Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Daniel Markovits (on meritocracy)

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Daniel Markovits (The Meritocracy Trap) is a law professor and author. Daniel joins the Armchair Expert to discuss what it was like growing up in different countries, why freedom of speech can sometimes be controversial, and why great art can impact society as much as scientific breakthroughs. Daniel and Dax talk about what it means to study meritocracy, how the landscape of going to college has changed, and how having educated parents affects a child’s development. Daniel explains why there is such a wide gap between the wealthy and the middle class, how some institutions use diversity to exclude people, and how the American marketplace is driven mostly by policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Markovits, and I'm joined by Lily Markovits. In this scenario, are we his brother and sister? Parents. Wow, yeah. Wouldn't you be proud if Daniel was your baby boy? So proud. I like this man so much.

I don't know if he'll listen, but if he listens, I want him to hear it right now. I so enjoyed meeting him. It's crazy. I want to go to his house as a dinner guest and I want him to come to my house as a dinner guest. I think that could happen. Okay. If you're listening, Daniel, invite me to your house for dinner. And me. Yes. Invite us to your dinner. Yeah. 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. I know I've referenced the meritocracy trap a bunch of times leading up to this. Yeah. I was inspired to read that from an article.

We get into all that. And Daniel's just one of the most thoughtful, smart humans we've ever talked to. 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. Really important subject. Yes. Once it gets in your head, it's not unlike the Sapolsky stuff. It's like, oh. Can't really unsee it. You can't unsee it. 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. This is very, very present. Everywhere.

It is. Okay, well, please enjoy Daniel Markovits. Trip Planner by Expedia. You were made to have strong opinions about sand. We were made to help you and your friends find a place on a beach with a pool and a marina and a waterfall and a soaking tub.

Expedia. Made to travel. He's an object expert He's an object expert He's an object expert How was the flight? Oh, it was totally easy. Okay. I mean, one of the things, I flew into Burbank.

Oh, we love a Burbank flight. Right, like, I mean, on the one hand, when you're there, it's not, like, nice. But on the other hand... Bus station. It's as easy as a bus station, right? And I'm flying out of Burbank tonight, too. Oh, but it's so much easier. It's so much easier. Oh.

Little airports are, like, the greatest thing. Exactly. Hello! How are you? Nice to meet you. Dax. Yes, nice to meet you. Fellow Tall Guy Club.

Yes, yeah. Well, sort of. 6'3"? 6'4", maybe. 6'4". Well, my brother's 6'6 1⁄2", so I think... Oh! You know?

So you're the little brother. He's my younger brother, too, so that's rough. And he's a much better basketball player than I am, too, so... Do you go by Dan or Daniel? Typically Daniel, but whatever you guys want is cool with me. Interestingly, I go by Dan, and I'm not even named Daniel or Dan. I love your—it's like Hogwarts. That's what I said.

Did you? It's very old school. It's very cool vintage. Yeah, I picture a little manuscript inside that was written on a typewriter. You know, it used to be. Now it's just got my running shoes. Oh, wonderful. Do you collect this kind of thing, like antique-y?

No, I just use it until it wears out, and then I buy another one. You would agree this is an unconventional carrying case in 2023. But it is perfect. It exactly is carry-on size on every airline. Oh, wonderful. And you probably know this as a tall guy. It's nice to have the wheelie ones, but they're too short for me. Oh, yes, yes, yes.

I do struggle with that a bit. If it's not that heavy, it's easier just to carry it. Yeah, I would agree with that. But you also have really nice leather boots on, because I'm feeling like you actually love leather. Well, I like old things. I like things that last. Okay. Where do you think that comes from?

That's a good question. My parents probably did. Okay. But also- Were they antique-y type people? They were kind of antique-y type people, but also we moved around a huge amount when I was a kid. Why? They were both academics, but my mother's from Germany. Oh, wonderful.

Came to the U.S. when she got married to my father. So we have sort of roots over there, and she likes being over there, so we moved back and forth every year. Oh, really? Yeah, so I went to like 10 schools and forth every year. Oh, really? Yeah. So I went to like 10 schools before going to college. Oh, my goodness. What city in Germany would you be going to? Well, some in Germany.

So in Germany, we went to Berlin. OK. But also to Flensburg. But hold on. You went to Berlin pre-'91 fall of the wall. Yes, totally. Wow. I lived in Berlin, 85, 86, when the Chernobyl disaster happened.

No. Oh my God. Would you go to Checkpoint Charlie and just scope it out or were you too young? No, I would go to the East a lot. Wait, you were allowed? So you were allowed over. Actually, as an American passport holder, because of the treaty that ended the Second World War, you had the freedom of the city. So the Russians couldn't keep you out. And so you could go over, but others could go over too. You had to change 25 West Marks for 25 East Marks at a one-to-one exchange rate. Which was not one-to-one. The black market rate was really like whatever. And then you could go over there. There was some cool stuff you could buy.

Like? Depends on what kind of a person you were. So there was some old East German handicraft stuff that you could still buy. You could buy a lot of great American jazz music, which the East Germans had decided was correct ideologically. Well, that was one of their tactics against capitalism. We had these geniuses we treated like shit, right? Exactly. And then the other thing is the East got the center of the former German publishing industry.

So you could get, if you cared about this, editions of some of the great reference works. Were you guys math students ever or physics students as kids? You were mathy. 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? What are you doing with this? I'm not going to be a mathematician.

I get this. But do you remember the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics? No. So it was this big reference book that had all the chemical formulas and all the integration tables before the internet. Oh, really? And it was like 100 bucks in the West. And you could buy it for like 20 marks in the East because it was published partly by East German press. Well, the Germans pre-World War II, right? They were the high watermark of

pharmacological compounds. They invented methamphetamine, 100% coke. Bayer is aspirin, Bayer is bion. Yes. And they even had MDMA that we got as a part of war reparations. I did not know that. Yeah, we seized a bunch of their chemical compounds and MDMA was in there. Totally interesting. Yeah. Wow, what a fascinating childhood. Was it lonely moving around that much? Well, first of all, when you're a kid, your world is the only world. So you don't really think that way. I was one of five.

Oh, okay. Well, that's helpful. So we had one another and we played together a lot. What order are you in? I'm the oldest. Oh, a lot of responsibility. Well, maybe a lot of blame is maybe a better way to put it. But you got good at kind of making friends quickly.

Well, you either do or it kills you, right? Yeah. And you got good at staying in touch with people. That's another thing you kind of learned how to do. Did you have a preference between being in Germany and the States? Well, I was in Germany. The other place I was that I haven't, we spent a lot of time in England. That kind of explains your matriculating there.

That's right. It was also kind of a compromise. You know, my mother's German, my father's Jewish. Germany in the 1970s was maybe not the most popular place. So England was kind of a compromise. Well, these leather goods feel very English. They do, yeah. So maybe it's reminiscent to that.

We both said, or I said Hogwarts. Hogwarts, you said Hogwarts. Where did you guys grow up? Atlanta. Atlanta. Detroit. Detroit. Automotive industry.

Professional parents. She's going to feed right into the meritocracy trap. A structural engineer and a computer programmer. I like Atlanta. It's nice. 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. Because otherwise we just stay in the suburbs. It's gotten better.

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. Where would you be when you were in the States? Austin, Texas. First, Palo Alto, California, then Austin, Texas. Oh, we love Austin. Did your dad have a tech bent? No.

My father is a law professor. 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. Oh, no kidding. Because like it ended. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. That is one of my earmarks. I'm going to earmark that question for you towards the end. But Austin's a lovely place. Austin is really great. When I was a kid there, it was one of the places where you could live well for cheap. And so that meant it attracted a whole bunch of people who liked doing interesting and fun things, but didn't care a lot about money.

And that made it incredibly appealing. And there's five universities. There are a lot of universities around there. There's Texas Instruments. There's all kinds of stuff there. I think for a while it had the largest number of books bought per person of any city in America. I had also heard the highest percentage of doctorate degree holders in the country. That could be.

How do you choose Yale for undergrad? Not very intelligently. 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 and Yale kind of looked like Oxford. That makes sense. Likely modeled after or no? Yeah, it is modeled after. I mean, to a grown

up's eye, it doesn't really look like Oxford because the stone is different. The scale is different. But to me, it looked like that. Yeah. And I was like, this seems like a nice place. So you do mathematics. And at that point, are you aiming at a career in math in some capacity? I don't think so. When I start college, I think I want to be a physicist, maybe. Okay. Do you have idols at this age? Who are my idols at this age?

So obviously- Steve McQueen. Oh, no. Athletes, right? Bart Starr. Michael Jordan. Sure. Artist Gilmore.

I don't know artists. Another basketball player. George Girvin. Do you remember the Iceman George. I don't know artists. Another basketball player. George Girvin. Do you remember the Iceman George Girvin? No. That's another basketball player? Yeah. I used to love the fact that his nickname was, instead of George the Iceman Girvin,

it was the Iceman George Girvin. Yeah, that is preferable. That made a big difference to me. Yeah, it's almost like a big time wrestler. But then also there were a bunch of scientists I had sort of read a little bit in the history of physics. So you liked Einstein and stuff, I imagine. Yeah, but also Niels Bohr and Faraday and Millikan.

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 theoretical physics was just cracking open the universe was almost still in people's memory. People like Richard Feynman, who was out here, but he knew those people. Oppenheimer's over there. Yeah, right. You could almost feel like it was still vivid and human and real. Yes. And they had proven themselves at their apex effectiveness with the atom bomb.

Yeah. This isn't theoretical. This just won a war. 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, that a lot of the theories they developed was this is the way it actually is. Finally.

Right. 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. And so it's kind of hard for people to make deep, profound breakthroughs. 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. But right now, it's just filling in gaps and doing little things a little bit better. Yeah, we've reached the limit of our instruments. We can't really measure more or sample more. We're going to need a new idea, I think, but I don't really know, obviously.

Right. Medicine has that problem a little bit too, I think, where it's like, no, we already figured out cholesterol. We know what causes it. Too many egg yolks. And then people just refuse to hear any outside information. It's like, no, we already did that. We wasted enough time. And we understand about DNA and we've mapped the genome.

Right. Done. 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 as it should be setting that part setting that part aside there was this idea oh my god we now understand how life reproduces itself 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. And it's just amazing. Yep. But we also then get myopically focused on this thing, DNA,

and we're kind of ignoring the epigenome. Yeah, all that stuff. Everything that now we're starting to look at. Turns out to be really a big deal. Now, I have no business having this theory because I'm not smart enough to have it. 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 or a law. We're looking for that one unifying thing that will allow us to predict everything. 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. I don't know. I don't know if we're chasing the wrong thing. Does that make any sense, what I'm saying? Yeah. You know, there's the natural world and then there's the human world. And I think you might even be right about the natural world,

but in the natural world, there's some reason to be attracted to the idea that a good explanation is a simple explanation. Right. Occam's razor. Exactly. But in the human world, not sure that's attractive at all. Or useful, right?

Yeah, right. So think about morality or ethics. The Greeks had this idea of the unity of the virtues, that the virtues should all fit together. If you have one virtue, you have to have them all. Otherwise, you can't have even that one. There's a structure to them. Does that mean that they weren't making room for contradiction within the virtues? They weren't making room for contradiction. They weren't making room for the fact that you could be really good in one way and really bad in other ways.

And even more than that, they weren't making room for the possibility that to have one virtue is to foreclose others. I have a very dear friend who for a while was a prosecutor, an unbelievably just and upright man. But he could also be merciless. And to be just requires you sometimes to be merciless. And if you're too merciful, then you're going to feel for someone and not do what justice requires. And it's not that one is more important than the other. They're both important. You can't have them at once.

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. We're trying to service a couple of ideals in this country that are contradictory in some way. Equality, happiness for all, yet liberty. Liberty and equality are so often at odds. I think liberty and equality are so often at odds. I think liberty and equality are often deeply at odds. In the academic tradition, there was a philosopher named Ronald Dworkin who thought they all fit together. 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. So we've transitioned into philosophy.

I know, which I prefer over math, just personally. Well, me too. Okay. Okay. Which I prefer over math, just personally. Well, me too. Okay. Okay, sorry I interrupted you. I know, but so he thought they all fit together. And he thought he had an account of how they all fit together. And I just think that can't possibly be true. 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, they're going to start saying things that are going to be both immoral and deeply offensive and also harmful to some other people. And if they get to say them too loudly and too often, it's going to exclude those other people in some meaningful way. And there's going to be a tension now between liberty and equality. And my view is reasonable people can disagree about how to resolve that tension. Well, they're very hard to weigh it's like even if you committed to like 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 so unknown 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.

The notion that we're going to come to some set of ideals and morality that are going to stand the test of time is preposterous. And we have to have a door open for you to come out and go, hey, gay people aren't actually spawn of Satan. But that at one time would have been so dangerous. That's right. spawn of Satan. But that at one time would have been so dangerous. That's right. 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's still lots of reasons to pay attention to what those people said and did. They had a lot of other wisdom, a lot of other skill, even greatness. And the future will look on us as we look on them. Yeah, it's so arrogant for

us to be like, oh my God, look at them. We shouldn't listen. The same thing's going to happen. And to throw out everything they said. Yeah. That just happened recently where I was like, well, hold on. Yes, this person's a scumbag. But additionally, they were brilliant at this. That's what I think is interesting. This is a total sidebar, but I think we've already spoken. And I don't know that it's the right verdict. So we have decided that art should be thrown out and that scientific breakthroughs should be upheld. If we find out Einstein was molesting children, we're keeping the theory of relativity.

But if Cosby's a rapist, that show's gone forever. Now, 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. And another thing, so really we're just saying we value science more than art, in my opinion. Yeah, maybe. I think Cosby's a hard case for the following reason.

So much of his art's appeal was connected to Bill Cosby's personal appeal. Totally agree. He's a bad example. I would say Picasso would be a better example. Picasso, I think, was terrible to women. Yes, yes. And I don't think we're going to throw Picasso out. And Shakespeare was an anti-Semite, and I'm sure was a racist. And I don't think we're going to throw Shakespeare out. Okay, these are great counters. Do you agree, though, that art is-

Much more vulnerable. Yes. Yeah. And I think it's partly because we're much more, both rightly and wrongly, insecure about the humanities. Yes. We don't really know if we think it's a worthy pursuit. I think the way in which we're rightly insecure 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. 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 to a whole series of voices that that wisdom was keeping out. Surely, yeah. 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. And it's very hard, I think, to balance those things. Well, but you find out the inventor of penicillin was, again, a serial killer. We're still going to use penicillin.

I would argue Michael Jackson's making a billion people happy a day. I hate what he did, but it's to me as impactful on this planet as penicillin might be. I had a friend years ago, he 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. So Michael Jackson's music is like that. Yes. Often music is like that. And so for that kind of art, it's a little bit like penicillin in that it just undeniably works. Yes. You don't need training. You don't need to develop your taste. And that's hard to throw out.

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. And if that kind of art is produced by somebody who is in some way or other depraved and the depravity is somehow connected to the art. That's the Cosby example. It's hard to watch that man be joyful. You can't like it anymore. Agreed. He is the piece of art.

It just becomes much harder. Yeah, because it's not like you're watching and you're like, oh, I feel bad watching. You actually feel bad watching. Like your body doesn't like it anymore. And then it becomes easy. I would say I also think part of it is ego. 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.

You're always a little suspicious that we might all have been fooled by this. Just lines. I could do that maybe, but I definitely can't create penicillin. We're smart enough to know that we have limitations in science, but we think we can make art. Is that maybe because you're just good at art? No, I'm horrible at art. So actually, I don't. I look at things and I don't understand how- Like, I see it. I'm like, I could never do that. Yeah.

Right. But I'm guilty of this. 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. Did people just make just kids like i guess that's the side of a face but it took me actually seeing that to give it up so i've been guilty i can see that 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. Whereas in science, you wouldn't say, I guess we're throwing out penicillin because there isn't an equal to that. We have to have it. Yes. And I also, for the record, understand when the artist is still alive and profiting and you're potentially fueling their abuse.

That's like a side. Like if Michael Jackson was still alive, I think I might have a different opinion. But at this point in Picasso and all these flawed people. Okay, you take a very circuitous route. 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.

You have a master's in economics and then philosophy hits you. And then you end up going back to Yale and studying law and then clerking for somebody, which then results with you becoming a law professor of all things. Do you feel like you're tying in all these things? So this is a little embarrassing, but that was the plan. That's wonderful. Getting an academic job can't be a plan. It's a hope, but the market is rough and irrational. So it couldn't have been a plan to end up with the particular job that I have.

But I had this sense. So you asked me about math and science, like I was interested in it, but two things happened. 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. And he told the story about being at a dinner next to Linus Pauling, who is like one of the great physicists of all time. And Pauling says to him, so what are you working on? And he starts describing the problem he's working on. And Pauling turns to him and says, you know, I thought about that problem for an afternoon about 20 years ago. And it seemed to me that what you needed to do was this and this and everybody had been thinking about it wrong

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 oh was that totally demoralizing that was just demoralized to me because I was like I'm not any Nobel Prize winning physicist and the idea that you could be one of the great physicists and then an even greater physicist could do your life's work in an afternoon. I was like, I'm out. And the other thing, and this I think depends on your character. If you're a mathematician or a physicist, your work life and the rest of your life are totally separate. So the things that you think about on your job have no relationship or bearing.

Yeah, like at a dinner party, you're a drag. At a dinner party. Yeah. Unless you're otherwise very interesting, right? But also just the kind of things that I do now. So I write, for example, about contract law and the nature of promises. I have kids and they ask me to make them promises. And it's sort of interesting to me, like, when do they ask for promises? When do they not? How do I feel when I make a promise? And so the thing that you do in your life is connected and it gives you ideas what to think of. It all fits together. And that was also important to me. Do you have the protocol in your house? Because it is developed in ours, which is, let me be clear. I'm not promising we're going to that restaurant tomorrow. I'm saying,

yes, that's an option. We'll explore it. Like I have to really delineate when I'm being- All the time. All the time. Especially when they were younger. They also go, you promised. Especially when I'm being- All the time. Yes. All the time. Especially when they were younger. They also go, you promised. Especially when they were younger. All the time. Yes, yes. We're in that stage right now, eight and 10. They love promises.

They love promises. Well, they know it's a mortal sin to break. They leverage it. So I think it's not just that. I think it's actually really profound in the following sense. You're the parent. And so you are going to determine what happens. And even if you promise, you're still going to determine what happens.

And they know that. But if you promise, they can't determine what happens, but it's up to them what should happen. And so they have a kind of authority over you. I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as kids grow up, they want to be like the authority figure. Control. Control.

And not just control about what will happen, but control about what's right and wrong. When you promise, you give them that kind of respect yes so you're entering into a contract right and they care about the respect not just the ice cream that you promised yeah and so i think that's why they really care about promises that's a good thing to remind yourself as a parent they're not actually flipping out about the ice cream they're flipping out about the injustice that you broke this contract right exactly we all have a deep sense of justice. You hope your kids have a sense of justice. I only have one measly degree, anthropology,

but I know about justice. What kind of anthropology did you do? Cultural, unfortunately. I did so many electives in physical and I probably just should have done physical. I'm getting totally interested in anthropology these days and sociology. Well, it's having a real moment.

Yeah. 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. You could go and be culturally relative and understand how a system works. And that was about it.

You couldn't advise. But I think there's a host of people that are starting to synthesize many different disciplines. And somehow when that happens, anthro is really required. We go back to like, what were we designed to do? And how is this matching up with what we're doing? I think it becomes a really quintessential ingredient into this.

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. It's increasingly becoming the study of us. 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. Yeah. Why are we doing all this stuff we do? What is the vestigial thing that we're being driven by still? Okay. So how

does all this lead to studying meritocracy? In three ways. The first is, whenever we moved around when I was a kid, I always went to whatever school the local state assigned me to. And in Austin, I graduated from a high school, which was a public high school inside Austin, was not the fancy public high school. 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, they didn't end up as rich and they didn't have the same amount of status. And I was trying to figure out, that's obvious in some sense, but what's not obvious is understanding exactly why and how. All the mechanisms. And also why the gap has grown and is growing. So survivor's guilt, number one. Yeah. Or maybe also just the fact that when you study promising

and your kids make promises, you sort of find that interesting. And so also reflecting on your own experience. Yes. The only reason I'm resisting survivor's guilt is that my friends from high school are doing fine. Well, because it sounds pitying and you don't want to do that. That's not the view I have of them. But it's fair, I think, because I have tremendous survivor's guilt. Of my friends all growing up, so many of them had enormous potential, equal to mine. For numerous reasons, they didn't realize any of that. 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. Now, if everyone you went to school with in Austin is exactly where they wanted to be,

great. And that's not true. But the other side of this is also true. There are lots of ways in which my friends from high school, you know, they're not as rich. They don't get as much respect from strangers. They're not an armchair expert. There you are. There you are. Exactly. Yet. Yet. We don't know.

Exactly. 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. Right. Joke's on us often. They're not as stressed. They have hobbies. Yeah. They might be as stressed. They have hobbies. Yeah. They might be closer with their children. They live close to their parents. So I wanted to understand that side of it too. Maybe questioning your own destination or where you landed and is this everything I thought?

Yeah, I should be very clear. 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 hard scrabble background. So it's not a question of like my own journey. My own journey is pretty boring. Child of professors becomes a professor. Pretty standard. Nobody's writing a novel about that. Only a satire. Only a satire. Yes. But in your own mind, you had fantasies of what a law professor at Yale would be. and then you arrive there and you go, I'm grateful for this. I enjoy this. But you evaluate a little bit, right?

Yeah, that's right. I wonder if this is something, especially when I was younger, I was a great admirer of certain thinkers. And I had this feeling that when they had finished their great book, they sort of had this sense, yeah, I've done it. This is what it's like. 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. Or I didn't really understand what I was doing. Your wife would say that or you would say that? She would say that. She would say that. You're wrong. They don't have this moment of purity and epiphany. Well, they look in the mirror and they're like fuck is that tooth rot yeah all that thing right

their back hurts they got indigestion their wife's pissed plus they read back on their book and like oh man i screwed that up yeah yeah and so i think that may be just the human condition very much so stay tuned for more armchair Expert, if you dare. Sasha hated sand, the way it stuck to things for weeks. So when Maddie shared a surf trip on Expedia Trip Planner, he hesitated. Then he added a hotel with a cliffside pool to the plan, and they both spent the week in the water.

You were made to follow your whims. We were made to help find a place on the beach with a pool and a waterfall and a soaking tub and, of course, a great shower. Expedia. Made to travel. What was the third thing that you think? Oh, the third was much more academic, which is that I had written some papers in a particular philosophical tradition

about economic inequality. Have you read The Broken Ladder by chance? No. Sounds like I should have. It's an incredible book about income inequality that I probably would have rejected before I read it. And it's one of my favorite books I've ever read. Oh, wow.

Yeah, I will get it. Yeah, it's really, really good. I'm embarrassed I don't know the fucking author. Keith Payne. Keith Payne. Fuck! Boom! I'll get that on my Kindle for the flight home.

Can I tempt your palate for one second? It talks about all this flight data. I'm going to mess these numbers up, but you'll get the gist of it. 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. If they enter in the middle and you can see first class to the left, but you turn right and go, it's like 2x. And if there's no class, it's just like, this is just black and white data.

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. These are people that are already on an airplane. Right. And also, flying coach is actually fine. Yes, if you don't know about first class. You know, it's kind of annoying and your feet hurt. If you're tall, you're kind of jammed in. But nobody would call this suffering. It's not horseback across the dust bowl. It's just relative. And the book makes a great case.

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 than people who are objectively below the poverty line but surrounded by other people though. And it's like, well, that's a head fuck, right? Yeah. 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, both on individual lives and consciousnesses and on social organizations. Inequality is bad, it turns out. And it's almost maddening to me. What I hate about it is largely it's in our minds. That's what's so frustrating because it's like, how do you combat something like that? 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.

Right. In some sense, it sounds like a banality to say inequality is bad. But another way to think about it is this. 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. And now you've got an extra million dollars to give out. It seems as though there may be lots of reasons to give it to the people with $50,000. But supposing you can't do that. Supposing your only choice is give it to the people with 100,000 or burn it.

It seems like it's obvious you should give it to the people with 100,000 because you're helping somebody, you're hurting nobody, but it turns out maybe you should burn it. Wow. Really? Because maybe if you give it to the people with 100,000, it'll make the people with $50,000 miserable. And maybe also in the medium run and certainly the long run it won't even be good for the people who get rich wow wait we have to talk about my white elephant oh yeah last year i went to a white elephant party with a bunch of our friends the 12th time you've been to it been to a million times all of our friends so people who know each other well respect each other there's all kinds of gifts happening at this party. You can steal gifts.

That's really relevant. Yes. Do you have to bring something? Everyone brings something. You bring something and everybody takes something. 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. 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. So you want to be last. Virtually, yes.

Although you can only be stolen twice and it gets locked. So it's like strategic. It's fun. That's really complicated. And it's really funny and fun. It's so fun and funny. And should be noted there's no cap on price. So there's a wide

range of gifts happening here and over the course of the 12 years these gifts have gotten crazy there's a dell tickets once so it's my turn and i never want to go for a package under the tree i'm going for the known to the unknown that's right okay 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. She also makes the most amount of money of anyone there. That's not true. That's not true. Okay. But you're in the top half of the distribution. I'm in the top one person. Okay. Yes. I'm in the top percentage of earners, I guess, but also should be said, everyone there has money.'s doing fine so i took the money and there was an audible sound that flew across and i wanted to just throw the money people were repulsed back

yeah it's crazy and then crazy stuff starts happening in your head we're like well i brought this and that's more than this amount of money. So I'm not coming out ahead here. Exactly. And why is everyone so mad? I'm so generous. I give. And then you feel disgusting for having all those feelings. I mean, it is crazy.

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. But then we were like, no, just imagine Jeff Bezos is at the party and he takes the money. You're like, fuck you, Bezos. Take the dog food. You are. But also, then I just imagine Jeff Bezos is at the party and he takes the money. You're like, fuck you, Bezos. Take the dog food. 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. Because you want to be able to get in the spirit. Yeah.

Well, and the other funny thing about this, you say everybody in the party is doing fine. 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. It used to be that the rich people had windows, the poor people did not. The rich people had light. Even when we were kids still, if you had a big TV. Right, you had a TV. Everybody's got a 50-inch TV. And if you look at things like the penetration of air conditioners or cars or washing machines. Cell phones. Right, all this stuff. It's not that people who don't have a lot of money or who are even poor aren't suffering. They are suffering.

And the gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor is enormous and growing. But the thing that people are suffering from is no longer mostly straight material deprivation. That's so true. It's something that's like constructed by our forms of respect, our forms of power, the way in which people treat each other.

Social primates, our status. All these things. Whereas it used to be what the poor died of is starvation and overwork. Right. They just led totally different lives in that way. And to try to understand how that happened and what to make of it and how to respond to it is really complicated. So let's talk about the system that existed before. Let me back up.

Just so you know, my father-in-law sent me the David Brooks article. I loved it. I then got your book. I listened to it on tape. There's so much data in it. I was sitting down to try to remember my favorite stats. I was like, there's so much data. It's so well researched.

But I was interested to learn that even this word meritocracy is only from the 40s or 60s or something. It's relatively new, which is interesting because the 40s or 60s or something it's relatively early 60s yeah relatively new which is interesting because the country was based on a foundation of merit because i want to talk about what system existed before we have a meritocracy and then i just think it's even interesting we didn't even have that word until the 60s so yeah yeah in europe and in much of the world we had an aristocracy and so that was a hereditary form of privilege in which rich people didn't work and it it was gross too, right? We watch these historical period pieces and you come to find out it's actually distasteful to work.

Work was a degraded occupation. To work was to be humiliated. 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. It was the reclaiming of a word that was a term of degradation into a source of pride. Oh, right. So you would be called a laborer and that would be a slurrish. 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. Because if you were in trade, you couldn't go in the front door. Yeah. Make a mess. Yeah, exactly. I think the U.S. was a lot more complicated. Wait, can we just put a couple finer points on that?

Because we're there. Yeah, so you didn't work, and your wealth was predominantly land holdings? Land holdings, and then at some point, eventually, it would be factories and machines, and maybe certain kinds of financial instruments. Right, but you would have virtually nothing to do with any of those things. You have nothing to do with any of it. 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, your wealth makes you free.

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. You give them 10 acres of your thing. You can keep what you grow, but you got to grow all my shit. Right. And you just take whatever surplus they produce and you keep it for yourself. So then you use it for whatever you feel like. That kind of wealth frees the rich person. And that's really important. And the contrast to, in some ways, the wealth we have now is important. Right. 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. It was intentionally set up as a merit. would have meant virtue and hard work would therefore rise. Of course, you had to be male,

you had to be white. Yes, of course. So they didn't really believe in equality. It's just they thought all white people were aristocrats. Yeah. 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. So is it true then that when slaves existed most white people could just go well but I'm not that? I think that there was that part of it. 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. Yeah, they almost were landowners in a sense. In a sense. A lot of the wealth in the United States in 1820 was held in the form of enslaved people. Yeah, the South had all the money. So two points here. One, U.S. slavery gives slavery a bad name. The kind of slavery that existed in ancient Rome, for example, was much less malign than U.S. slavery. I didn't know that. Because in ancient slavery, slave was a status a person could have. And if you were a slave, you were a person. And that meant there were limits to what could be done to you.

It meant you could buy yourself freedom. You could acquire freedom. There were slaves who were extremely wealthy in ancient Rome. Oh, wow. Whereas in the U.S. regime, to be an enslaved person was not to be a person at all. It was to be a thing that could be owned, right? Which was particularly both degrading and brutal. 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.

Yeah, it was more of a caste system, yet they rejected that part. There's a guy who's written a great book on this called Aziz Rana, who's a professor at Boston College. 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. Interesting. Okay, so we have this premise for white men. How does it evolve between 1776 and, let's say, turn of the century, 1900s? In the early years of the Republic, there's a relatively high degree of economic equality among the white population. Well, when I read all these books about the tycoons and the patrician class,

most of them came from nothing. So many of them came from nothing. And in the early years, they weren't that rich. 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. Okay, so that's when we find our way back into hereditary. Into something that looks a little bit like an aristocracy, which is broken in America by the stock market crash of 1929. The U.S. in the 20s actually looks a lot like the U.S. in the aughts.

There's incredibly high inequality. So the concentration of income and wealth in the 1% in 1929 looks a lot like it did in 2007. And in between, it's much lower lower and it's highly financialized. So Wall Street is a big deal in the 20s. By the 1950s, Wall Street is not a big deal. And then in the 80s, 90s and aughts, it becomes a big deal again. So we get that kind of U-shaped story. Okay.

Now some other interesting things start happening. Tell me if there's one worth mentioning before the 60s and the Vietnam draft. In a sense, the end of the Second World War and the challenge of communism is worth emphasizing in two ways. The first is, in Europe, the Second World War is really important because it destroys all the wealth. So one way in which the Second World War produces economic equality in Europe is all the rich people had all their shit destroyed. Okay, right. Just wiped out wealth. Destruction makes equality. In the U.S., that doesn't happen. But what happens in the U.S. is that the ideological needs of resisting communism, also coupled with the, as we said earlier on when we talked about jazz in 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. 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. And then you have this ideology out there saying, wait, everybody's equal. That's not a good position for the U.S. to be in. Is this, I've never even thought of this, but does the narrative get propagated? Do we start selling our system more and more because we have to, because there's an alternative afoot? Like pre-Cold War and threat of communism,

was the American dream as present in media and as propagandized? Or do we have any reaction to this threat where we've got to double down on the virtues of our system? I mean, I think Horatio Alger, so the rags to riches stories are present in the US. Prior. Prior to this. Okay. But there's a certain kind of law-based, constitution-based patriotism

that comes only really after the First World War. 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.

Also, the Holocaust made it hard to keep excluding Jews, who were excluded also. The need also to compete with the Soviets made it important to have a sort of hyper-capable, competent, and energetic elite. So Khrushchev says, we will bury you. And in the early years, actually, the Soviet Union, Stalin, it was not clear which economic system would prove to be dominant. Stalin brings Russia, the Soviet Union, Stalin, it was not clear which economic system would prove to be dominant. Stalin brings Russia, the Soviet Union, from an agrarian peasant society into an industrial powerhouse. Into space. In one lifetime, which took capitalism a long time. And so there were serious people who thought, uh-oh, they might out-compete us. And if we're going to fight back, we need an

elite that is not inbred, is not lazy. We need the best elite we can get. And so meritocracy starts producing that too. Yes. We've also just learned from World War II, we imported the minds we needed to win the war. We also had some very tangible proof of what that can do to have that brain trust here. They stay in Germany, we lose. Yeah. There's something to that. Okay. Now 60s come along and Vietnam comes along and there are deferments issued for boys attending college. Right.

And I would imagine at the time, the argument would have been, we need those minds for America to compete. Right now, looking back, it's like, well, that's fucking nuts. 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. It's rough. Now it's pretty black and white. Yeah, I mean, that's actually a really good point. 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 the system,

importance of the Vietnam War and of those deferments in structuring this system, partly because one thing those deferments meant, it was suddenly incredibly valuable to go to college. Oh, it would save your life. Right. Beforehand, you would go to college if you wanted to go because you wanted to study. You might go to college if you wanted certain jobs, but Detroit, you could get a job at GM straight out of high school. And if you'd worked hard and did well, you'd be a tool and die maker by the time you were 45. You'd have the equivalent of $100,000, maybe a little more income in today's money. You'd buy yourself a house on Lake St. Clair. You would be basically doing as well as a college professor. Even when my family was a vendor of General Motors in the 80s and 90s, the people at eighth level and above, they weren't elite college grads. They had gone

to Michigan State and they had proved a great aptitude while working there and they did move up. Exactly. And so it wasn't obvious, I think, in 1955 that if you were ambitious, you needed to go to college. It's hard for us in modern society to imagine that, that it was almost a fucking a hobby to go do that. Right. You know, it should be said, even today, I don't have the numbers right now. 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. You finish high school, you go join, you know, Siba Gai Ghi or whatever the chemical 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. Yes. But the Vietnam War, so two things happened. One is this change in the training and the rewards to certain kind of training became much, much greater. 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. Yes. Like a vaccine. That's right. That's right. Totally. Yeah. Totally right. That makes it much more competitive to get in. 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. Yes. Our college system at this point is still- Is much more egalitarian. Yes. And when does that start changing? In the 60s and 70s. It changes partly in response to deliberate policy.

So at Harvard, it changes earlier, for example, than at Yale and Princeton. At Berkeley, it changes early. So in the 50s, these changes are starting to happen, say, at Harvard and Berkeley. Because it's fair to say that plenty of deadbeats went to Harvard back then, right? Oh, yeah. In the 50s, the language was you didn't apply, you put yourself down for the college your father attended. Right. And Harvard was very interested in the happy bottom quarter of the class. 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. They were going to inherit their father's company or their jobs or whatever it was that they needed. And by the way, there wasn't that much inequality. You didn't have to be that rich to be at the top. 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, but there wouldn't be people above you. And then this changed and partly it changed in response to policies of seeking more competitive, hardworking, academically inclined, academically accomplished students. 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. 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 deserve to be there. So at Yale, Kingman Brewster becomes the president and he transforms

this. He says at some point, I do not intend to preside over a finishing school on the Long Island Sound. And that's what Yale had been. And so he transforms it into a modern university. If you and I are alive in that moment, this sounds good to me. Yeah. I don't think it should be a fucking country club for rich kids. I think that's right. What happens is, I've just done the research, so I know the history best at Yale.

He hires this guy, Inky Clark, who has like this waspy name, but turns out to be an immigrant's kid from Long Island. And he becomes the director of admissions. He basically completely turns over the admissions office. And the first year he's the director of admissions, the percentage of alumni kids who are admitted gets cut in half. The average grades of the kids who get in goes way up. And I think the son of the head of the Yale Corporation or something like that gets rejected. Wow.

Right. And so he's like, there's a new regime in town. Is it still expensive? It is still expensive, but it's a lot less expensive. Okay. Relatively. 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. Even today, I think that this is something many Americans

don't fully get. There are very few colleges that are really, truly need-blind. In other words, when you apply, you do not, in your application, include any information about your ability to pay. Oh, I didn't know what that meant. 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. They admit people without even looking at whether they can pay. Right. And then they put together financial aid packages. Again, sounds great. Right. Sounds great. At most colleges, even at most pretty good colleges, if you can pay, you're more likely to get in. So that starts happening.

So these places transform the kind of thing that they are. And initially, you're right, it's like totally great because excluded people start getting in. People start getting in who are harder working. They're not just partying all the time. They're trying to do what they're there to do. 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. And it looks pretty good for a while. And then the worm turns. And it turns in

two ways that are really important. One is the reason this worked initially at opening up the elite is that the old aristocrats, if you're being blunt about it, weren't that hardworking, they weren't that smart. 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. The best high schools in America in 1960 were all public high schools, not private schools. Private schools were full of lazy, dumb people. 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. And so the system that

in the first couple generations opened up the elite, by the time it gets entrenched, the people who won in that competition are now able to dominate it for their kids. Right. And so I think now would be a great time to talk about the mechanism by which that happens. And this is just the investment that those people who graduated on a merit-based level, their investment, what they can make. Is this hard to quantify? It's partly a money investment. It even begins before they start investing money. So for example, in 1970, women, regardless of their income or education, had about 10% of their children outside of marriage. Today, women with a college degree or more have only about 5% of their children outside of marriage.

Women with a graduate or professional degree, I think, have only about 3% of their children outside of marriage. But women with a high school education have over half of their children outside of marriage. Holy smokes. So a 15x difference. Right. 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. 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. So this starts even before kids go to school. We just had Robert Sapolsky on.

Stuff's happening in the womb. There's scarcity, there's trauma. Yes, all this trauma really harms kids. You know, there's a woman named Florencia Torche, who's a sociologist at Stanford, who did this incredible dark natural experiment. But she looked at women who were pregnant during the great earthquake in Chile recently,

but not physically harmed while they were pregnant. So these were women who had an enormously stressful event while they had a pregnancy, but no physical damage. And she looked at what happened to the kids. And two things are interesting about this. The first is that the kids who were in utero during the stress event had a whole series of disadvantages from birth relative to kids who were not subjected to this stress. 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 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. So this like starts before you're conceived. It happens as soon as you're conceived. Then it continues on. You know, when you're born, kids of parents with college degrees hear many millions more words before they're two or three than kids of parents without college degrees. Then they go to preschool. The really rich kids, there are preschools in New York City that cost $50,000, $60,000 a year. Oh, yeah. They're here as well. That have departments. They're full of specialists and training kids. They have very low acceptance rates. They have like 10% admission rates. And it turns out, you know, that kind of education is ridiculous, but it's effective. Yeah. It gives you an advantage.

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. 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. 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. A middle-class district spends maybe $12,000 to $15,000. The most elite private schools spend over $75,000. A kid. A kid. A year. A year. All right. Oh my God. 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. And what this produces is enormous gaps between the rich and the middle class when they apply to college.

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. points higher on the SAT than the average kid whose parents are right in the middle of the income distribution. 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. So the rich middle-class gap is twice as big as the middle-class poor gap. Wow. 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. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. I'm going to add two things. I just brought up Sapolsky. You will be the second person I've invited here that I hate your opinion, but respect you enormously. Sapolsky's most recent book is about determinism and a lack of free will. Fucking hate it. But God, I worship the guys.

And you've been turned a little bit. Yeah. I move. I move. I move. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, I hate your book. I hate the premise of your book, right? Because my personal story is one of coming from single mother, lower middle class, and then buying the house that we're at. And so for me, the American dream works big time. And I was able to go to UCLA without good grades in high school. I went to a community college. For me, this system has been incredible. I've been able to become educated at

a great place, having fucked up many times along the way. So it threatens my story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm curious, what percentage of these elite schools is made up by these kids we're talking about, children of the elite? Yeah, so good. So let me answer that question, and then I want to talk about your story, if that's okay. Yeah, yeah. 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. Wow. So the majority... Well, I don't know, because there's also the middle. Now, one thing that these colleges have been trying to do is to get better about that. I don't yet have systematic data on this. I have anecdotal data and just having been swimming in the water. What they're doing is they're trying to admit more kids who come from real lack of privilege. And they're doing a creditable job at that. But mostly these kids are squeezing out middle-class kids. 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. I've had three jobs throughout high school. But I had a really hard time and I've overcome a lot and I'm a really good bet. And on the other hand, 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. No. But you do speak Chinese. Right. And you do have 11 APs. And you did join an archaeological dig and discover something new. Yeah.

You raised $10 million. You probably have an app. Right. And so you're impressive. Right. 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, but also is not squeezed full of accomplishments because they went to the Akron public schools and they did well. So there's a real problem there. 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. More than half of the Republican Party now thinks colleges are bad for America. There's a sense in which they're not wrong. Oh yeah. It's not a baseless opinion. If you talk about public schools, I was talking to somebody recently who was on the faculty at UCLA. So you went to UCLA. UCLA's acceptance rate is now under 10%.

I'm not shocked. The starting grade point average was 4.03 when I went there. And so if I'm a middle-class Californian, my kids probably aren't getting into UCLA. And I'm like, well, what the hell? I've got this public university. My taxes are funding it. So what's going on there? So that's a structural problem. And it's gotten worse. Let's add in now 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? There's a total argument against it. 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. Right. If the choice is between doing it and doing nothing, that's a closer call. Right. But bang for the buck, these people are going to mostly dig themselves out of it. Right. Yeah. Well, I want you to talk about a story, but I do want to say, is part of it though, this idea that you have to go to that school, that UCLA is, even though it's a public university.

It's up there. It's so highly regarded. I mean, I wouldn't have got into Harvard. I feel like I'm more in that middle classy section, no Mandarin or whatever. A couple AP classes did well, but couldn't compete with a private school person. And I went to the public university and got a great education there. And are doing great. Yeah. So part of it is this overall mindset.

Yeah. I think it's really hard. 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. I memorized one figure coming into this conversation, which is of the 9,200 or 9,600 sent to millionaires, people with $ hundred million dollars or more of those nine thousand plus thirty five percent are from eight universities and so part of you could go well that's a bummer but also for me who likes my story i'm like well but 65 percent didn't well and also 100 i mean that's looking at such a specific group calling that success. And partly the hundred millionaires are going to be people who either are crazy capable, have a crazy high tolerance for risk, or are crazy lucky. Or a combination of. Maybe all three.

Probably all three. Maybe all three. 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. All right. 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. If you look at who is at McKinsey or who is increasingly running the biggest companies,

these are people who've gone through a very small number of institutions. And there's compounding forces, which is the gap between the incomes at that strata have also 10x what they were in the 80s. Right. The other part of this is that there are fewer and fewer just good jobs. Yeah. Right. 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. Yeah, that's great. Eleven is a little better, but it's not clear depending on how much you value life versus work. I don't know what the tradeoff is.

Right. If you're picking between 170 and 240 grand a year and it's 30 percent more work. Exactly. But what started to happen instead is that all the rungs from like six to 13 are gone 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 yeah let's i do want to get back to tell me 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, in which ordinarily talented people can do well. It is always going to be the case that exceptional people will find a way. Yeah. This is the best thing about Letterman when we interviewed Letterman. He has a scholarship at Indiana University or wherever he went for average students.

You had to have like a 2.0 scholarship because he's like, I was average. Right, because you're a decent, not just morally decent, but also well-functioning society. Most of us are ordinary. You want a way of living in which if you're ordinary, your life is good. And this is where I also think science is helping us right now. We're shining a light on these. We're starting to acknowledge the pride that someone should have for being smart. We're recognizing like you were born with it. So it's like being born hot. No one should feel super

proud of themselves for turning out attractive. And likewise, we're learning a lot about the Sapolsky stuff, your environment and your genetics. Some people are starting on second base or third. Yeah, the environment also is a huge part of this. We see this physically. The American elite is thin and fit and healthy, good skin, well-dressed. Well, money turns out to play a role in all that. To do a lot. Yes, it does.

So this is what I really like about the book, is I think you're fair to everybody. 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, pretty groovy life. You point out no one's really winning in this. If you look at what this elite that everyone's jealous of, what their actual life is like. 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? Right.

You've got a lot of data in here about how miserable these people's lives actually are. The place where the data is strongest is with the kids, because the kind of training that you need in order reliably to get into Harvard these days, coupled with the fact that Harvard admits three to 4% of its applicants. You just read 3.1 last year or something. 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. It's fucking nuts. You get in a car accident. Right, exactly. You get mono at the wrong time. Like you smoke a little too much pot for a few months before you realize, hey, maybe

this isn't for me. Whatever these things are. There's no allowance for that. So that's really tough. 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. 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. Right. The kids I went to high school with, we were pretty happy.

Some of us were more ambitious than others, and we figured we'll be seniors, we'll sit down, take these tests. Somebody bought me one of those books, and I read the SAT prep book. And that marked me out as like somebody who was doing extra. Neurotically obsessed. Exactly. And then you graduate. And here's this thing to go back. We talked earlier about the form of wealth the old aristocrats had. If you hold your wealth in land and factories, you mix it with other people's labor, wealth in land and factories, you mix it with other people's labor, extract surplus, and live a good, happy life. 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.

We don't yet have a technology through which I can mix my skill and training with some poor other person's labor. Yeah, you need a neural link into a robot that executes everything you've gathered in your head. But we don't have that. We have it a little bit. So I always tell my law students, that's called associates. Yeah, exactly. Right, right, right. What the partner does is they mix their skill, their human capital with the associate's labor, and they take a cut. And that's why the associates, they still make a lot. They only make

two $400,000 a year, but the partner makes four to $6 million a year because they're taking a cut. And that's why the associates, they still make a lot. They only make $200,000, $400,000 a year. But the partner makes $4 to $6 million a year. Right. Because they're taking a cut from every associate. But most of us can't run our affairs that way. And even the partners, to be a successful manager of associates, you have to work all the time. So let's just be clear, too. So 200 years ago, if you would have lined up the 100 richest people on the planet, certainly 90 plus would have been landowners.

Yeah. And zero would have worked. And now, generally all the people in that upper strata have actually worked and made that money. With their own talent, skill. I mean, they've had luck, they've had help. But you know, think about Zuckerberg, Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. I'm reading Elon Musk's biography right now. This person has not stopped working for more than 20 minutes in the last 30 years. All these people, nobody's self-made, but they're more self-made than inherited.

Yes. Yes, yes. In a trust fund. Right. Now, many of those people, because they're entrepreneurs, they got to work on the thing they cared about. 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. You're not building anything. You're hoping to sustain Goldman Sachs' dominating.

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. Whatever other people tell you you need to do, that's what you need to do. And it doesn market tells you to work at. Whatever other people tell you you need to do, that's what you need to do. And it doesn't matter whether you like it or not. It doesn't matter whether you think your clients are good or not. It doesn't matter whether this is the business that you care about or not. Or that it's giving you purpose or not. None of that. This is what you do. 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. Today, there are lots of law firms that have a minimum billable of 2,400, 2,500 hours. I know lawyers that have billed 3,000 or 4,000 hours. These are people who you get to the office, you get there at eight or nine in the morning, you work till midnight, six and a half days a week, 365 days a year. Because you're hourly ultimately. Because you're hourly. 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. Exactly.

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 is working four to eight hours a week more. And the bottom 60% is working 12 hours a week less. And if you go into not just the top 1%, but the top half of 1%, at that stage, there's no systematic data. That's the first thing. Because all the mass data sets, they top-coded incomes. And so it's really hard to separate out the super high earners from just the high earners. 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, those people are now working 30, 40 hours a week more than they used to. Yeah, like 60s average. 60s average, 80, 90. And you see this in sort of the lore. It used to be banker's hours were like nine to three. Today, there's something called the banker nine to five, which begins at 9 a.m. one day and ends at 5 a.m. the next day.

Oh, my God. Okay, that's confusing. Oh, my God. So 20 hours. That's what junior bankers do. Wow. 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. Okay.

Wow. Well, that's one way to live. Yeah, yeah. Others may disagree, but my view is that all of this is dictated by the economic logic of this kind of wealth. Again, if I hold my wealth in my own education, the only way I can get income out of it is by working it. Yeah. Okay, so we've transitioned greatly into the elite class being overly employed, and they are experiencing all kinds of consequences because of this. When these people are pulled, they regularly wish they had a different relationship with their children.

They're missing life. 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. So it's like, weirdly, they're suffering, and then the middle class is evaporating. They have no role in it. And then the lower working class is increasingly less unionized and everything else. So you wonder, I guess, who's winning. Nobody's winning in a certain sense. 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. Oh, I don't think you'll ever have any compassion for them. Right. But on the other hand, that doesn't mean they're not real to the elite. 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. 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. The people who lived back then, they understood that this wasn't fair in a certain way. They knew it was a rigged game. So they're not going to blame themselves too much over the outcome. Whereas our story is, if you're not a millionaire, that's on you, partner. Like if you had worked a little harder, if you were a little smarter, a little more virtuous, a little more self-disciplined.

So there's a kind of moral insult that's added to the economic injury. And that insult is extremely destructive. It's destructive to the individual person. Set aside COVID. But if you look at the other causes of falling life expectancy in the sort of bottom half of the U.S. distribution. The other causes are opioid addiction, alcoholism, diabetes, suicide. These are all forms of direct or indirect self-harm. You have to ask, why is there an epidemic of this kind of self-harm now? And a good part of the answer is because people are cut off from opportunity

and are then blamed for it. And that's just a terrible place to be. And then at the same time, collectively, this system makes you alienated from, angry at the institutions of your society, resentful, inclined to try to find someone to blame. And so the rise of a kind of right-wing authoritarianism and populism, it won't probably surprise you. I'm no fan of Donald Trump's. I'm shocked. Yeah, exactly. But one thing that he's not wrong about when he says that the institutions in the elite of this country are excluding middle-class and working people from advantage. Well, that's true. The stuff about immigrants and people, that's not true. That's dark and brutal and malign. But the stuff about these institutions not being, well, that is true.

This syndrome gives people like him an opening. 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 wouldn't. This is from the article. Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx, and intersectional is a sure sign that you've got cultural capital coming out of your ears. 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.

You're probably uncomfortable with that part of it. I have no idea, but I will say that this is also what Trump's right about and people are fucking pissed about it. I would formulate it slightly differently. I wonder what you think of this formulation. Okay. I am less inclined than David Brooks is to think that sort of the thought police are totally present and dominant inside elite institutions. 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.

Of course, the situation has never been ideal. But it's not the case that one slip of the tongue gets you fired. In my experience, if you're trying and if you're decent and have an honorable motive, people will adjust. They might call you out and then you say, hey, yeah, I shouldn't have said it that way. And then they're like, okay, it's not perfect. And there are some people who really get mistreated by this system. But I think what he's right about is this.

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. Well, and can we add morally righteous? Morally righteous, both of those things. And so what elite institutions do is they say, no, no, we're not unfair. We accept everybody. We don't care what your background is or what your sexuality is or what your race is or what your religion is. We are accepting you on the merits. And it is proof that we are so fair that we have such enormous diversity and such a commitment to diversity. And that commitment to diversity is one of the things these institutions use to justify their exclusion of working and middle-class people. 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. The problem is another reason why these institutions do it is it would be wrong not to. Yeah, this is a trickier- It's a tricky thing, right? It's not as easy as they're doing it wrong.

I want underprivileged kids to be able to- They're just not digging deep enough of what diversity means. Yes. As much as the left is wonderfully supportive and defensive of marginalized groups, they seem very reluctant to include socioeconomic strata as a group. And that's what's frustrating to me. 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. But I just know this institution best, so I'll talk about Yale Law School. Over half of our students are now people of color. And that is, in my view, right. That is to say, the country is almost half people of color. We should not be 90% white in a country that's 50% white. And so whether the right number is 52% or 46%, whatever, it basically is the right way for us to be. 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. And we cannot do that with respect to class. If our graduates stopped being rich, our economic model

would fall apart. Yeah, that's hard. We don't need to make our graduates men. We don't need to make our graduates white, but they have to be rich. Or why go there? Right. We can't make our budget if we don't have rich alumni. Then it also needs to be on the people hiring people in America to maybe take a chance on a kid not from Harvard. It requires everyone to participate in evening this out. Because once you get out of school, you're just someone who just graduated college. And if you're at Goldman Sachs, maybe there's an imperative to hire a more diverse crowd there. Beautiful segue into solutions. Yes. Well, I think places are starting to try to do that. And I think it's exactly the right thing to do.

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. 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. And if you look at the list of those schools, it's the same damn schools that were on it 50 years ago. They don't have a lot more students.

The country is many times bigger. It has not kept pace at all. But again, they're incentivized to keep the clubs small because the odds of a graduating class of 3,000 reaching $10 million. Much lower. But I think one thing they have to do is they have to get bigger. And they have to be forced to get bigger. That would be policy.

Because they all have charity status. Right. So they're all tax exempt. A WAG once said Princeton is a hedge fund with a university attached. And the university gives the hedge fund certain advantages. 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. These are incredibly well endowed.

Elite kindergartens. That's like the craziest oxymoron I've ever heard. But also these schools, you know, Phillips Exeter Academy, I think, has an endowment above a billion dollars. Oh, my God. So these are- It's fucking laughable. These are large institutions, right? Yeah.

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. Yeah. I like this. It's not a crazy view and not requires a massive departure from our traditions. It's not creeping socialism or regulation. It's still going to be hard as hell to get in there.

It's still going to be hard to get in there. Yeah. But imagine if all those places took three times as many students. First of all, the returns to going there would go down. They wouldn't be zero. It would still be a good place to go. Second of all, there'd be more resources per student at the next tier down and the next tier down. So the education at other places would get better. Explain that to me. 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 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. And that means that my students get all kinds of legs up. They get training and teaching that other people can't give. But they also get very personal letters of reference. Hard to get lost in that system. You would know.

I would know. And next semester, I will have students in my house every week. Can we be students? I want to go to your house. Yeah. We're students today. Listen, if you guys bring right elephant parties and if you promise not to take the money. She's going to take the money.

I will be taking the money. I've decided. That will be good. But look, that kind of training is both effective and valuable. And if there were more people, I couldn't provide it in quite that way. And that actually would not be bad because first of all, it would reduce the gap between the elite and everybody else. 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 and it would make the system more equal and better for everybody. 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 looks at a study of what colleges lawyers graduated in their rate of becoming partner. And at least in this chapter, he's like, they're kind of unrelated. We're putting a value on this that in practice isn't really useful. Right. So first of all, it probably doesn't dictate who's a good lawyer or not. Now, there's a question about whether it dictates how much money you make. True.

But second of all, there are a bunch of studies like this. There was just a study done by Purdue and Department of Education or something. 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. This is a little too broad of a map. It's too broad, given, as you said before, eight colleges produce 35 billionaires. So if you're looking at 100 colleges, you're not going to see the effect.

Correct. Right? So there's that problem. The other problem is the system that we have now is so incredibly intense at sorting. 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. And in the year I was calling around, the answer was fewer than five. Five total or 5%? Five total. Okay. All right. So basically everybody goes to the highest ranked school they can get into. 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. And so the fact that you do really well. You're an outlier to begin with. Doesn't tell you a whole

lot. So I'm much more skeptical of those studies than other people are for that reason. 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. I mean, there's so many people that would prefer to stay in their hometown. Can I tell you a story about this? Yeah, please. Going back to my German connections, I know a young woman, well, she's now an adult, but I knew her when she had just finished high school in Germany. She had wanted to be a doctor. She applied to German medical schools. So German universities are very egalitarian. There aren't more competitive ones. I mean, that's not quite right. Everybody wants to live in Berlin. So universities in Berlin are

hard to get into, but not because they're fancy, but because everyone wants to live in Berlin. So universities in Berlin are hard to get into, but not because they're fancy, but because everyone wants to live in Berlin. The medical school she got into was an eight-hour drive from the town she grew up in. And she decided, I don't really want to move that far from home. So she abandoned being a doctor, decided to become a pharmacist, and went to pharmacy school nearby. In the U.S., that's kind of a crazy choice. You'd make character assessments of her. She had a fear of success. Right. Whatever it is. But here's the thing about Germany. German doctors are relatively paid a lot less than American doctors. German pharmacists are relatively paid a lot more and higher status.

I can go to a German pharmacist. They can prescribe simple medicines for me. So the difference between being a pharmacist and a doctor in Germany, it's not zero, but it's not like here. Might not be worth an eight hour drive. Right. And so what that does is it made her free because she got to have her life without throwing her career off a cliff. Yeah.

Right. And her status. Exactly. Huh. It is heavy. We've had so much of your time and I appreciate it. This is really fun. My last thought was, I see how that could be enacted at these universities.

That makes sense. When we get into the marketplace, have I drank the Kool-Aid so much to suggest that the marketplace is the marketplace. The best product will be the one that sells. And you're ultimately trying to implement something where the end result is the marketplace. Does that make any sense? Yeah. is the marketplace. Does that make any sense? Yeah. 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. Here's the pushback and see whether you find it persuasive or not. Yeah. All right. So the narrower pushback is the marketplace right now isn't really the marketplace.

It's governed by policy a lot. For example, right now, mid-skilled labor is the highest taxed factor of production in the American economy. You know, we all have an income tax, but we also have a social security wage tax, about 14, 15%. It doesn't matter exactly. Some paid by the employee, some paid by the employer, but economists think it all falls on the employee. That tax has a base cap. So above about $130,000, you pay zero Social Security wages. That means that somebody who is making $120,000 a year is paying a total tax rate, 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 now here's the thing if you replace twenty hundred thousand dollar a year workers with robots and algorithms and one two million

dollar a year worker and you make that two million dollar 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%. 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 than the total tax burden on a form of production that uses mid-skilled labor. Which is just policy. It's tax policy. Which is just policy. And if we change that- This is Warren Buffett's legendary claim that is receptionist pays a higher tax rate. And it's not just him. It's a lot of people. And the people who pay the highest taxes

are middle-class working people. And if we change that, we could create incentives to shift the form of production back. That's the first part of this. 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 and deprive middle educated people of their jobs. There have been previous times of high technological innovation when new technologies actually helped mid-skilled people and hurt super-skilled people. 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. And so what we're doing now is because we have this class of super-trained people 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. And if instead we had a large army of mid-skilled people, we'd change the technologies we use. We'd invent different stuff. The products in the marketplace would change. Exactly, would change.

So we can imagine a future that's more equal, even in a market economy. This is not a recommendation for governments taking over. 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. Yeah. 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. Despite that, I love your book. I love it so much. Every night when I turn it on, I can't wait to hear more bad news about the elites. So I feel better for not having a billion dollars. It's just beautifully researched. It's very well written. And it's a very powerful and provocative question you're asking. Well, thank you all so much. Thanks for having me on. This was great. Thank you.

Really, really great. I got to say, I've done a bunch of these. You guys know this. You guys are good at this. Oh, that's nice. So thank you. We'll keep going. Our goal will be to outlive this briefcase you have, which is going to be a challenge.

This suitcase is 120 years old. Oh, fuck. I can't commit to that. I wish I could commit to that. Yes. Well, maybe with these breakthroughs. Exactly. You. I can't commit to that. I wish I could commit to that. Yes. Well, maybe with these breakthroughs. Exactly. You got to get your doctors on it.

Well, Daniel, this has been so incredible. I hope everyone checks out The Meritocracy Trap. And also you're nearing completion of a different book. I am in the middle of a different book called The Good Life After the Age of Growth. And it's about how we should all live to live well after economic growth stops. That's great. I need that book right now. We'll have you back, obviously, when you're done with that.

I want to get Daniel over to the White Elephant and see how he plays it. Yeah, me too. All right. 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. Amazing. Oh, wow. Well, this is a dumb family here. You got a game theorist

well daniel thinks good luck with everything and it's been a pleasure stay tuned for the fact check so you can hear all the facts that were wrong we're not you know i know we're not but we're in a weird way matching. Well, not any longer because I took off my top, but my piece. When you were wearing your piece, we were a little more matching. Because you have like a thick gabardine. I'm going to use a lot of words. I don't know what they are. It's a thick tweed.

You look up gabardine. Do you mean aubergine? She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy. I said, be careful. His bow tie is really a camera. I don't know that. Simon and Garfunkel. Oh.

Laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces. It's a durable twill woven cloth. That sounds exactly like what you're wearing. It does. I wonder if it's gabardine. Twill is what I wanted to use. Another word I wanted to use, but I don't know what it means. But I was like, yeah, it's kind of a tweed, a twill, a gabardine.

But it's a thick fabric. It is. And it looks very English. Thank you. Maybe like haberdashers or something. That was the like. I was a haberdasher. My first acting role ever.

In what play was it? Taming of the Shrew. Taming of the Shrew. Taming of the Shrew. Fifth grade. That's a very prestigious. And I said, here's the hat your worship ordered. Oh, it was specifically a hat. Yeah.

Oh my gosh. So for a long time, I thought haberdashers were hat makers. Well, I think a haberdasher is all clothing, no? Yeah. Exactly. So I was, because of my role. Yes. I was confused about the nature of a haberdasher i think we've had this conversation already before in our life maybe you taught me

it was a full clothing i think so and i think dang 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 hat to the air 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. This brown girl is no shit. Brown girls are supposed to know everything.

She's dumb. She's dumb and brown. Oh, no. Double whammy. I have a lot to report. Oh, I can't wait to hear it's been a while and i just feel my integrity demands i always report these to you okay let's start with when i took my morning poop yesterday okay it was like what's a good analogy all i know is i took the biggest poop of your life. One of the bigger poops in my life.

No. And in 0.02 seconds. Oh, wow. 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. Yes, it was incredible. It was one log? Yes, and it was impossibly long and malleable. Did you poop the day before? Yeah, 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. Because I had that in the morning and I thought, well, wow, that was a clean 100% evac. I'm going to be. And you felt good? Yeah, I felt footloose and I thought, well, wow, that was a clean 100% evac. I'm going to be.

And you felt good? Yeah, I felt footloose and fancy free. Oh, good. Yeah, like I'm just kind of tip tapping around. And then an hour later, I had to go back in and that was a very sizable experience. Really? Yes. And it's getting less firm.

Let's just say that. Sure. Oh, I just did this on my spit cup at the same time. It sounded like you farted. I know, and I wouldn't want people, because they're probably already gagging right now. And then you farted. And then you farted because it's all coming out. Are those new jeans?

Or I've seen them. You've seen them, but they are my favorite of my new levi well it's funny because you you told me you had another favorite right yeah but i think these are my favorite to see them i've only seen these no on um thanksgiving you wore them i thought you were these no oh shoot that's all right it's fine i'm really sorry you're in a gabardine twill you got your hands full with your own look i like them them. I like these. Oh, thank you. Me too.

Okay, back to your poops. Okay, so. We went and got Christmas trees and I had to put the stands on three. I'm embarrassed to admit that, but we did. We have one for the kitchen, one for the living room. Oh, I was like, what do you embarrass? The girls have a little one. Yeah, it's so cute.

So my three Christmas trees, so indulgent. It's a lot. I did. I love it. I'm going to get six. Okay, good. That'll make me feel less indulgent so i'm having to like stop in between putting the stand on the first tree and the second tree to go inside you know it's yes it's getting uh mildly so you're a little sick i guess yeah i guess i i you know what i kept remembering i kept

reminding myself of the marathoner the woman woman running the half marathon, who was like, well, there can't be anything left. Right. Remember, she thought that twice. Well, there can't be anything left. Yes. I was certainly at that point at five o'clock p.m. I had gone. I bet you had gone nine times.

No. Yeah. Yeah. Not nine. Yeah, for sure. And I'm like, again, where is all this stored? Okay. So, God, I hate to have to report this story to you.

So then Matt arrives for us to watch the Formula One race. And I go, yeah, let's go. I'm just going to pee and grab something from upstairs. I don't even know what I was going to grab. Okay. I should be gone for 38 seconds. I go up i'm peeing i'm standing up oh man i don't i wouldn't even say i tooted i just all of a sudden you know when you activate well i don't know what it's like for a girl well i do know because you say sometimes a fart comes out on accident when you're sure it

can happen when you push it can happen yes so i i wasn't even like i didn't feel like i had a tooth yeah and i was just peeing but maybe the force of the peeing all of a sudden oh okay all and i'm i already forgot about your anatomy because you're facing you're standing up oh my god okay facing the toilet And what happened? All of a sudden I was like, oh, oops. And then I was like, oh. And I'm trying to now pull my pants on really quick and sit on the toilet. But this. It got on the floor?

No. Well, okay. Oh. So I'm wearing boxers. Oh. The last couple times this has happened to me, I was wearing me undies. Sure. So it's going to be contained.

Oh, yeah. But I was wearing me undies. Sure. So it's going to be contained. Oh, yeah. But I was in boxies. Hold on, so when you peed, you didn't pull your boxers. You just pulled your dick out. Like a second grader? Yeah, I mean. Like around my ankles? I mean.

Standing in front of the toilet with my. That feels. Cute, really. It feels like you guys should be doing that. Pulling our pants all the way down to our ankles. Yeah. Like little boys. Not all the way down to our ankles. Yeah. Like little boys. Not all the way, but maybe like.

Below our butt cheeks? Yeah. But why? Yeah, you're right. Why? Only at like a public bathroom at the stand up urinal will you do that. To be funny. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, you do? Well, once in a while. You know your buddies are coming in. That's kind of a funny thing to do. Oh, wow. Because no one pees like that other than four-year-olds. Okay, go ahead.

Four-year-old boys. Okay, so it was up, and then the poop got on your boxers. And the floor. And some tumbled into my, like, my pants I was wearing. What do you mean? Well, listen, they were baggy. Everything was baggy. But your pants are around your ankles.

Nothing's around my ankles. Where are the pants? Look, you can imagine I just, I unbutton and I'm sitting here like this and the pants are open. Oh. And I'm peeing and then, oh, and then, and then, so, and then. Oh, my God. It was so disheartening. Oh.

It was so disheartening. Oh. It was so disheartening. And then I had to. Then you had to take a shower? Well, okay, great. So then you're on a cold case. Like, you're on a mystery. I get everything off. I go home to him.

And then I take everything over to the bathtub. Do you scoop it out of your pants with a tissue or do you use your regular hand? I use tissue for what I've found. And then I go into, I can't just leave that. Yeah. Nor can I throw it in the dirty clothes. It needs to be dealt with right now. Oh, okay.

So I take the boxers and the pants to the bathtub. Okay. And I get the wand out. Sure. But I'm flustered, of course, right? So like when I turn it on. Are you wearing clothes when you are doing this

or you're moody? No, I'm just a top. Okay. Like a Winnie the Pooh. Yeah, now I am, I look like the four-year-old you were picturing. Yeah.

And when I turn the water on in the tub and I'm holding the wand, of course, I'm not, I'm so frazzled. Sure. It's pointing right up and at my face.

Oh my God. Yeah, so I turn the water on and then I get blasted in the face with the wand and it's going all over the floor. So now I've got water everywhere. 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. And then hop in and from the waist down, give myself a wand. Oh, you do? Okay. All this to say, I ran upstairs to pee and Matt's waiting at the staircase to watch the race. I'm probably gone for 11 minutes.

Oh, no. And I come down in sweatpants. Yeah. Do you explain yourself or no? I did. I had to. It was insane. You love to. I didn't this one you didn't i didn't because often i've tooted and i feel a little more responsible you know and i like that marathoner i thought it was all gone yeah i mean i definitely

think you're not drinking enough electrolytes. Okay. Because sometimes your body is so dehydrated. It is real that the more dehydrated you are, it can be worse for diarrhea, which makes no sense. But I've also always heard that if you're dehydrated, your poop will get really firm. They'll tell kids who have hard poops, you got to drink more water. Now, I don't know if that's scientific. Yeah, I think it's both. It can go either way. It can go either way, and it can be a sign of dehydration.

Okay. I had drank a lot of fluid that day, but who knows? No electrolytes. Well- Well, I've had some tummy troubles. You have? Yeah. Poop your pants?

I haven't pooped my pants yet. Okay. And I think I'm on the other side of the troubles. Well, 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. So you just said, no, I haven't pooped my pants yet. If you thought it was a real possibility, you'd go knock on wood.

Yeah, that means I don't think it's a real possibility. Yeah, you're positive. Yeah, I am positive. I am positive. I know myself. Yeah. I know. You can't myself. Yeah. I know. See, when I tell-

You can't know what you don't know, though. When I tell you to knock on wood, it's because it's something out of my control. The pooping in my pants is in my control, so I don't need you to do that. You think. I know. Okay, well, it's clearly not in my control, and it's in- I'm sorry that happened. Also, when it happens, I'm like, I'm going to have to tell everyone.

I don't know. Okay, exactly. Hold on. Some of them are good and funny. This one was just sad. I was already melancholy, and then it was just sad. Then I felt like the world was conspiring against me, and then I remembered that was also a sign of megalomania.

And then not to get into self-pity, because that's also like self-indulgence and aggrandizement. So I had so much going on before I walked downstairs and now sweatpants to watch the race. Well, I'm really sorry that you pooped in your panties and got it all over your pants. Now, had I been peeing the way you suggested. What jeans were they? Those? No, no, no, no, no, no.

Were they new Beckhams? Although if I'm being honest, if this had happened in high school on Sunday, and these are my favorite jeans. You would have. After the bathtub, I've been like, that's good enough. Really? I mean, I probably would have thrown them in the washer. 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. You'd pick aesthetics over poop smell.

That's interesting. Well, no, I would sniff around and make sure it didn't smell okay you could have added some soap yeah i should i was i feel it was too much i know it's too also the pants were black i mean they're not these i know that's confusing because these are also black but they're my linen black oh loose uh-huh yeah very oh that's hard yeah hard. Yeah, that's tricky. That's tricky. Wow. When it was happening, because I know you're really back and forth about whether you are upset to tell people or excited to tell people.

Yeah. When it was happening and you were like, it was spraying in your face and you were washing it down. Yeah, I just wanted to die at that point. How excited were you to tell me? I'm telling you, sometimes I am. I wasn't. Yes, you were. To tell me. To tell you, yes, yes.

Not America, per se. Yeah, but. Yeah, but this is the opportunity. Comes with the territory. Yeah, exactly. That's precisely it. Okay. I'm never proud of myself.

Over time, they get funny enough that they are great stories. But something weird. It's still tender. I know. Like, in two weeks, I'll love the story. I time, they get funny enough that they are great stories. But something weird. It's still tender. I know. Like in two weeks, I'll love the story. I'll probably tell anyone they'll listen. I'll be at 7-Eleven. I know.

I feel like I want to hug the story. Okay. Okay. Okay. But something weird is between us. There's something weird with it. Well, I'll speak for myself, I guess. I pooped on Thanksgiving.

Okay. And I don't like doing that. Oh, at our house? Yeah. Oh, okay, great. And I hate that, right? Right, yes. I almost left instead.

Like, I was like, maybe I should just go home. I like, I know this poop is coming, but I wanted to stay. And I didn't know if we were going to keep playing spades. Is this before or after the sauna? After the sauna. After the sauna? Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Was it uncomfortable in the sauna? After the sauna. After the sauna? Yeah. Interesting.

Okay. Was it uncomfortable in the sauna? No. Okay. It didn't hit you yet? No. All right. And then, so then I like had to go find like the furthest bathroom.

Middle bathroom did you choose upstairs? Yeah. Uh-huh. And I was going to the bathroom and I was so bummed that it was all happening this way. Right. And I hated it. Really quick, did you lock the door to the hallway? Of course.

Yes. And then lock the door. The bedroom door and then also the bathroom door. Just in case. Absolutely. Something is penetrating. What do they call that? Double authentication?

Yeah. Yeah. And even though I hated it, I was like, oh, I gotta, I gotta like go tell Dax that I pooped. That he just pooped in his house. Yeah. Yeah. But then you were never alone. And I didn't, I did not want to tell everyone else.

Right. So it is interesting. It's a bond. Because I did, I was on the F1 podcast this morning and I didn't tell that story. And Matt was there. Yeah. Okay. I like that

yeah i was like if i'm gonna tell it this is where i appreciate that but this is kind of interesting really quick was it enormous the one you took at my house it was full water oh it was so something you ate i didn't feel great i guess okay okay great and was it were you nervous about the smell yeah yeah okay did you open a window or anything or just let the fan do this okay i got Okay, great. And was it, were you nervous about the? Smell? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Of course. Did you open a window or anything? Or just let the fan do its work?

No, because, okay, I got kind of worried about the window, because I was like, well, if they're outside. Oh, you thought we might smell it? I don't know. There's so much fear. Like a cartoon, like green gas just coming out of the window and then floating down into the party. Exactly.

Exactly. Also, I have a grievance you guys need matches in every bathroom that's a fair okay and that's solvable can you do that but let me just say none of us think of that like there's so much privacy there not at a huge party though that it makes me wonder how many poop people how many people pooped in that bathroom during Thanksgiving. Well, I know one other person who pooped. You do? But I don't know if it was in that bathroom or not.

Okay. But they pooped. Matt. Nope. Laura. No, it was a boy. Oh, Orion. Yeah.

How did you find that out? He told me. I think I just took a dump. Well, no. Presumably, all the guests took dumps, I guess. Yeah. How did you find that out? He told me. I think I just took a dump. Well, no. Presumably, all the guests took dumps, I guess. No. Because everyone ate a ton of food and they were there all day. Well, right.

And it's like rich food. Well, don't out me. Not expensive food. I'm already uncomfortable about the amount of trees I bought. 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. Sure. Like you could get a computer could give it a rating out of 10. And if you looked at any two people talking, it say like 3.8 4.9 no no no no

i mean like there's rungs right like yeah i was saying to you i think holding hands is the most intimate oh act okay on earth yes and kristen was like well no like anal and i was like I'm I I'm serious I would put that as less intimate I think holding hands is so intimate and I would then I was thinking about why like why to me because that's probably most people would say anal is more intimate sure I think most people would say that yeah I think anal is a little more intimate than holding hands. Gay dudes might not. Right. Yeah. And I actually think it's tied to that.

I think part of it is you're not doing anal on the sidewalk. Oh, yeah. And you're holding hands generally in public. You're not holding hands in the house. You're somewhere. There's a sidewalk. There's something. And it is this weird declaration we're together

yeah because i've had gay friends who have had lots of sex with a certain person and when that someone has tried to hold their hand in public it's but it's like a panic for all the obvious reasons they're not a target and whatever else right but it just immediately tells everyone in your vicinity we are romantically involved. Yes, it does. And for me, it's not just like we're romantically involved. For me, you can have sex of all the varieties with someone you're not in love with. In fact, most of the time, that's the case. Yes.

But to me, hand-holding is- You're reserving that. You do that with someone you love. 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. Oh, I know you want to hear the end of this. I've never seen my parents hold hands ever. No, I don't like that. I know, but it's the truth.

And I think they've held mine when I was a baby. Exactly. But there's no hand-holding. And I think they've held mine when I was a baby. Exactly. But not, there's no hand holding. I was just somewhere and I held my mom's hand for a while. Yeah. Intentionally. I forget where I was. That's really nice.

It's sweet. I think it brings you back to childhood. Like I hold my girl's hands. All the time. All the time. Anytime we're walking, hopefully I'm holding their hand. Yeah. So imagine.

That's what I mean. Like for the kids. So I think they held my hand when we walked down the street and stuff. So cars don't hit me. Yeah. But. But the only people who held your hand loved you and you loved them. Yeah.

Yeah. It wasn't really an affection thing. It was like a protection thing. Sure. But it's a very privileged. No one's doing that. No. I like really an affection thing. It was like a protection thing. Sure. But it's a very privileged. No one's doing that. No. I like this hand-holding thing.

So Aaron and I hold hands a lot. Ugh. You know? That's really sweet. But no other friend of mine have I held their hand. But I'll hold Aaron's all the time. That's nice. When you're walking down the street, you do?

No, but like. You just hug him sometimes. Or we'll be sitting in a booth. And you hold his hand? And we're both talking with our hands. And I'll just put my hand, like I'm going to arm wrestle him. And I'll just hold his hand a little bit. And then I'll squeeze it and stuff.

Like I just like to touch him. Like it's a water weenie? Yeah, I just like to touch him and connect with him and let him know. That's so really nice. It so nice i like there's a i feel like you've seen a picture of us holding hands that i know i think the one i've sent you long ago was like him leaning on my shoulder in a booth at a restaurant we were caught we lived at well we lived specifically at a place called country crack Crackle Barrel. Oh, my God. Well, the equivalent.

It was like a no-name Denny's in my town. It was like a one-off. Country Boy. Oh. Triggering, right? Yeah. Yeah, Country Boy. Yeah, that sounds really racist.

It didn't sound very welcoming. No. But then you guys were doing like handholds and stuff there. It's shocking we got out alive. I know. But yeah, because we would be like snuggling in a booth chatting. 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 making out fucking in the bathroom i'm surprised you guys did it yeah just that's i don't have that gear but you have yeah

yeah i don't it's yeah for me i can't speak for anyone but for me i can't i just i can't i can't choose it no of course not yeah i i i mean more because you're already wild no i mean you already like you want to touch him like you want his like skin and stuff yeah i want to hug him to me again that's physical attraction is I want to touch that person's skin or like lick their sweat. Well, I don't want to lick their sweat,

although I would for very little amount of money. I mean, I guess Eric likes to lick people's sweat of people he's not physically. Oh, he probably is physically attractive to all of us.

Yeah, he's, yeah. Well, I would say it's more like the way I want to hug my children. Yeah. That's the feeling. Protection. Protection, affection, connection.

Then for you, because I don't think hand-holding then for you is like the highest form of love expression. No, staring in someone's eyes as they have an orgasm is the ultimate threshold. It is? I think so. A physical attraction? No, it's the only thing I would compare to wiping your butt in front of somebody. For whatever reason, that's way worse than pooping in front of somebody. Oh, you think it's so vulnerable.

It's so vulnerable. You don't know what your face looks like. They don't know what their face looks like. It's contorted. There's a very specific look in the eyes and that 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 i think that's probably the very apex of intimacy.

That I guess, that I could see a lot of people feeling like that. Very exposed. Yes, and enormously connective. Mm-hmm. Yeah. We're really getting somewhere here. Well, if we're saying that mine comes from never having seen it, like a love so deep. That it requires handholding?

Well, like for me, handholding is a love so deep that I've never even seen it. Uh-huh. Then I wonder why yours is, because it's maybe just because you've had so much sex that like you recognize when it's. Insanely intimate and connected. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. What about you, Rob? What's your highest rung? Probably the same as Dax's.

No, you need to pick a new one. No repeats allowed. Anal sex. Okay, there we go. I would do that with anyone. Same. Just knock on my door. Yeah. Come and knock on my door yeah so come and knock on my door

that's anyway i thought that was well because i was talking to a friend about this also and and she was saying that her partner for them the most intimate thing was like laughing together. Oh, really? Just being like so playful. Oh, uh-huh. And uninhibited, like talking about poops and stuff like that. Yeah, letting all the facades go away. Yeah. Yeah, laughing is very exposing. In the same way that orgasm is.

Yeah. Like if you're having a real uncontrolled laugh, you're not in charge. Yeah, that's true. And there's like layers. There's a cry that's uncontiness. Yeah. Like, if you're having a real uncontrolled laugh, you're not in charge. Yeah. And there's, like, layers. There's a cry that's uncontrolled. Yeah. Crying is also would be high up there for me. Uh-huh.

On the scale. Yeah. Okay. Thanksgiving highlights. Thanksgiving was beautiful. It was so great. It's so fucking great. Secret turkey.

Secret turkey delivered again. did it did it's so sweet because everyone's annoyed all week and like you hear it right you hear rumbles oh and charlie arrived he's like finally he's so upset because he didn't he doesn't like his present is how he wanted to or something didn't have time but it's really it's like everyone pulls it off yeah reminder a 13 year old assigns us a person and has invented this and we just participate yeah and everyone shows up and it's really really sweet charlie made me two onesie rompers yeah he sewed them he bought fabric at joanne's fabric and uh yeah and then talk about exposing you tried one on i tried one on it was snug oh boy maybe that was a signal from char. Maybe. Maybe he wants to snuggle.

Yeah, maybe. It was very soft. It was like made of snuggle wear. You got Matt a box of Krispy Kreme donuts. Well, I made him an F1 McLaren Lego car. Yes. And I packaged it in a box of Krispy Kreme donuts with a sticker with his name on it that I had made. Yeah.

And it took you, you said, way too long to build the Lego. Took me three hours. I was really proud of it by the end. 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. This is the armoire situation.

Exactly. It is with the shelf where i was like my brain doesn't work like this but i i have to do it yeah and then i did it and then i was really proud but legos are annoying because you just see this finished product it looks like kind of easy yeah and you open up the box and nothing's bigger than an inch. You're like, whoa. There's so, I mean, the layers in that car. Yes, of course. Oh, my God. Really?

I'm impressed you got through it. Me too. Do you think you'll build more now that you've proven you can do it? I liked doing it. It's meditative, yeah? Yeah, it is. You can guess why I don't like it. Because it's like fake, the real thing you do?

Directions. Oh. Yeah, like when I'm being creative or assembling something or building something, I don't like directions. Yeah. To me, there's no personal sense of accomplishment. Whoa. If I follow directions. Yeah, we're so different.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I loved Lego. By the way, I've never said Lego. I'm starting to, if you notice. I don't like it. I like Legos. I don't like it either. I just want to be clear that I didn't've never said Lego. I'm starting to, if you notice. I don't like it. I like Legos. I don't like it either. I just want to be clear that like, I didn't grow up saying Lego.

Legos. Yeah, you can say Legos. But it's Lego. No, keep at it? Yeah. Okay. This is like math versus math. I spent more time doing that than anything in my childhood, for sure.

I had this enormous case of raw Legos. Yeah. And I made dragsters and all this stuff but in that you know never that was even before they had like the kits kits yeah exactly and i loved sitting down yeah i'm just creating something that i'm like this is my favorite um and then you i too put hours into it like your lego project smuggled sunshine peachy aka. AKA Peachy, which is Molly's dog. Yeah. You had Molly tears in a row.

I hate to admit, Peachy's is the cutest dog in the world. She's so cute and stupid and playful and funny. And not afraid of strangers, right? So, okay. It was a big conspiracy, really, because we had to get Peachy out of the house. I can't just show up to their house and take Peachy. Sure. That'll tip the bit. 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. Yeah. You know, I'm not there normally. Yeah. As I'm walking in, it was comical. There's more than one sign on each door

that says no pets. Like, clearly people want to bring their pets to this mall. And they've had enough. I've never seen anything more. There was less signs about smoking and firearms and alcohol on the premises as there was pets. Like, clearly pets was the number one thing they were on the lookout for. So Eric has her in the little carry-on bag. So that's kind of fine.

But we're going to get her out. And also, the pitcher place isn't going to do pets. Clearly, they're in the mall with no pets. So I was there before Eric. And I put on my selling shoes. I was talking with everybody that worked there. And I was really engaging and going for it. Yes.

And thank God when Peachy arrived and it was clear to them what was happening, I'm like, is this going to be okay? And she was like, it's dead. It's fine. Just let's go quick. The dog can't be on Santa's lap, but we'll put the dog on the stool. Okay. So maybe it's happened before because they seem to have a protocol. Yeah.

Whatever. I greased Santa a hundred bucks. Nice. Yeah. So he'd play his part. And by God, we got Peachy and I had a little outfit for her. We had to put her in her little stocking. She was in a stocking.

And then she got her picture taken with Santa. Yeah. Yeah, so that was the present I got for Molly. It was really, really cute. Okay, this is bizarre because on last week's episode of Nobody's Listening Right, Elizabeth and Andy favorite, Andy is telling a story about being at the mall. Oh boy. And. Someone wanted their dog.

A dog pooped in the mall. Oh, wow. And then he had to kind of deal with it. It was a very funny story, but that's. Why did he decide it was his responsibility? Well, exactly. Was there old people walking around that were going to slip in it? Did he feel like a sense of duty?

He did. Oh, duty. Call of duty. Call of duty. He did. Oh, duty. Call of duty. Call of duty. He felt like- He felt the call of duty. People might slip. Okay.

And they saw him and his brother saw. So he's a bit of a justice warrior. Sure. And so he needed the person to know and to come clean. He didn't want to clean it. He just wanted to block it and then have the person come deal with it. He had seen the, what do you say, the assailant? The perpetrator.

Perpetrator, that's what it was. Yes. He saw it. Yeah. Anyway, this makes sense why they have all these signs up. Was he able to get the person's attention and shame them into cleaning it up? He doesn't know if they cleaned it up, but he did say, excuse me, sir, your dog made a duty.

So then he showed the guy, then they left. You know, when I take the girls to school in the morning, occasionally we don't find a spot close enough. So we parked on the block. This is probably two mornings a week we walk down the block a bit. Yeah. And there is, you know, there's a bunch of apartments on the block this is probably two mornings a week we walk down the block a bit yeah and there is 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 they're just like kind of i don't know maybe six feet long and then there's a driveway and then another little piece of grass 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. No. There's hundreds of the same size poop. And I'm like, what kind of fucking person. Oh, God. Doesn't give a shit.

I mean, maybe they're a bad addict or something. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what's going on, but I can't believe. Are you sure it's not human poop? Yeah, no, it's smaller dog doodoo. Doody. Doody. Call it doody. Yeah, poody. Well, not po you sure it's not human poop? Yeah, no, it's smaller dog doody. Doody. Call it doody. Yeah, poody.

Well, not poody because it's not wet. Or presumably some of them are. I bet it was, yeah. But these are, yeah. Or maybe it's a cat. Maybe that's someone's cat's litter box. 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. Yeah. Or maybe that's getting clean. No, it's clearly the, and it's just taking it to a pile of poop and making it go there. Ew. Yeah. And it's probably stepping in its old poop.

I'm trying to think if I witnessed it, what I would say. Would you say something? I'd have to minimally make a joke. You would. Yeah. Yeah, you would. If I saw it, let's see. I'm walking out. It's you. Yeah. Go here. Go. Go. Oh, wow.

It looks like this isn't its first time, huh? I guess that would be what would come out. I'm trying to think. I'm not cutting enough. I'm trying to think what I would, I would get defensive probably about that. That would be the goal. I would want to make you defensive. And then get in the fight? No, no, I just keep, I just keep, as I walk by.

What if they start screaming like bad stuff and then you yourself get triggered? Okay. Oh, wow. It looks like it's not the first time for him there huh This is the only place he knows how to poop He only has one leg Oh I wish his owner had a bag That'd be helpful

I can't afford bags I've seen you on TV You stupid rich prick Why don't you buy me some bags I'd love to Fuck you Hold on partner That's what they would say

I don't know. I'm pretty big. Yeah. Fuck you, you fucking asshole. That's pretty extreme. Well, someone who's doing that, I would not put it past them. That's a very good point. I didn't even like that role play because I don't like saying that.

I know. And you don't own a dog. I need to do research before I can play a dog owner. But mainly I don't like saying mean words to you. I do want to, I want to say something really quick. It just reminded me when I was telling that story about Andy Rosen. Andy is a music producer.

I knew this. I was driving the other day and I was like, oh yeah, I remember I want to listen to some of Andy's music. He, especially this one album he did with this artist, Ophelia Kay. They talk about it sometimes on the show and I've always been like, oh, I should listen to that. I put it on and I was like, this is incredible. Dynamite? This is so good. Ah. And it's so interesting. That you would be shocked? 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. Yeah. Because Andy's like fun and funny on the show. And I have a- In your mind, he's a podcaster kind of. Yeah. I just have this idea of him. It's just like, nice guy, Andy. And then I heard that and I was like, I was just very surprised at how talented he is.

Yeah. That's such a fun thing about life and people and getting to figure those things out. It is. It is. Fun pop-outs. Yeah. Oh, I can is. Fun pop-outs. Yeah. Oh, I can't wait to listen to it. I found a song that I am so obsessed with in the last, I don't know, week.

Lavender Haze? No. No, we all know that stuff. Yeah, you love that. Yeah. No, this song. You heard it with me playing spades. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, this is a really good song. Leisure. Slipping away. It has Sade vibes. It's really good. Yeah, we love it. I just want to hear the voice. Okay.

I just want to listen to the whole song, actually. I should protect you I should set you free I should defend you I should let this be I keep this home Let's hear the chorus. Let's hear the chorus. It's nice. That's a good one. I like it. From New Zealand.

No way. Oh, Zealand. No way. Oh, shit. No way. Do you think David Ferrier knows them? We'll have to ask. He has to. He knows every creative person on that island. He really does. Especially music.

Oh, my Lord. Although it's not his style per se, but he probably does know. We'll have to ask. Oh, this is exciting. They're from New Zealand? Mm-hmm. From Auckland. Oh.

He's certainly bumped into them. Seen him at the gym. All right. We have a couple of facts. This is for Daniel Markowitz. I really, really liked Daniel. Me too. So much. In fact, there was this very curious moment at the end, and I don't think I made the right choice. Uh-oh. Which is we interviewed him kind of late in the day. Yeah. And then he said, I need somewhere to hang out for a couple hours before I get on a red eye. And so I said, well, we both said like, oh, you should go to Cara down the street. It's Monica's hangout.

It's a great meal, great bar, blah, blah, blah. And then I was like, I'll drive you. Yeah, you drove him. I ended up driving him there. And then I kind of thought when I got home, maybe I should just have invited him over. I was willing to have like a, then an evening hang with him. That's how much I liked, I liked him so much. Right. I mean, he has specifically, he said, is there a place I can go get a beer? I have to, he had to do work. He was doing computer work. I know it well. 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. He'd be an incredible dinner guest. Yeah. He's so smart.

And thoughtful. It's like more than being smart. Everyone that comes on here is smart. 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 garlic sauce. Yeah.

A creme. Glitter and a creme. Yeah. So, okay. Danny. Now we're calling him Danny. Yeah, I call him Danny. Danny boy.

Okay. Where did Letterman go to school? His scholarship. The David Letterman Telecommunications Scholarship. Muncie. It's something about Muncie. It's at Ball State University. Which is in Muncie, Indiana, I think.

Yeah, that's right. The purpose of the scholarship is to provide financial assistance to Ball State majors and minors in telecom. Telecom was Callie's major. It was. And Anthony's. Were they impacted? Because com in general, all the schools I went to was always impacted. At Georgia, there's a film program, but that's more film studies.

In order to do film production, it's telecom. Oh, interesting. I don't know if I'd say it was impacted or not. Oh, okay. Anywho, okay, Muncie, Ball State. Ball State in Muncie, Indiana. Papa John's went there. Oh, really?

That guy's wild, right? Isn't he interesting? I think he's not great. Okay. Okay. I looked up the city with the largest number of books bought per capita. He said he thought Austin was or at some point had been. Yeah.

It's really hard to find that. There is a city that has more bookstores per capita. That's got to be San Francisco. It is, oh, hold on, because this is global, damn it. Buenos Aires. Oh, find folks in Buenos Aires. Okay, but hold on. Buenos Aires oh find folks in Buenos Aires okay but hold on Buenos Aires

although in this other one it says Hong Kong Hong Kong okay America's most bookish city is San Francisco ah good job

thank you wow how'd you know that 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 interesting okay beat books and stuff that I liked, those authors were all in these small San Francisco presses that had their own bookshops. Interesting. Okay. San Francisco, Hayward, which is part of the Bay Area. Brooklyn. Yeah, that makes sense. Seattle. Other cities

with more bookstores than my model expects. This person's model. Austin. Austin. Austin, Columbus, Portland, San Diego, and New Orleans. Hmm. Okay. City with the highest percentage of doctorate holders.

We have done this before, and it is also confusing because this says Los Alamos. Oh, sure. Which makes sense. Yeah. But then- Although we can't count that as a city. Well, okay. Yes. That's probably what the debate was last time. Probably.

Because according to onlinephdprograms.org, Mm-hmm. Number one is Brookline, Massachusetts. That certainly makes sense. Yeah. I mean, Harvard, Boston College, and BU are within three and a half miles of Brookline. And MIT?

And MIT is 0.4 miles. Oh, my gosh. Then Davis, California is number two. Really? From UC Davis? Yeah. Maybe it's just because the population is so small? Well, also Davis is, quote, in the top 10 brainiest cities. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Number three, Palo Alto. Four, Cambridge. Five, Bethesda. Maryland. Mm-hmm. Then six, Ann Arbor. Oh, that makes sense.

Very small. Let me see if I can find any Georges on here. Athens, where are you? Number 15 is College Station, Texas. My aunt was born there. She was? Yeah. My that's my aunt was born there she was yeah my mom's youngest sister was born in college station because my grandpa was a professor he was getting his phd at texas oh yep okay um yep okay let's see what else do i got here oh yeah if you if you're interested in learning more

about the Germans and the meth, there's a Good Time article on it. Also a great book. Blitzed. Blitzed, yeah, they reference Blitzed in this. But if you want a short, if you don't want to read the whole book and you want some info,

there's an article called How Methamphetamine Became a Key Part of Nazi Military Strategy. It's in time. Uh-huh. Ding, ding, ding. I just recommended that book to Peter Attia. Oh.

And he read it already and he loved it. So one for one on that prediction. It's a hit. Yeah. Of course, Tom Hanson had read it. I got so excited I discovered this book. I was like, Tom, you got to get this book. Listen.

Yeah, I read it. Yeah, it was great. It was great. I'm like, when did you read it? I don't know, a year, a year and a half ago? I'm like, the day it came out? Maybe he just reads everything the day it comes out. Maybe.

I could see that. He has an alert. 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. Who wrote the N-Wide. The meritocracy, the columnist. Who wrote the Envoy. The meritocracy, the article that you reference. He's conservative and admittedly so. Oh, he is?

Yeah. Okay. The spirit level, Daniel referenced that book and he said it was by somebody and Pickett. It's Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. That's a very memorable name you meet a gal at the bowling alley kate pickett have you ever dated anyone just because you like their name no but i dated someone whose name i loved who when i was in the sixth grade sasha crossett that's a good name and she was the hottest girl in my school and her name

was sasha cross it's not really fair that she got. All of it. Or is it chicken or the egg? Is it like the name's so good she's going to be hot? Her older sister's name was Darby Crossett. These are pretty wild names for Highland, Michigan. Darby, that's cute. Yeah, Darby and Sasha.

And they were both foxes. Darby apparently died. 2014. What? Of what? Farmington Hills, right? Oh, that makes sense. Sasha is her sister.

No way. Oh, this is so sad. What happened? Also, Rob, sometimes you don't have to look up everything. No, this is incredible. Makes me think he's looking up everything. He is. Yeah.

It's just her obituary. I don't. It's like, might've been better off not knowing this. Well, now I want to know how she died. I'll read through the. Okay.

Comments. Let's see. Comments. Oh God. Oh God. Oh, that's heartbreaking. I didn't know that.

That's really sad. Really sad. 2014, nine's heartbreaking. I didn't know that. Yeah, that's really sad. Really sad. 2014, nine years ago. So she's probably 39 or something. Oh, no. Oh, that's really young. That's scary. Oh, I don't like death.

Now I'm thinking of one. I just got to save one other girl from the same school. Oh, that name you like? Or what? Yeah, she's just so cute. So this is when I was in seventh grade. I had moved to Milford. And then they had this combined dance, which was so brazen of them.

They hosted it at Milford High School, but it was both junior highs came together. Highland Junior High and Muir Junior High. Oh, wow. Okay. And now I had gone to both. Yeah, that's a big day for you. Big day for me. Potentially, I don't know if I'm going to have to fight

because there's older kids. It turned out to be so much fun. Okay. And then Susie Scott. That's a real name, Monica. Okay. Susie Scott. I didn't know her when I was at i didn't know her

when i was at highland junior high and then we're at this combined dance and there's this blonde girl suzy scott when you were young did you like anyone non-white and i don't oh my god yeah the number one my number one obsession was lisa bonet oh i know okay i mean real people there weren't any non-whites until i got to high school and then you know yes and i'll give everyone's name because this is what i'm doing on this episode there was the most beautiful albanian girl kaz's sister and her name was like her name was kaz's sister oh but I was so wild for her. It was crazy. And that was playing with fire because Kaz was, he was something to be feared.

Yeah. He owned a Coney Island when we were in high school. Oh, my God. I told you this. Oh, God, here we go. So Aaron and I would get off school and drive to Troy, Michigan, like 40 minutes. And then we would work for five hours. I had early release. And we would constantly be driving, dropping cars off in downtown Detroit.

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. And his brother ran at the other half of the day. Wow. Did his parents own it? Clearly, but the brothers ran it, but like in high school, in downtown Detroit at 16. And this will paint the exact picture on why this is crazy. Aaron and I rolled in one day, as we would do once a week. We'd stop by, get some coneys from him. We roll up.

There's police tape everywhere. We're like, park. What's going on? I see Kaz. He's like in the parking lot. We go up to him. I'm like, what happened? He's like, oh, yeah, dude, there's shooting across the street.

So my brother pulled out his Mac-10 and there was a shootout. So all the windows of the Coney Island are shot out. Oh, my God. They've been in a gun battle with two dudes across the street. And he's in 11th grade. Don't look up at him, Rob. When I liked his sister, it was, you know. Scary. Thanks for going with me on it was, you know. Scary.

Thanks for going with me on that little ride. Scary. Okay. Did you find out what happened to Darby? No. Okay. When I searched Kaz Kwafa, it said, do you mean Wiz Khalifa, though? Oh, that's flattering.

Cool. Okay, so that's really it. Oh. Well, now I regret taking you on all those detours. Why? Because it left a bad taste in your mouth. It was about violence and guns and bravado and customs, old world customs. Okay, I will

end on something else then. Okay, great. And I don't want to because I'm nervous you're going to take it the wrong way or be mad at me for saying it. Okay. But I do think it's important that I say it. Yeah. Because, you. Because this whole episode is about meritocracy and our story. And you were saying that you hate it because it fucks with your story a little bit, that you came up from nothing. Overachieved.

Yeah. And that's right. 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. Sure. As in like your mom could afford to pay for you to go to college. Like she paid for your college. She did. Yeah. It was $3,800 a year, but she 100% did. Yeah.

And at that point, she totally could, yes. By the time I left high school, my mom was upper middle class. And so many people's parents can't afford that. For sure. So, you know, it's just like little baby, not taking away from what you've done, but it's things like that, right?

Right. That do end up making differences. Well, that's very fair. Because, well, first of all, half of my college was done at SMC, which was like literally $22 a quarter. I could have done that. Yeah. But $3,800 a year when I made $8,000 a year, Ann had to pay rent.

Exactly. She paid my rent. Yeah. Until Bree moved in. Then we split that. Yeah. So I might not have gone. Yeah.

I don't know that I would have spent the money on it. Even if I wanted to, I don't know that I would have prioritized it. That hurdle might have prevented me from going. Yeah. It's just like one of those factors. Yeah, that's big time true. I had a mom who I watched get up every morning and go to work and build a business. Like that's worth a katrillion dollars.

For sure. Exactly. Or worth, you know, yeah. In my household, people could start businesses and succeed. My dad had done it several times. My mom did it. Yeah. That had to have been world expanding in a way I wasn't even aware of.

That's really true. All right. Well, this was so fun. Yeah, this is fun. All right. Love you. Love you. Love you.

Love you. Love you. Love you. Love you.