boy?
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it sounds really racist.
11
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t sound very welcoming.
11
SPEAKER_00
No.
11
SPEAKER_00
But then you guys were doing like handholds and stuff there.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s shocking we got out alive.
11
SPEAKER_00
I know.
11
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, because we would be like snuggling in a booth, chatting.
11
SPEAKER_01
We would sit on the same side and then our girlfriends would sit across from us and we would end up just kind of laying on each other and holding hands.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s right.
11
SPEAKER_01
Making out fucking in the bathroom.
11
SPEAKER_01
I m surprised you guys did it.
11
SPEAKER_01
I don t have that gear.
11
SPEAKER_01
But you have, yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
For me, I can t speak for anyone, but for me, I can t choose it.
11
SPEAKER_01
You can t cross over.
11
SPEAKER_01
I can t choose it.
11
SPEAKER_00
No, of course not.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean more because you re already- Wild?
11
SPEAKER_00
No, I mean, you already like, you want to touch him, like you want his skin and stuff.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, I want to hug him.
11
SPEAKER_00
To me again, that s physical attraction, is I want to touch that person s skin or like lick their sweat.
11
SPEAKER_01
Well, I don t wanna lick his sweat, although I would for very little amount of money.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I guess Eric likes to lick people s sweat of people he s not physically, well, he probably is physically attracted to all of us.
11
SPEAKER_01
Well, I would say it s more like the way I wanna hug my children.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s the feeling.
11
SPEAKER_00
Protection.
11
SPEAKER_01
Protection, affection, connection.
11
SPEAKER_00
Then for you, because I don t think hand-holding then for you is like the highest form of love expression.
11
SPEAKER_01
No, staring in someone s eyes as they have an orgasm is the ultimate threshold.
11
SPEAKER_00
It is?
11
SPEAKER_01
I think so.
11
SPEAKER_00
A physical attraction.
11
SPEAKER_01
No, it s so, it s the only thing I would compare to wiping your butt in front of somebody.
11
SPEAKER_01
Like, for whatever reason, that s way worse than pooping in front of somebody.
11
SPEAKER_00
Oh, you think it s so vulnerable.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s so vulnerable.
11
SPEAKER_01
You don t know what your face looks like.
11
SPEAKER_01
They don t know what their face looks like.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s contorted.
11
SPEAKER_01
There s a very specific look in the eyes, and that to me,
12
SPEAKER_01
to me is probably the apex of like, if I m not fully, fully, fully in love with someone at that moment, I think it ll be obvious and I d be too afraid to show, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
I think that s probably the very apex of intimacy.
12
SPEAKER_00
That I guess, that I could see a lot of people feeling like that, very exposed.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and enormously connective.
12
SPEAKER_01
We re really getting somewhere here.
12
SPEAKER_00
Well, if we re saying that mine comes from never having seen it, like a love so deep.
12
SPEAKER_01
that it requires hand-holding?
12
SPEAKER_00
Well, for me, hand-holding is a love so deep that I ve never even seen it.
12
SPEAKER_00
Then I wonder why yours is, maybe just because you ve had so much sex, that you recognize when it s- Insanely intimate and connected?
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I guess.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
What about you, Rob?
12
SPEAKER_00
What s your highest wrong?
12
SPEAKER_01
Probably the same as Dax s.
12
SPEAKER_00
No, you need to pick a new one.
12
SPEAKER_00
No repeats allowed.
12
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it was a good one.
12
SPEAKER_01
Anal sex.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, great, he has to use an anal sex.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, there we go, there we go.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I would do that with anyone, so I don t really.
12
SPEAKER_00
Same.
12
SPEAKER_01
Just knock on my door.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so... Come and knock on my door.
12
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, I thought that was... Well, because I was talking to a friend about this also, and she was saying that her partner, for them, the most intimate thing was like laughing together.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh, really?
12
SPEAKER_00
Just being like so playful.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh, uh-huh.
12
SPEAKER_00
And uninhibited.
12
SPEAKER_00
I like that one.
12
SPEAKER_00
Like talking about poops and stuff like that.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
Letting all the facades go away.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, laughing s very exposing.
12
SPEAKER_01
In the same way that orgasmine is.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like if you re having a real uncontrolled laugh, you re not in charge.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s true.
12
SPEAKER_00
And there s like layers.
12
SPEAKER_01
There s a cry that s uncontrolled.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Crying is also would be high up there for me on the scale.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_01
Thanksgiving highlights.
12
SPEAKER_00
Thanksgiving was beautiful.
12
SPEAKER_01
It was so great.
12
SPEAKER_01
It s so fucking great.
12
SPEAKER_00
Secret turkey.
12
SPEAKER_01
Secret turkey delivered again.
12
SPEAKER_00
It did, it did.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s so sweet.
12
SPEAKER_00
Because everyone s annoyed all week and like you hear it, right?
12
SPEAKER_00
You hear rumbles of everyone s.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh, when Charlie arrived, he s like, ah, finally.
12
SPEAKER_01
He s just so upset because he didn t do his present how he wanted to or something.
12
SPEAKER_01
He didn t have time.
12
SPEAKER_00
But it s really, it s like everyone pulls it off.
12
SPEAKER_01
Reminder, a 13 year old assigns us a person and has invented this and we just participate.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and everyone shows up and it s really, really sweet.
12
SPEAKER_01
Charlie made me two onesie rompers.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he sewed them together.
12
SPEAKER_01
He bought fabric at Joanne s Fabric.
12
SPEAKER_01
And yeah, and then.
12
SPEAKER_00
Talking about exposing.
12
SPEAKER_00
You tried one on.
12
SPEAKER_01
I tried one on.
12
SPEAKER_01
It was snug.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh boy.
12
SPEAKER_01
Maybe that was a signal from Charlie.
12
SPEAKER_00
Maybe.
12
SPEAKER_00
Maybe he wants to snuggle.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, maybe.
12
SPEAKER_01
It was very soft.
12
SPEAKER_01
It was like made of snuggle wear.
12
SPEAKER_01
You got Matt a box of Krispy Kreme donuts.
12
SPEAKER_00
Well, I made him an F1 McLaren Lego car.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yes, it took you- And I packaged it in a box of Krispy Kreme donuts with a sticker with his name on it that I had made.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and it took you, you said- Three hours.
12
SPEAKER_01
Way too long to build the Lego.
12
SPEAKER_00
Took me three hours.
12
SPEAKER_00
I was really proud of it by the end.
12
SPEAKER_00
My brain doesn t work like that, so it was a good skill and a reminder, again, because I had to, I was pot committed.
12
SPEAKER_01
This is the armoire situation.
12
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
12
SPEAKER_00
It is with the shelf where I was like, my brain doesn t work like this, but I have to do it.
12
SPEAKER_00
And then I did it.
12
SPEAKER_00
And then I was really proud, but Legos are annoying because you just see this finished product.
12
SPEAKER_00
It looks like kind of easy.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
And you open up the box and nothing s bigger than an inch.
12
SPEAKER_00
There s so, I mean, the layers in that car.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yes, of course.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
12
SPEAKER_01
I m impressed you got through it.
12
SPEAKER_00
Me too.
12
SPEAKER_01
Do you think you ll build more now that you ve proven you can do it?
12
SPEAKER_00
I liked doing it.
12
SPEAKER_01
It s meditative, yeah?
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it is.
12
SPEAKER_01
You can guess why I don t like it.
12
SPEAKER_00
Cause it s like fake the real thing you do?
12
SPEAKER_01
Directions.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, like when I m being creative or being, or assembling something or building something, I don t like directions.
12
SPEAKER_01
To me, there s no personal sense of accomplishment if I follow directions.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we re so different.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
No, I loved Lego.
12
SPEAKER_01
By the way, I ve never said Lego.
12
SPEAKER_01
I m starting to, if you notice.
12
SPEAKER_00
I don t like it, I like Legos.
12
SPEAKER_01
I don t like it either, I just wanna be clear that like, I didn t grow up saying Lego, Legos.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you can say Legos.
12
SPEAKER_01
But it s Lego.
12
SPEAKER_01
No, keep at it?
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_01
This is like math versus math.
12
SPEAKER_01
I spent more time doing that than anything in my childhood, for sure.
12
SPEAKER_01
I had this enormous case of raw Legos.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I made dragsters and all this stuff.
12
SPEAKER_01
But in that, you know, never, that was even before they had like the- Kits.
12
SPEAKER_01
Kits, yeah, exactly.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I loved sitting down, yeah, and just creating something out of them.
12
SPEAKER_01
That s my favorite.
12
SPEAKER_00
And then you.
12
SPEAKER_01
I too put hours into it, like your Lego project.
12
SPEAKER_01
Smuggled Sunshine.
12
SPEAKER_00
Peachy.
12
SPEAKER_01
AKA Peachy, which is Molly s dog.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you had Molly two years in a row.
12
SPEAKER_01
I hate to admit, Peaches is the cutest dog in the world.
12
SPEAKER_01
She s so cute and stupid and playful and funny and not afraid of strangers, right?
12
SPEAKER_01
So, okay, it was a big conspiracy, really, because we had to get Peachy out of the house.
12
SPEAKER_01
I can t just show up to their house and take Peachy.
12
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
12
SPEAKER_01
That ll tip the bit.
12
SPEAKER_01
So thank God Eric put Peachy in a carry-on bag, met me at the Westfield Mall, which is in the heart of the Valley.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
You know, I m not there normally.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
As I m walking in, it was comical.
12
SPEAKER_01
There s more than one sign on each door that says no pets.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like, clearly, people want to bring their pets to this mall and they have had enough.
12
SPEAKER_01
I ve never seen anything more.
12
SPEAKER_01
There was less signs about smoking and firearms on the premises was pets like clearly pets was the number one thing they were on the lookout for.
12
SPEAKER_01
So Eric has her in the little carry on bag.
12
SPEAKER_01
So that s kind of fine.
12
SPEAKER_01
But we re going to get her out.
12
SPEAKER_01
And also the picture place isn t going to do pets.
12
SPEAKER_01
Clearly, they re in a mall with no pets.
12
SPEAKER_01
So I was there before Eric, and I put on my selling shoes.
12
SPEAKER_01
I was talking with everybody that worked there, and I was really engaging and going for it.
12
SPEAKER_01
And thank God when Peachy arrived and it was clear to them what was happening,
12
SPEAKER_01
I m like, is this going to be okay?
12
SPEAKER_01
And she was like, it s dad.
12
SPEAKER_01
It s fine.
12
SPEAKER_01
Just let s go quick.
12
SPEAKER_01
The dog can t be on Santa s lap, but we ll put the dog on the stool.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_01
So maybe it s happened before.
12
SPEAKER_01
Cause I seem to have a protocol, whatever.
12
SPEAKER_01
I greased Santa on her box.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
So he d play his part.
12
SPEAKER_01
And by God, we got peachy and I had a little outfit for her.
12
SPEAKER_01
We had to put her in her.
12
SPEAKER_01
Little stocking, she was in a stocking.
12
SPEAKER_01
It s so cute.
12
SPEAKER_01
And then she got her picture taken with Santa.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so that was the present I got for Molly.
12
SPEAKER_00
It was really, really cute.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, this is bizarre because on last week s episode of Nobody s Listening Right, Elizabeth and Andy favorite.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Andy is telling a story about being at the mall.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh boy, someone wanted their dog.
12
SPEAKER_00
And a dog pooped in the mall.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wow.
12
SPEAKER_00
And then he had to kind of deal with it.
12
SPEAKER_00
It was a very funny story, but that s- Why did he decide it was his responsibility?
12
SPEAKER_01
Were there old people walking around that were gonna slip in it?
12
SPEAKER_00
Did he feel like a sense of duty?
12
SPEAKER_00
He felt worried, he did.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh, duty.
12
SPEAKER_00
Call of duty.
12
SPEAKER_01
Call of duty.
12
SPEAKER_01
He felt like- He felt the call of duty.
12
SPEAKER_00
People might slip.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_00
And that they saw him, his brother saw, so like, he s a bit of a justice warrior.
12
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
12
SPEAKER_00
And so he needed the person to know.
12
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that he had cleaned it.
12
SPEAKER_00
And to come clean.
12
SPEAKER_00
He didn t want to clean it.
12
SPEAKER_00
He just wanted to block it and then have the person come deal with it.
12
SPEAKER_01
He had seen the, what do you say, the assailant?
12
SPEAKER_00
The perpetrator.
12
SPEAKER_01
Perpetrator, that s what it was.
12
SPEAKER_01
He saw it.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, this makes sense why they have all these signs up.
12
SPEAKER_01
Was he able to get the person s attention and shame them into cleaning it up?
12
SPEAKER_00
He doesn t know if they cleaned it up, but he did say, excuse me, sir, your dog made a duty.
12
SPEAKER_00
So then he showed the guy, then they left.
12
SPEAKER_01
You know, when I take the girls to school in the morning, occasionally we don t find a spot close enough.
12
SPEAKER_01
So we parked on the block.
12
SPEAKER_01
This is probably two mornings a week.
12
SPEAKER_01
We walk down the block a bit.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
And there is.
12
SPEAKER_01
You know, there s a bunch of apartments on the block, and then the patches of grass in between the sidewalk are pretty small, right?
12
SPEAKER_01
They re just like kinda, I don t know, maybe six feet long, and then there s a driveway, and then another little piece of grass.
12
SPEAKER_01
And in front of one of these apartments, what is clear to me is someone is letting their dog poop there every single day, twice a day, never picking it up.
12
SPEAKER_00
No!
12
SPEAKER_01
There s hundreds of the same size poop, and I m like, what kind of fucking person doesn t give a shit?
12
SPEAKER_01
I mean, maybe there are
13
SPEAKER_00
bad addict or something.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I don t know what s going on, but I can t believe I m sure it was.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s not human poop.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, it s some smaller dog.
13
SPEAKER_00
Do do duty duty.
13
SPEAKER_00
Call it duty.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
Putty.
13
SPEAKER_00
Well, not putting it s not wet or presumably some of them are.
13
SPEAKER_00
But it was.
13
SPEAKER_00
But these are.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
Or maybe it s a cat.
13
SPEAKER_00
Maybe that s someone s cat s litter box.
13
SPEAKER_00
But it s so much, and I m like, God, when they walk out there to do this, first of all, the dog s running out of places to poop, and they re too lazy to walk even to a next patch of grass.
13
SPEAKER_00
Or maybe that s getting clean.
13
SPEAKER_00
No, it s clearly, and it s just taking it to a pile of poop and making it go there.
13
SPEAKER_01
Ew.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
And it s probably stepping in its old poop.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m trying to think if I witnessed it, what I would say.
13
SPEAKER_01
Would you say something?
13
SPEAKER_00
I d have to minimally make a joke.
13
SPEAKER_01
You would.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you would.
13
SPEAKER_00
I saw it.
13
SPEAKER_00
Let s see.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m walking out.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s you.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
Go, go here.
13
SPEAKER_01
Go, go.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wow.
13
SPEAKER_00
It looks like this isn t its first time, huh?
13
SPEAKER_00
I guess that would be what would come out.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m trying to think.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m not cutting enough.
13
SPEAKER_01
I m trying to think what I would, I would get defensive probably about that.
13
SPEAKER_00
That would be the goal.
13
SPEAKER_00
I would want to make you defensive.
13
SPEAKER_01
And then get in the fight.
13
SPEAKER_00
No, no.
13
SPEAKER_00
I just keep, I just keep, as I walk by.
13
SPEAKER_01
What if they start screaming like bad stuff and then you yourself get triggered?
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wow.
13
SPEAKER_00
It looks like it s not the first time for him there, huh?
13
SPEAKER_01
This is the only place he knows how to poop.
13
SPEAKER_01
He only has one leg.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I wish his owner had a bag.
13
SPEAKER_00
That d be helpful.
13
SPEAKER_01
I can t afford bags.
13
SPEAKER_01
I ve seen you on TV, you stupid rich prick.
13
SPEAKER_01
Why don t you buy me some bags, huh?
13
SPEAKER_00
I d love to.
13
SPEAKER_00
Here s $20.
13
SPEAKER_01
Fuck you.
13
SPEAKER_00
Hold on, partner.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s what they would say.
13
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m pretty big.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
Fuck you, you fucking asshole.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s pretty extreme.
13
SPEAKER_01
Well, someone who s doing that, I would not put it past them.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s a very good point.
13
SPEAKER_01
I didn t even like that role play, because I don t like saying that.
13
SPEAKER_00
I know, and you don t own a dog.
13
SPEAKER_01
I need to do research before I can play a dog owner, but mainly I don t like saying mean words to you.
13
SPEAKER_01
I do wanna, I wanna say something really quick.
13
SPEAKER_01
It just reminded me when I was telling that story about Andy Rosen.
13
SPEAKER_01
Andy is a music producer.
13
SPEAKER_01
I knew this.
13
SPEAKER_01
I was driving the other day and I was like, oh yeah, I remember I wanna listen to some of Andy s music.
13
SPEAKER_01
He, especially this one album he did with this artist, Ophelia Kay.
13
SPEAKER_01
They talk about it sometimes on the show and I ve always been like, oh, I should listen to that.
13
SPEAKER_01
I put it on and I was like, this is incredible dynamite.
13
SPEAKER_01
This is so good.
13
SPEAKER_01
And it s so interesting that you would be shocked.
13
SPEAKER_01
Well, no, no, it s just so interesting to see people in their element or get pieces of people s secret side or inner self or what they re meant to be doing and you see it.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
Because Andy s like fun and funny on the show.
13
SPEAKER_00
In your mind, he s a podcaster, kind of.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I just have this idea of him.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s just like, nice guy, Andy.
13
SPEAKER_01
And then I heard that and I was like,
13
SPEAKER_01
I was just very surprised at how talented he is.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s such a fun thing about life and people and getting to figure those things out.
13
SPEAKER_00
It is, it is.
13
SPEAKER_00
Fun pop-outs.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I can t wait to listen to it.
13
SPEAKER_00
I found a song that I am so obsessed with in the last, I don t know, week.
13
SPEAKER_01
Lavender Haze?
13
SPEAKER_00
No, no, we all know that stuff.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you love that.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
No, this song.
13
SPEAKER_00
You heard it with me playing space.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, this is a really good one.
13
SPEAKER_00
Leisure slip.
13
SPEAKER_00
Slipping away.
13
SPEAKER_00
It has Sade vibes.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s really good.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we just want to hear the voice.
13
SPEAKER_00
I just want to listen to the whole song actually.
13
SPEAKER_00
I just wanna hear the chorus and then I ll stop.
13
SPEAKER_00
Just let s hear the chorus.
13
SPEAKER_00
Mmm.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s nice.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s a good one.
13
SPEAKER_01
I like it.
13
SPEAKER_00
They re from New Zealand.
13
SPEAKER_00
No way!
13
SPEAKER_01
Oh shit.
13
SPEAKER_00
No way do you think David Ferrier knows them?
13
SPEAKER_00
We ll have to ask.
13
SPEAKER_00
He has to, he knows every creative person on that island.
13
SPEAKER_01
He really does, especially music.
13
SPEAKER_01
Although it s not his style per se, but he probably does know, we ll have to ask.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, this is exciting, they re from New Zealand?
13
SPEAKER_00
From Auckland.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, he s certainly bumped into him.
13
SPEAKER_00
Seen him at the gym.
13
SPEAKER_00
Huh?
13
SPEAKER_01
All right.
13
SPEAKER_01
We have a couple of facts.
13
SPEAKER_01
This is for Daniel Markowitz.
13
SPEAKER_00
I really, really liked Daniel.
13
SPEAKER_01
Me too.
13
SPEAKER_00
So much.
13
SPEAKER_00
In fact, there was this very curious moment at the end, and I don t think I made the right choice.
13
SPEAKER_01
Uh-oh.
13
SPEAKER_00
Which is we interviewed him kind of late in the day.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
And then he said, I need somewhere to hang out for a couple hours before I get on a red eye.
13
SPEAKER_00
And so I said, well, we both said like, oh, you should go to Kara down the street.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s Monica s hangout.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s great.
13
SPEAKER_00
meal, great bar, blah, blah, blah.
13
SPEAKER_00
And then I was like, I ll drive you.
13
SPEAKER_00
You remember that?
13
SPEAKER_00
I ended up driving him there.
13
SPEAKER_00
And then I kind of thought when I got home, maybe I should have invited him over.
13
SPEAKER_00
I was willing to have like a, then an evening hang with him.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s how much I like, I liked him so much.
13
SPEAKER_01
Right.
13
SPEAKER_01
Specifically, he said, is there a place I can go get a beer?
13
SPEAKER_01
I have to, he had to do work.
13
SPEAKER_01
He was doing computer work, I know it well.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay, okay, so he had to work, so I don t need to worry that I- No, but that is nice of you, and I agree, he would have been fun to keep hanging with.
13
SPEAKER_00
He d be an incredible dinner guest.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he s so smart.
13
SPEAKER_00
And thoughtful, it s like more than being smart, everyone that comes on here is smart.
13
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, yeah, that s what, I guess when I say it, I only mean it about something extra, because everyone is smart, that s right, so it s like when there s an extra,
13
SPEAKER_01
Garlic sauce.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, a creme.
13
SPEAKER_01
Glitter and a creme.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
So, okay, Danny.
13
SPEAKER_00
Danny.
13
SPEAKER_00
Now we re calling him Danny.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I call him Danny.
13
SPEAKER_00
Danny boy.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay, where did Letterman go to school?
13
SPEAKER_01
His scholarship.
13
SPEAKER_01
The David Letterman Telecommunications Scholarship.
13
SPEAKER_00
Muncie, it s something about Muncie.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s at Ball State University.
13
SPEAKER_00
Which is in Muncie, Indiana, I think.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s right.
13
SPEAKER_01
The purpose of the scholarship is to provide financial assistance to Ball State majors and minors in telecom.
13
SPEAKER_01
Telecom was Callie s major.
13
SPEAKER_00
It was.
13
SPEAKER_01
And Anthony s.
13
SPEAKER_00
Were they impacted?
13
SPEAKER_00
Because com in general, all the schools I went to was always impacted.
13
SPEAKER_01
At Georgia, there s a film program, but that s more film studies.
13
SPEAKER_01
In order to do film production, it s telecom.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, interesting.
13
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if I d say it was impacted or not.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, okay.
13
SPEAKER_01
Anywho, okay, Muncie, Ball State.
13
SPEAKER_00
Ball State in Muncie, Indiana.
13
SPEAKER_00
Papa John s wasn t there.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, really?
13
SPEAKER_00
That guy s wild, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
Isn t he interesting?
13
SPEAKER_00
I think he s not great.
13
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
13
SPEAKER_01
I looked up the city with the largest number of books bought per capita.
13
SPEAKER_01
Mm-hmm.
13
SPEAKER_01
He said he thought Austin was, or at some point had been.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s really hard to find that.
13
SPEAKER_01
There is a city that has more bookstores per capita.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s gotta be San Francisco.
13
SPEAKER_01
It is, oh, hold on, because this is global, damn it.
13
SPEAKER_01
Buenos Aires.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, find folks in Buenos Aires.
13
SPEAKER_00
Okay, but hold on.
13
SPEAKER_00
Buenos Aires.
13
SPEAKER_01
Although in this other one, it says Hong Kong.
13
SPEAKER_00
Hong Kong.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay, America s most bookish cities, San Francisco.
13
SPEAKER_01
Good job.
13
SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
13
SPEAKER_01
Wow, how d you know that?
13
SPEAKER_00
A lot of those beat books and stuff that I liked, those authors were all in these small San Francisco presses that had their own bookshops.
13
SPEAKER_00
Interesting, okay.
13
SPEAKER_01
San Francisco, Hayward, which is part of the Bay Area.
13
SPEAKER_01
Brooklyn.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that makes sense.
13
SPEAKER_01
Seattle.
13
SPEAKER_01
Other cities with more bookstores than my model expects, this person s model.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
13
SPEAKER_01
Austin.
13
SPEAKER_01
Austin, Columbus, Portland, San Diego, and New Orleans.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
13
SPEAKER_01
City with the highest percentage of doctorate holders.
13
SPEAKER_01
We have done this before and it is also confusing because this says Los Alamos.
13
SPEAKER_01
Oh, sure.
13
SPEAKER_00
Which means that makes sense.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
But then we can t count that as a city.
13
SPEAKER_01
Well, OK.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
13
SPEAKER_00
Probably what the debate was last time.
13
SPEAKER_01
Probably.
13
SPEAKER_01
Because according to online Ph.D.
13
SPEAKER_01
programs dot org.
13
SPEAKER_00
Mm hmm.
13
SPEAKER_01
Number one is Brookline, Massachusetts.
13
SPEAKER_00
That certainly makes sense.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
I mean, Harvard, Boston College and BU.
14
SPEAKER_00
are within three and a half miles of Brookline.
14
SPEAKER_01
And MIT?
14
SPEAKER_00
And MIT is 0.4 miles.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh my gosh.
14
SPEAKER_00
Then Davis, California is number two.
14
SPEAKER_01
Really?
14
SPEAKER_01
From UC Davis?
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it s just because the population s so small?
14
SPEAKER_00
Well, also Davis is quote, in the top 10 brainiest cities.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh wow.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_00
Number three, Palo Alto.
14
SPEAKER_00
Four, Cambridge.
14
SPEAKER_00
Five, Bethesda.
14
SPEAKER_01
Maryland.
14
SPEAKER_00
Then six, Ann Arbor.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that makes sense, very small.
14
SPEAKER_00
Let me see if I can find any Georges on here.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh, Athens, where are you?
14
SPEAKER_00
Number 15 is College Station, Texas.
14
SPEAKER_00
My aunt was born there.
14
SPEAKER_01
She was?
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, my mom s youngest sister was born in College Station.
14
SPEAKER_01
Because your grandpa was a professor.
14
SPEAKER_00
He was getting his PhD at Texas A&M.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yep.
14
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
14
SPEAKER_00
Okay, let s see, what else do I got here?
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, if you re interested in learning more about the Germans and the meth, there s a good Time article on it.
14
SPEAKER_01
That was a great book.
14
SPEAKER_00
Blitzed.
14
SPEAKER_00
Blitzed, yeah, they reference Blitzed in this.
14
SPEAKER_00
But if you want a short, if you don t wanna read the whole book and you want some info, there s an article called How Methamphetamine Became a Key Part of Nazi Military Strategy.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s in Time.
14
SPEAKER_01
Aha, ding, ding, ding.
14
SPEAKER_01
I just recommended that book to Peter Atiyah.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh.
14
SPEAKER_01
And he read it already and he loved it.
14
SPEAKER_01
So I m one for one on that prediction.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s a hit.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
Of course, Tom Hanson had read it.
14
SPEAKER_01
I got so excited, I discovered this book.
14
SPEAKER_01
I was like, Tom, you gotta get this book, listen.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I read it.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was great, it was great.
14
SPEAKER_01
I m like, when did you read it?
14
SPEAKER_01
He s like, I don t know, a year, year and a half ago.
14
SPEAKER_01
I m like, the day it came out?
14
SPEAKER_01
Maybe he just reads everything the day it comes out.
14
SPEAKER_00
Maybe, I could see that.
14
SPEAKER_01
He has an alert.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh, one thing that I just wanted to note, because he came up in another episode too, and I think you do know this, and it doesn t matter, but David Brooks, David Brooks, the columnist.
14
SPEAKER_00
Who wrote the NY- The meritocracy, the article that you referenced.
14
SPEAKER_00
He is conservative, and admittedly so.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh, he is?
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_00
Okay, the spirit level,
14
SPEAKER_00
Daniel referenced that book, and he said it was by somebody and Pickett.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
14
SPEAKER_01
That s a very memorable name.
14
SPEAKER_01
You meet a gal at the bowling alley, Kate Pickett.
14
SPEAKER_00
Have you ever dated anyone just because you like their name?
14
SPEAKER_01
No, but I dated someone whose name I loved.
14
SPEAKER_00
Who?
14
SPEAKER_01
When I was in sixth grade, Sasha Crossett.
14
SPEAKER_00
That s a good name.
14
SPEAKER_01
And she was the hottest girl in my school.
14
SPEAKER_01
And her name was Sasha Crossett.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s not really fair.
14
SPEAKER_00
that she got.
14
SPEAKER_01
All of it?
14
SPEAKER_00
Or is it Chicken or the Egg?
14
SPEAKER_00
Is it like the name s so good she s gonna be hot?
14
SPEAKER_01
Her older sister s name was Darby Crossett.
14
SPEAKER_01
These are pretty wild names for Highland, Michigan.
14
SPEAKER_00
Darby, that s cute.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Darby and Sasha.
14
SPEAKER_01
And they were both foxes.
14
SPEAKER_01
Darby apparently died.
14
SPEAKER_01
2014.
14
SPEAKER_01
What?
14
SPEAKER_01
Of what?
14
SPEAKER_01
Farmington Hills, right?
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that makes sense.
14
SPEAKER_01
Sasha is her sister.
14
SPEAKER_00
No way.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh, this is so sad.
14
SPEAKER_00
What happened?
14
SPEAKER_00
Also, Rob, sometimes you don t have to look up everything.
14
SPEAKER_00
No, this is incredible.
14
SPEAKER_01
Makes me think he s looking up everything.
14
SPEAKER_01
He is, he is.
14
SPEAKER_01
It s just her obituary, I don t.
14
SPEAKER_00
I was like, might have been better off not knowing this.
14
SPEAKER_01
Well, now I wanna know how she died.
14
SPEAKER_01
I ll read through the comments and see.
14
SPEAKER_01
Comments?
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh God.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh God.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s heartbreaking.
14
SPEAKER_00
I didn t know that.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s really sad.
14
SPEAKER_01
Really sad.
14
SPEAKER_00
2014, nine years ago.
14
SPEAKER_00
So she s probably 39 or something.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh no.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s really young, that s scary.
14
SPEAKER_00
I don t like death.
14
SPEAKER_01
Now I m thinking of one, I just gotta say one other girl from the same school.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that name you like or what?
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, she s just so cute.
14
SPEAKER_01
So this is when I was in seventh grade, I had moved to Milford.
14
SPEAKER_01
And then they had this combined dance, which was so brazen of them.
14
SPEAKER_01
They hosted it at Milford High School, but it was both junior highs came together.
14
SPEAKER_01
Highland Junior High and Muir Junior High.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wow, okay.
14
SPEAKER_01
And now I had gone to both.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s a big day for you.
14
SPEAKER_01
Big day for me.
14
SPEAKER_01
Potentially, I don t know if I m gonna have to fight, because there s older kids.
14
SPEAKER_01
It turned out to be so much fun.
14
SPEAKER_01
And then Susie Scott.
14
SPEAKER_01
That s a real name, Monica.
14
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
14
SPEAKER_01
Suzy Scott.
14
SPEAKER_01
I will just, I didn t know her when I was at, I didn t know her when I was at Highland Junior High.
14
SPEAKER_01
And then we re at this combined dance and there s this blonde girl, Suzy Scott.
14
SPEAKER_00
When you were young, did you like anyone non-white?
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God, yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
The number one, my number one obsession was Lisa Bonet.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I know.
14
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
14
SPEAKER_00
I mean, real people.
14
SPEAKER_01
There weren t any non-whites.
14
SPEAKER_00
At your school.
14
SPEAKER_00
Until I got to high school.
14
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
14
SPEAKER_01
And then you know, yes, and I ll give everyone s name, because this is what I m doing on this episode.
14
SPEAKER_01
There was the most beautiful Albanian girl, Kaz s sister, and her name was like.
14
SPEAKER_00
Her name was Kaz s sister.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh, but I was so wild for her.
14
SPEAKER_01
It was crazy.
14
SPEAKER_01
And that was playing with fire because Kaz was, he was something to be feared.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
He owned a Coney Island when we were in high school.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God.
14
SPEAKER_01
I told you this.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh God, here we go.
14
SPEAKER_01
So Aaron and I would get off school and drive to Troy, Michigan, like 40 minutes.
14
SPEAKER_01
And then we would work for five hours.
14
SPEAKER_01
I had early release and we would constantly be dropping cars off in downtown Detroit.
14
SPEAKER_01
And when we would do that, we would swing by Kaz s, a classmate s Coney Island in the heart of Detroit that he ran half of the day.
14
SPEAKER_01
And his brother ran it the other half of the day.
14
SPEAKER_00
Did his parents own it?
14
SPEAKER_01
Clearly, but the brothers ran it, but like in high school, in downtown Detroit at 16.
14
SPEAKER_01
And this, this will paint the exact picture on why this is crazy.
14
SPEAKER_01
Aaron and I rolled in one day as we would do once a week, we d stop by and get some coneys from him.
14
SPEAKER_01
We roll up, there s police tape everywhere.
14
SPEAKER_01
We re like, Park, what s going on?
14
SPEAKER_01
I see Kaz.
14
SPEAKER_01
He s like in the parking lot.
14
SPEAKER_01
We go up to him.
14
SPEAKER_01
I m like, what, what happened?
14
SPEAKER_01
And he s like, oh, yeah, dude, there s shooting across the street.
14
SPEAKER_01
So my brother pulled out his Mac-10 and there was a shootout.
14
SPEAKER_01
So all the windows of the Coney Island are shot out.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God.
14
SPEAKER_01
They ve been in a gun battle with two dudes across the street.
14
SPEAKER_00
And he s in 11th grade.
14
SPEAKER_01
So.
14
SPEAKER_00
Don t look up, Rob.
14
SPEAKER_01
When I liked his sister, it was, you know.
14
SPEAKER_00
Scary.
14
SPEAKER_01
Thanks for going with me on that little ride.
14
SPEAKER_01
Scary.
14
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
14
SPEAKER_00
Did you find out what happened to Darby?
14
SPEAKER_00
No.
14
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
14
SPEAKER_01
When I searched Kaz Kwafa, it said, do you mean Wiz Khalifa, though?
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that s flattering.
14
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so that s really it.
14
SPEAKER_01
Well, now I regret taking you on all those detours.
14
SPEAKER_00
Why?
14
SPEAKER_01
Because it left a bad taste in your mouth.
14
SPEAKER_01
It was about violence and guns and bravado and customs, old world customs.
14
SPEAKER_00
Okay, I will end on something else, then.
14
SPEAKER_00
Okay, great.
14
SPEAKER_00
And I don t want to, because I m nervous you re gonna take it the wrong way or be mad at me for saying it.
14
SPEAKER_00
But I do think it s important that I say it.
14
SPEAKER_00
This whole episode is about meritocracy and our story.
14
SPEAKER_00
And you were saying that you hate it because it fucks with your story a little bit, that you came up.
14
SPEAKER_01
Overachieved, yeah.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and that s right.
14
SPEAKER_00
I m not taking that from you, but I do think sometimes when you, Dax, build that story, you do leave out, like, your brain leaves out pieces.
14
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
14
SPEAKER_00
As in, like, your mom could afford to pay for you to go to college, like, she paid for your college.
14
SPEAKER_01
She did, yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
It was 3,800 bucks a year, but she 100% did, yes.
14
SPEAKER_01
And at that point, she totally could, yes.
14
SPEAKER_01
By the time I left high school, my mom was upper middle class.
14
SPEAKER_00
And so many people s parents can t afford that.
14
SPEAKER_01
For sure.
14
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, it s just like little baby, not taking away from what you ve done, but it s things like that, right?
14
SPEAKER_00
Right.
14
SPEAKER_00
That do end up making differences.
14
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s very fair, because, well, first of all, half of my college was done SMC, which was like literally $22 a quarter.
14
SPEAKER_01
I could have done that.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
But 3,800 bucks a year when I made eight grand a year and had to pay rent.
14
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
14
SPEAKER_01
She paid my rent.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
Until Bree moved in.
14
SPEAKER_01
Then we split that.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
So I might not have gone.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
I don t know that I would have spent the money on it.
14
SPEAKER_01
Even if I wanted to, I don t know that that I would have prioritized it.
14
SPEAKER_01
That hurdle might ve prevented me from going.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s just like one of those factors.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s big time true.
14
SPEAKER_01
I had a mom who I watched get up every morning and go to work and build a business.
14
SPEAKER_01
Like that s worth a katrillion dollars.
14
SPEAKER_00
For sure, exactly.
14
SPEAKER_01
Or worth, you know, yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
In my household, people could start businesses and succeed.
14
SPEAKER_01
My dad had done it several times, my mom did it.
14
SPEAKER_01
That had to have been world expanding in a way I wasn t even aware of.
14
SPEAKER_01
That s really true.
14
SPEAKER_01
All right, well this is so fun.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, this is fun.
14
SPEAKER_00
All right, love you.