The Dispatch Podcast - Our Fragile American Economy | Roundtable

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Megan McArdle to discuss the strength of the current U.S. economy, the prospect of an A.I. bubble, and President Donald Trump’s recent trip through Asia. The Agenda:—How's the economy doing?—The A.I. bubble—Why presidents can’t save the economy—American investor confidence—Bonzo goes to Busan—Losing the trade war with China—Trump’s gifted crown—NWYT: Grade inflation at Harvard Show Notes:—Amazon blog post on layoffs The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss the state of the U.S. economy, Donald Trump's just completed trip to Asia. And finally, and not worth your time, grade inflation and undeserved marks that we got both high and low over the years. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson, as well as dispatch contributor Megan McArdle of the Washington Post. Let's dive right in. Welcome, everyone. I want to start big picture today. If you are sort of the average news consumer living your life, doing things that average news consumers do, going to jobs, dealing with kids or grandkids, and you don't have time to read the transcripts from the Fed meetings or otherwise

study deeply in the reporting on the U.S. economy. There's so much conflicting news out there these days. There are certain indications that the economy is doing well, if you look at the stock market, et cetera, but inflation is up, unemployment is up. So I want to just take a big picture look at the U.S. economy and try to help people understand kind of where we are, where things are going, short term, long term. And I'll start with you, Megan. What's your sense? If I were to ask you the simplest question possible, is the U.S. economy doing well? How would you answer that question? It is fragile. That, look, stock market's doing well. But if you actually look at the stock market, there was a great report out from a hollow management a while back, showing that it's functionally all, not all, but it is largely driven by a handful of tech firms and kind of tech-adjacent firms.

And similarly, the job market, you know, unemployment's 4.2%. That's not bad. But we're getting big layoffs at companies like Amazon, full disclosure, Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon owns my employer. and you're seeing especially new graduates have difficulty getting hired. Firms, I think, are a little worried about laying people off because, you know, I think firms are worried about what happened during the pandemic when they shut a lot of workers really fast, and then they ended up paying the sun, the moon, and the stars to get workers

back when it was time to expand again. And so they're holding on, but holding on is not the same thing as investing, as growing, there is a ton of investment happening in one sector, and that's building out AI data centers. And maybe the AI data centers are going to rescue the whole economy, but I tend to think that, you know, it takes a while for humans to process a new technology. If you think about the Internet, right, in 1995, I was hired to be a secretary. And this was already a kind of obsolete job. My bosses could have typed their own letters into a computer, but at that time, place and time. They didn't want to learn to type. And so they paid me the princely sum of $25,000

a year, so they didn't have to learn to type. Now, eventually, we got to a point where people looked around and said, people are coming out of college, they know how to type. I'm not hiring someone secretary to sit in front of his office and look pretty, or so we lightheartedly hope. And the secretary started going away. And I think that's what you will eventually see with AI, but I think it is going to take longer than people think, because it just takes time for organizations to adjust, bosses are reluctant to fire. And so all of those things together paint a picture of an economy that's a little bit in stasis. And some of the stasis is bad. Inflation is well above where the Fed's trying to target, where we have one potential bright spot, but then we get a lot of dark

spots on the horizons, including tariffs, including China's retaliation, including rising geostrategic tensions that are going to screw up trade even apart from the tariffs and China's retaliation. And so overall, I would say, you know, B-minus and probably heading in the wrong direction. Kevin, Megan mentioned AI and I think her direct quo was largely driven by a handful of tech companies, the current stock market, but I think is correct. I think that's the way most people view this latest run-up, sustained. run up in the stock market. Are we in an AI bubble from your perspective? Well, I think Megan maybe even understated how much data center construction has been driving the economy over the last

year or so. Berman at Harvard calculated that U.S. GDP growth outside of AI data centers was only one-tenth of one percent in the first half of the year. So if you take that out, there's essentially no economic growth. So there is a very, very large footprint there that is subject to short-term change and revision. You know, is these business models and business environments change. The decisions about how fast, how big to build, those things can change pretty quickly. And so when you've got an economy that's as big and complex as ours, but it's essentially at the moment anyway dependent on one industry for most of its growth, That's a dangerous and an unhappy situation.

I don't know whether the AI industry itself actually is a bubble. I mean, yes, it's a bubble in the sense that there's a lot of speculation. There's a lot of irrational exuberance, as someone once put it in the market, whether that's the early stages of a new technology coming out or something that's really, truly destructive. I don't really know. I think there's a 50-50 chance that 20 years from now we look back and say, you know, it seemed like AI was going to be a bigger deal than it was. Now, I may be completely wrong about that, but I don't think that it's yet at the point where

we entirely know what its economic ramifications are going to be. We've already been through a couple of big technological revolutions in our lifetimes, all of us, you know, the personal computer when we were all pretty young, really changed how people work. The Internet certainly changed how people work. AI probably is going to change how people work. But what we've seen recently in our economy is going from what Megan was talking about, what was known as the no hire, no fire economy, where there weren't a lot of new jobs, but not a lot of layoffs.

And that seems to be changing where there are, you know, Amazon's having layoffs, UPS, I think now has 50,000 fewer employees than it did a year ago. Target is laying off a bunch of people in Minnesota. So we are starting to see some downsizing and restructuring of labor forces. And that's something that's something that's going to weigh on people a little bit, you know. Let me jump in there and ask you specifically about Amazon to follow up on that. Because it seems, you know, we've been hearing these warnings about sort of the coming, the end of white-collar work, depending on who you listen to,

but a coming transformation in the workforce based on AI and what AI is able to do. And in these Amazon layoffs, which happened just, this week. There were some early reporting that it was going to be 30,000 employees. It turns out it's actually 14,000 employees, but that's 4% of the Amazon workforce, no small number. And Beth Goletti, the head of Amazon HR, put out a blog post on the Amazon website. And she directly attributed some of these layoffs and reorganization to AI. She wrote, this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before

in existing market segments and altogether new ones. We're convinced that we need to be organized more leanly with fewer layers and more ownership to move as quickly as possible for our customers and businesses. I think the way that that news hit this week was that it's sort of

we've been talking about this forever and it's here. This is the first of the big ones or one of the sort of first of the big ones. Is that, it sounds like you might be skeptical of that. If you think that some of this is overblown and that, A, I may not be as transformative as a lot of people are suggesting it will be. Well, I think we're already seeing that there are certain jobs that can do pretty well.

And I think there's a good case to be made that there's certain jobs. It's not quite there yet and may not be for a long time. I think there's a good reason to believe that Jeff Bezos personally is a true believer in this stuff because you see it not just at Amazon, but he's also, apologies to Meg. I don't want to make her nervous about this conversation, but he thinks he's going to use AI to, edit the Washington Post, which I think is probably not going to work as well as some of the folks over there maybe think it does. But, you know, if I were a paralegal, I would just be looking for a new job because I don't think they're going to be a lot of paralegals in the future. I think that, you know, things like proofreading in our business, AI is pretty good at, although

it's not really good at editing per se about really improving, you know, copy. AI generated copy tends to be pretty bad, and it all tends to read alike and look alike, so I don't worry about that too much. But it's the same as we've seen, I mean, because of the words artificial intelligence push a lot of science fiction buttons for us, we don't think about this about in terms of what it actually is, which is the automation of routine tasks. And we've seen the automation of routine tasks in a lot of other industries for years and years and years now, something we're kind of used to seeing in businesses. And this may be a more dramatic version of it, and it may be automating tasks that were, well, certainly were previously too complex to be automated

in a routine kind of way. But I don't know. I don't worry about it that much in the sense that you know, a lot of people lost those secretarial jobs when the personal computer came around and everyone could be their own secretary. A lot of people lost all sorts of jobs when the Internet made them no longer economically feasible. But those people went on to do other things. You know, our economy typically churns through about a million and a half jobs a month anyway. And that's a lot of jobs. But we end up having, you know, net gains in that stuff because human action and human labor and human attention are inherently valuable.

And I think we'll find new things for people to do. It'll certainly be disruptive in a lot of, in a lot of occupations, you know, reviewing insurance documents. I bet AIs get real good at that. And identifying Medicare fraud and things like that, they'll be pretty good at, I bet. But they're already pretty good at in some ways. But I don't worry about it being some sort of, you know, economic dystopia where suddenly human labor is no longer valuable. I think that's just, that's kind of upside down Malthusianism.

Well, it'll be interesting to hear from AI, Kevin, in two years when we're living in that dystopia saying, boy, real life, Kevin, got it so wrong two years ago. Yes, artificial intelligence will never replace organic rage. So, I feel safe. Jonah, are you worried about the AI file replacing the G file anytime soon? No, I'm not worried about that kind of thing. I'm sort of between Kevin and Megan on this. My frustration with the AI thing is it's still, it's not quite the Peter Thiel. We were promised jet packs and we got 140 characters.

But it's closer to that. Like, it's being, it's transformational and revolutionary. in service industry and in sort of, and then the sort of low-hanging fruit of cognitive work, like cognitive, you know, service work, you know, from journalism and scheduling and administrative stuff and that kind of stuff. I was told that it was gonna come up

with all these new molecules and we were gonna be able to build cities that look like 19th century Vienna much cheaper and much more quickly. and that, you know, we were going to get that kind of stuff, that it was going to figure out compounds that, because it can compute combinations of molecules and in billions of a second, that it was going to come up with new things for cancer and that.

And instead, it's like, oh, it's getting rid of the reservation desk at the rental car company. Oh, okay, interesting. Like, I hear more and more people saying that it's going to have the kind of productivity boost that the internet had. Okay, that's not a small thing. It's also not as big a thing in retrospect as maybe some people thought at the time.

And so it's somewhere in there. In terms of the broader question about the actual economy, I don't think the people's attitudes of the economy, I mean, the extent that the AI stuff matters to the broader mood about the economy, I think it is one of the sections of the orchestra creating the mood, music of uncertainty. And, you know, uncertainty is kind of a double-edged sword because if you are an investor and you're a booster and you're a bull on the market and all that kind of stuff, uncertainties can have an upside connotation about how we have no idea how great it's

going to be, right? There's that part of it. But the broader mood of uncertainty, I think, for normal people is, what is AI going to do to my job? What are these tariffs going to do to my job what are these tariffs going to do to the grocery store prices and and for the mid-sized businesses the small and mid-sized businesses have been hit the hardest with all this tariff stuff it's like can I hire anybody can I fire anybody should I order more stuff should I not order anything should I close my shop that kind of thing and I think that that says more about attitudes towards the economy than then all of the thumb-sucking punditry we get about AI which I'm not saying is not an important topic to talk about,

but like I just think it's one factor in a portfolio of unease about the direction of things. And then there's just the added thing that, you know, whether you love him or hate him, I think it's, whether you think it's a criticism or a compliment, Trump is unpredictable.

And people are like, I have no idea what he's going to do next. And I, so like, you just kind of get blocking, and you freeze up on making decisions good or bad, and that's never good for an economy that depends to a large degree on churn and dynamism and creative destruction. If you're just scared about choosing door A

when it might be door B, that's not productive, that's not growth. So if I would have asked you, at the beginning of the Trump administration, let's say it's January of 2025, what your expectations would be, you know, 10 months in for the economy under Donald Trump. You know, on the one hand, I've talked to many people who are Trump voters because of the economy.

They say, look, he's not going to, he's going to deregulate. He did that in the first term. It's going to be an easier operating environment for small businesses, large businesses as well. And that's going to be good for everybody. I'm not going to have to worry about the government. So harassing me as much as the government typically does. as I try to make a living and build my company. On the other hand, of course, he came in announcing that he was going to do the tariffs.

He's done the tariffs. And as you say, they've created, I mean, I think they've created pretty significant economic headwinds separate and apart from the uncertainty that they've caused, but also in addition to the uncertainty. So if I would have asked you in January 2025, where you thought we would be right now, are things going better or worse? or is this roughly what you expected? I don't know. I guess I would say close to roughly what I expected, maybe a little worse. If you'd asked me in April of 2025, I would say things are going better than I would have expected the week after Liberation Day.

And some of that has to do with clawbacks. Some of that has to do with the ability people to – we talked about this a couple weeks ago, you know, front load their inventory is all sorts of adjust. But, you know, look, I mean, I'll just say one of my biggest arguments with my friends who voted against Kamala Harris rather than for Trump, the rationalization that they made was that the most likely scenario was that Trump 2 was going to be just like Trump won. And they also said, that's the best case scenario. And I kept saying, I did a bunch of podcasts about this, you can't, whenever you think. The best case scenario is also the most likely scenario. It's time for a gut check.

I mean, it seems to me that's one of the most conservative truisms possible. It's like, you know, what's the song that leads into the commentary progress? Hope for the best, expect the worse. That's kind of a small, more of a small C, at least for my people, way of thinking about the world. And there were a whole bunch of people who kind of wishcast and thought that it would just be a replay. and it's it has not been a replay and you can say that's good or bad but it's i never thought that was going to be the same thing and um in part because the economic head win the economic tailwinds that trump inherited in his first term we're not here for a second term and presidents always

take more credit for the economy than they deserve and um the idea that we're going to get an exact replay and it's sort of like there are a bunch of people on the left and the right there's a scene in the movie Excalibur which was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid and Arthur has been lying in a near coma and then all of a sudden he gets Excalibur back the sword and he starts riding through the countryside and all of a sudden all of the trees which are like leafless and barren start blooming and turning green and the the landscape is utterly reborn with this sort of metaphysical spring there are people who think presidents simply by their metaphysical nature fix the economy and it's just magic

medieval thinking. And it's really widespread on both the left and the right. And the idea that Trump, just by being Trump, was going to do that with the economy, was idiotic. And here we are. Kevin, Megan mentioned earlier some dark spots. She mentioned China and tariffs. Specifically, we're going to talk about China here in a minute. But I wanted to get your thought about something that doesn't get a lot of attention or doesn't get nearly enough attention, although it's something we talk about pretty regularly here. And that's our growing debt. Seems to me like that might be a big deal, $38 trillion, and counting to major political parties who are not only not proposing reforms to this coming debt crisis, to the programs that are leading to what I think is an inevitable debt crisis, but are in most ways positioned strongly against those kinds of reforms. So not only do we not have leadership in these areas, we have people making the argument that either nothing's wrong or the,

the whatever the solutions would be, they'd be worse than the existing problem. At what point does that matter for sort of the macroeconomic picture in the United States? I mean, this can't go on forever, can it? Well, that's the famous Stein's law, right? If something can't go on forever, it won't. Right. Yeah, first of all, I have to correct Jonah real quick. The stuff with the presidency and the economy is not magical medieval thinking. It's way, way older than medieval thinking. It's ancient, pagan, primitive, howl at the moon, barking, thinking. And it never, ever, ever goes away, unfortunately. You know, the debt is, we're in a situation right now where we're spending more money on debt service than we do on most government programs.

It's, you know, the situation a lot of us talked about where, you know, suddenly when interest rates start going back to something more like historical norms, and you've got either a Pentagon size, hole in the economy or in the budget or kind of something more like a social security size hole in the budget that's just a debt service, that's going to get our attention. That's what we all said for a long time. Well, now we've got that and it still doesn't seem to be getting anyone's attention. So at some level, I have to assume that there's some level of pain that gets their attention. But apparently we are not there yet. So I don't know when it's a third of revenue or a third of spending is going to debt service or half of spending is going to debt service is someone going to start paying attention um excuse me i have a cold and a missing tooth so my my voice sounds a little

weird today um i really am genuinely curious to see how bad that has to get before it forces them to act uh apparently their their tolerance for this sort of thing is is even higher than i expected it to be i used to have pretty um a pretty optimistic view of this stuff um based in large part on the Canadian example. You know, when Canada went through its fiscal crisis back in the 90s, they had a left-wing government in charge. And that left-wing government actually did exactly what conservatives would want. They fixed their budgetary problems essentially with, you know, $10 in spending cuts for every dollar in tax increase. It's a pretty good deal. And I assume that at some point fiscal pressures would force the United States into a situation that was going to

end up being something like that. Although now I'm starting to think that, you know, the idea of American exceptionalism as applied to fiscal policy may be a dangerous and horrifying thing and that they may run off in some kind of really, really crazy, more sort of Argentinian, Venezuelan sort of direction. And just to close on the happiest of happy thoughts, you know, we've seen countries go through credit crises and fiscal crises before, but we've never seen it in a country that's 22% of the world's economic output. You know, it's always some like, you know, second-rate country like Argentina, which we're bailing out for some reason. And it's going to be real, real interesting when it hits the wall for the United States, not just for us, but for the rest of the world, too.

No one knows how that unfolds, what that looks like in terms of a global economic crisis. But my guess is real, real ugly. Megan, you have a long history of writing about personal finance. If somebody listening today is an investor thinking about sort of what should I be doing in these moments. And I'm not asking you to give actual investment advice. And, of course, we would caveat it that past performance is not indicative of future results. But should investors in this moment sort of be confident? And is it the case that, you know, the old saw about, you know, investing in the stock market in particular?

Yes, there will be down times, but there's this long history of the stock market always recovering and doing better and your best to invest in the long term. Does that still apply in this moment? Well, past performance is no guarantee of future results, but it is a better indicator of future results than random guessing. Look, I went to the University of Chicago for business school. The thing they hammer into your head over and over and over with an actual hammer, if necessary, is that you can't beat the market. And let me explain what that means, which is not that no one can ever beat the market.

but that on average there is like when you look at returns they are pretty much normally distributed the people who do actually beat the market tend to make about the cost of paying them to actively manage the money and so for most people the correct strategy is just to go with the herd put your money into the stock market and with some hedge in in box also, in my opinion, some hedge in international. So I split my portfolio, 70-30 U.S. rest of the world. That said, we've been in a really long bull market. Price to earnings ratios are really high. Can this go on forever? We are going to have boomers who are trying to divest all over the world, not just in the United States. I am not super optimistic about our fiscal adjustment, like Kevin.

I look around, and yes, there's examples of Canada and Sweden and Denmark and so forth. But in fact, the more common examples are that you get different groups competing to not be the people who bear the burden of adjustment. Right. And they just put it off until there's a crisis. Or until one side wins so decisively that they understand that they will bear any political. costs for not doing the adjustment. We don't look like we're close to that, which means that the alternative is that we're probably going to have a fiscal crisis. And it is really hard to say what to do in a fiscal crisis. Like one reason our markets are doing so well, not the only reason.

I do think I'm maybe a little more bullish on AI than Jonah and Kevin. And I would say that, you know, when you say, well, why is it so underwhelming right now? I mean, I don't find it that underwhelming. I use it every day. I use it for a lot of stuff, including fact-checking my columns and editorials. But also, if you look at cars in 1890, you look at them now, and they're like things you buy for your five-year-old to potter around in the driveway. It takes a while. But it does happen. Eventually, someone comes along, invents the Model T, and then we're off to the races. But one of the things that is driving the investment in the U.S. stock market is just that everyone else looks worse. It's not that we look good.

Correct. Yes. It's that, you know, when I talk to investors, they're like, okay, where am I going to put my money? Can't put it in China. First of all, they'll expropriate it. If I invest in a physical factory, they're going to, like, I'm at risk of expropriation. I'm going to get hassled by officials for various things, and they're going to steal any ideas I have. You want to put it in Europe? Demographic problems, slower growth than we have. Depending on the country, worse debt problems than we have. I mean, the U.K. is in really bad shape right now. You want to put it in South America or Africa? There's just not that many places that look good right now.

And so we're getting a ton of capital. Despite Trump doing the tariffs, which is going to naturally, through the magic of international trade accounting, is going to, should be slowing investment in the United States. It's not slowing it that much because no one else knows where to put their money. and that makes it hard to know how do you hedge against this? Right? As an economist said to me a while back, the problem with trying to hedge against a debt crisis in the U.S.

and a collapse of the U.S. dollar is that if that happens, everything is so bad that, you know, like, your hedge at that point is not gold, it's canned goods and ammunition. And that's kind of where I am. I keep on keeping on

because I can't figure out a good hedge against the situation we're in. But that doesn't mean I think the situation's good. It just means I can't figure out a better alternative. Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right about nowhere else to go with your money. I had a conversation not long ago with someone who was a decision maker and a sovereign wealth fund who made that exact point. He's like, look, we're worried, we're nervous. We look around. Some of this stuff makes us nervous, particularly rule of law questions, sort of open corruption questions.

that make the United States riskier than it has been, you know, even in our recent history. But he said, as you did, there's nowhere else to go. What are we going to do? Go to China? Like, they're not going to China. They're not going to invest in Europe, at least not at scale and not at the way that they have been in the U.S. And I would add, like, just one more thing that I think that actually creates a problem for

us because it blunts the signal that policymakers should be getting, that this is unsustainable. it could end really badly. And markets would like to deliver that signal, but they can't figure out how. So they're not. And I think that's allowing this to go on and things to get worse and put us in a worse position

for a bigger crash. I suspect that many of our listeners would like to know which canned goods Megan is stockpiling. She has good taste on this stuff. We are not looking for more sponsors. Yes, we're not looking for, you know, canned goods forever.com.

Well, Megan cares about food. She has a lot of expertise in a lot of things, and I think everyone would like to know about it. Well, I mean, I am a big fan of... About your recipes from last week. We got lots of feedback. People want to know way more about it. But we're not going to be doing braised short ribs in the future if we're talking about

it'll be braised corned beef hash. I do want to let the listeners know, though, who asked me for that recipe, that the next time I make it, because for me, it's just I do it by feel at this point. I make it so often. But the next time I make it, I will write down some quantities, and I will give it to Max, our... intrepid producer so that he can put it in the show notes perfect so just a fun fact uh my mom was a great cook who did everything that way too and my wife once asked her for a recipe for something

and my mom said oh you put in a splash of this a bunch of that and then um you know it's done when you can smell it in the farthest away room in the house and that was the total science do you think your mom actually walked to the farthest room in the house well the her bedroom was far her we're in an apartment and the bedroom was the farthest room from but like she was like it's done when you can smell it in your bedroom but then she was like oh i mean the farthest way room in the house that's funny and that was it so last question on this topic before we move on um and i'm afraid this is probably not going to be the the upper that we are looking for some some ending on some note of optimism one of the things it strikes me as you look back at the past decade and what we might call the trump era is that we've seen this sort of dramatic increase in polarization and rise in populism, blaming outgroups, what have you. And I would say normal times we might expect that, those kinds of tensions to rise at a time of great economic challenge.

And in fact, things have been more or less good. We've had our moments. We've had some ups and downs. Of course, we had the pandemic. But broadly, things have been pretty. good and the country seems to be fraying in a way that we might not have expected. If we were to see a downturn, whether an AI bubble pops, whether our debt catches up with us, whether other countries decide, in fact, there is someplace else to take their investments. What do you worry,

I mean, this is such a loaded question. I'm sorry, I'm leading leading the jury here. leading the witness, do you worry about what the implications would be societally if we had that kind of a moment, given what we've just seen, Jonah? Of what course? Yeah. I think that, and it's too complicated to get deep in the weeds on here, I think one of the reasons why things are so polarized and angry about the state of the economy is that we're so rich now that that large chunks of Americans care more about positional goods and status than they care about material goods. Fred Hirsch economist in the 1970s coined the idea of a positional good. And all positional good is it's sort of like a Veblen good, but a positional good is like

it's zero sum. If you have it, someone else can't have it. Megan and I, the first time Megan was on the Remnant podcast, we talked about this in the context of dog economics. Yes. Parks are full of sticks but there's one stick that all the dogs want because they were actually what they want to be is the dog that all the other dogs chase that's the positional good they're there's sticks enough for everybody but that's not the point you can only the only one person be the best basketball player in their high school and fred hirsch said the rise of this conception of positional goods is why america can no longer provide the american dream for a lot of people is because their expectations are about their relative status towards other people rather than material

real satisfactions. Everyone could get a car in a garage and live in a suburban home. I'm not saying that I'm just saying in theory, right? And then all of a sudden you start competing with people about who has the slightly better car, the slightly better driveway, the slightly better bathroom, whatever. It's that kind of thing. And I think social media and a lot of other forms of media heightened that where we're watching people curate their lives to live better than other people, even though they're not actually happier than other people. They're just pretending at it better. And I think that's one of things that's running through the culture. And so in some ways, the only reason I bring that up is that in some ways, I could see a massive economic correction having weirdly unexpected reactions culturally

from people. I think a bunch of people who have been struggling, if they all of a sudden saw a lot of rich people become poor, their schadenfreude would make them a little happier than you might expect that oh okay finally they know what it's like kind of thing um i think so much of the screaming about millionaires and billionaires has more to do with this status anxiety thing and envy than it has to do like whenever i talk to progressives about income inequality they very subtly and sometimes very quickly you say why don't you want to fight poverty and i was trying to point out that like fighting poverty and fighting income inequality there's a Venn diagram overlap but they're not the same thing um there's uh and megan's written a ton about this about the journalists

who define rich is just slightly about 10% above what they make um there is um there's a lot more psychology to the economy on this stuff than i think people are accrediting and they just want to put it down into this dollars and send stuff and i just don't think that's where things are going and so i just think that means if there were a major correction the response psychologically would be more interesting and more unexpected than a sort of static, oh, people are going to be pissed and they get poor kind of thing, which is not to say that wouldn't happen, but I think there would be other things going on. Megan? Yeah, I think that's right, but I also think, I think the concept of positional goods is really smart, and I really like the way you put it, Jonah. But I would add that

another thing people want to buy as they get richer is insurance. They want to buy protection against anything changing for the negative in their life. And I buy, I say this as someone who buys a ton of insurance. I buy basically all the insurance my employer offers. I am like, I got the accident insurance. I got the hospital insurance. I got the like freak, you know, random weather occurrence insurance. I don't think we have that, but I would buy it if we had it.

Megan, just great quick on it. Do you buy, you always click yes to the travel insurance thing? No. No, travel insurance is a scam. Okay. So, like, no, no, I buy, like, I buy a lot of, everyone should get disability insurance if you don't have it, run, do not walk, and get some disability insurance. This is the way that Americans are the most underinsured in their lives, actually. But that's what people want, right?

And so part of the drawback, part of the real downside of, I think you saw this in the Great Recession, right? people were not, the problem was not that people were starving. There were people who were losing their homes. It was really tragic who had bought homes that they could not afford and who lost them when the downturn had or who lost jobs and then could not afford homes that they could afford before. But it wasn't that people were starving and it wasn't even that that many people lost their homes in a really catastrophic way because we did develop, in fact, a lot of mechanisms to do short sales and let the bank eat the difference and all of these ways to get people out from under the mountain of debt that they had acquired that was not sustainable. We had a lot of generous

stimulus programs. We did, what did they lose? They lost security. They lost the feeling that everything was going to go up, that they understood how the world was going to work, that they could plan. And I think that, you know, that time it happened. with a backstop of, like, the government has plenty of fiscal capacity. You know, we entered the Great Recession. It is incredible to contemplate for all the complaints about how George Bush was profligate and he ran up the deficit with his unsustainable tax cuts, he'd actually stabilize the deficit at a third of GDP, which is a very, very sustainable ratio.

We can argue about whether it should be zero, but the country can carry that basically forever. And then Obama ran it up to about 75%. And then Trump ran it up to about 100% during the pandemic. Trump and Biden. I should not, I do not want to let Biden off the hook. And it's a very different, and we've got, you know, these massive deficits. Our interest rates have gone up. The money is not free, basically the way it was during the 2010s. So when we go in, you're not only going to lose your personal security. We may well lose the feeling that, like, like the government's got this, that they can step in. We might have to do a fiscal adjustment during a recession or a financial crisis,

and that would be catastrophic. And so if you think about that's basically Greece, is having to do a fiscal adjustment downward at the same time as your economy is contracting for other reasons. So I think it could be real bad. Let me just say, I am not sure that people will be comforted by saying the billionaires lose everything if they are losing a lot of their forms of insurance, including their retirement and other things.

Kevin, I waited to go to you last because I just was certain that you would provide a dose of optimism after Jonah and Megan. Do you have anything that might make us feel better about the societal consequences of an economic downturn? Well, I think the lesson to take out of the situation that Megan has just has just lined out for us is a very old piece of wisdom that we should have been paying attention to for a long time, which is do the hard stuff in the good times when you've got lots of options and resources and choices about what to do. And that's one of the great things about living in the

United States in such a prosperous society with so much kind of historical, real capital and social capital to go on, is that when the world throws problems at us, we've still got lots of options. We've got lots of choices. Even right now, we've got lots of options and lots of choices. There are a number of ways we could stabilize our national finances that would be unpleasant for some people, yes, and they would require some political costs and a level of prudence and patriotism and courage that we don't currently see in Washington. But we are not at the situation yet where we don't have a lot of choices and a lot of options. And so we do still have time to deal with this stuff in a way that is non-catastrophic. But, you know, as every day passes that we don't get serious about this stuff, we get closer and closer. to the catastrophic situation.

But in terms of the large social dislocations, one thing I think is worth keeping in mind, the historical example I think of is if you look at the very, very early days of what ends up becoming capitalism, you know, the end of feudalism, you get a general increase in people's standard of living. People start to have more choices about where they live and what kind of work they do and what their occupations are going to be like and whether they can start a business. and they hate it. People are profoundly, profoundly unhappy with this new freedom and this new prosperity

that's been thrust upon them. And out of that you get the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, Nationalism, all the sort of stuff that you associate with the end of feudalism in that period in time. So prosperity can have, you know, dislocating effects on people, too. And I think that partly that is what we're seeing. And that goes to Jonas positional goods and Beblin goods, where, you know, material prosperity is a matter of a rising tide that lifts all boats to use the great cliche. But status competition is by definition a zero-sum game, because status is always inherently

relative. And we're in an era of this kind of weird, social media-driven, extraordinarily petty. And I think in 50 years, we will all look back with a great deal of embarrassment at this era of the kind of weird status competition we have right now. All right. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be

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Search for the Remed in your podcast app and hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into our conversation. Jonah, Donald Trump is on his way back from a six-day trip to Asia. it was filled with leaders in the region showering Donald Trump with praise, with honors, just the kind of treatment that Donald Trump loves to get. I think that our allies have learned to provide him. This was similar to what we saw when he took a trip to the Middle East. And less, I would say, concrete deals, but sort of vague understandings, I would call them, in places like South Korea, Japan, and most recently and potentially most significantly with China.

What, in your view, was Trump trying to accomplish on this trip to Asia and how much progress did he make? I want to be really clear. I have no friggin idea. I mean that kind of seriously. I think you're absolutely right. Everyone's figured out how to respond to Trump. You know, in some ways, he's kind of like the pain-in-the-ass frat guy who insists that everybody call him Honda or something, right? And so, like, everyone thinks it's kind of stupid, but, like, he's such a pain in the ass about not being called Honda.

and won't let it go that every all right hondo whatever it's like that kind of thing right everyone oh you were just so brilliant you're so smart you're so great you're i love your musk and um so it's impossible to figure out um whether these are actual pivots of policy from these different nations or are they just trying to sweep on to hondo through the palace you know court and get them out of there without causing too much trouble. There's a lot of chatter out there that you had us read this piece by Ben Smith over at Semaphore that maybe Trump is trying to do a, you know, a kind of a version of Nixon to China thing, but more of a just sort of a capitulation because it turns out that China

learned a lot from Trump won. And sort of to Kevin's, and I think China's having a rough time, rougher time than people think, but sort of to Kevin's point about do the hard things when times are good, they've been doing a lot of hard things for the last six years about making it more difficult for Trump to do the kind of damage to their economy that he threatened to do and did it, you know, and experimented with in his first term. And they had a plan. They had a plan about buying soybeans from elsewhere. They had a plan for, you know, onshoreing this and working out relationships with their near abroad in all sorts of different ways. And they're on a rush to being able to take Taiwan. And

it turns out that I, this is my suspicion, that the, the, the, the, the, the, the Smith piece is closer to right. It might be overstated, but it's closer to right than wrong insofar as I think Trump has realized it's too hard to be really confrontational with China if you have an addiction to positive headlines for the economy domestically. And, you know, we've talked about this. One of the reasons why these frigging trade deals are so, first of all, they're not trade deals. Actual trade deals are ratified by the Senate, you know, like they're actual things. These are like these handshake understandings, you know, they're all the equivalent of...

That may or may not ever really happen. I mean, that's the other thing is we don't know. They're the equivalent of the golf tournament giant check. Like, maybe there's a real check that goes with it. Maybe there's not. But the giant check thing is the picture that ends up in the newspaper. That's what he wants. He wants the headlines.

Hondo gets his headlines. And so, like, he gets these headlines from Japan, from China, from all these places. And we won't know for days, weeks, months, years, decades, what are the details? What's the ground truth about them? But if you have that kind of addiction to you just want to be able to tout, you know, he says he's ended seven wars, fact check, he's not ended seven wars. I think he thinks he just ended another one on this trip. actually. That's right. I mean, that's what people do. I, you know, I pick up, you know,

cheap leather goods when I travel abroad. He ends worse. That's just who he is. But my point is that if, if all you want is enough to say, to have the press release, it's just too damn hard to actually substantively contain China. Like, it is the wrong mindset for it. You need, you know, you need to isolate China and bring in your friends in the region. Maybe he's done some of that. I mean, the Japan thing seems to have gone well. And if this Westinghouse thing is real, that'd be good. That's good, you know.

But I just have no freaking clue. That's an acceptable answer. I love it when people say they don't know because so much of what we do for living, I mean, shows podcasts like this, shows like the ones that we've all done. over the years, there's such intense pressure to pretend that you know, because if you don't know, it suggests some gap in your knowledge and then people won't trust you. I think the opposite. And I used to say, I mean, when I was doing special report, sometimes alongside you, Jonah, if I'd get a question that I didn't know the answer to, I was happy, sometimes even eager to announce,

I don't know. I mean, we did one special report panel on Cypriot monetary policy. This is during the Greek desk crisis. And I thought, I can't go on and actually pretend like I really know about Cypriot monetary policy. Like, I have no freaking idea. So I called some people and did some reporting. Where have you been for the last 20 years, Steve, when the rest of us were. But it just holds a monthly salon on Cypriot monetary policy. Yeah. You should come.

It's great. Yeah, I actually wouldn't doubt that you know a lot about Cypriot monetary policy, Megan. But I didn't. But I didn't. And I felt like this obligation to tell people kind of in advance. I forget exactly how I did it. But I think I said something like, it won't surprise anyone to learn that I'm not an expert on monetary policy.

So I called a bunch of smart people. But anyway, forever on this podcast, it's acceptable to say I have no friggin idea. Jonah's point about what Trump is getting from this, though, I think holds. And, you know, it's particularly clear in a comment that he made to reporters on the flight back, I believe it was on Air Force One, where he was asked about this China deal, which, again, isn't really a deal. We saw, if you look at where things were three weeks ago when China announced this ban on rare earth minerals, and Trump said new 100% tariffs, Trump in effect said, I'm calling off the meeting. There's no reason to meet because he's so outrageous and

we're not going to make any progress anyway. The meeting's off. This is all terrible. If you judge from that moment three weeks ago, well, sure, this is progress. And that's how Trump wants us to see it. So when he was asked about this by reporters on the flight back, he said, I guess on a scale from zero to 10, with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12. So Trump is declaring success in his own meeting here. But I wonder, is it success in sort of the, if we look at this in a way other than Trump sort of creating these problems or creating these challenges and then taking steps towards solving them. However, vague, the solutions are still at this point. Does this count as win? Are we better off? Kevin? Yeah. So Jonah starts with he has no idea about sending

something. I do have an idea about that. I'll, I'll say with some competence. You were saying, who knows whether these deals actually, these handshake deals actually play out? I do. I know, and the answer is no. So the South Korea thing, for example, South Koreans apparently are obligated to invest $350 billion in the United States. They're that in ship building. South Korea is a much smaller economy than we do. 350 billion dollars is 21% of South Korea's GDP. They are not investing 21% of their GDP in the United States on any sort of short timeline anyway, maybe over the course of 50 years or something like that. And if they did, by the way, as Megan was pointing out earlier, that would imply a new $350 billion trade surplus on their part with the United States because it's where that capital comes from.

And that wouldn't be acceptable to the Trump administration either. So this stuff isn't really going to play out the way that these headlines pretend that it does. I think the short version of this is there was a trade war and the United States lost. We gave China what they wanted in terms of the suspension of the export controls so they can now get technology to their companies that they need to adopt. stopped. And China, in return, went back to the status quo of we're no longer going to be punching Wisconsin soybean farmers in the throat by boycotting their products. And by the way, we want to buy their products. China wants to buy those soybeans because it makes animal feed cheaper and makes meat cheaper in China. And food prices are a real issue there. The Chinese

understand American internal politics, much more than Americans understand Chinese internal politics. That's one of the downsides of living in a free society. The people can see inside how your machinery works where it's harder to see inside how their machinery works. And what did we actually get out of this? Nothing, really. So they've got a temporary suspension of the controls that we're going to put on rare earth exports. So that's just enough to disincentivize U.S. firms and European firms and the Australians and others from creating real alternatives to China. It still gives them the whip hand to use this in the future, which, you know, they use it against Japan. They're used it against us. It's still going to be there unless we start developing our own alternative sources to

that. So, yeah, we got, we got snookered. But that's no surprise because Trump is really bad at this stuff. And he's always been really bad at this stuff. He was bad at the first time around. And he's bad at it at this time around. And, you know, you can get the new Japanese premier, give him a golf club and make him really happy and make him feel like, you know, a very special little boy. And someone else gives him a crowd! No American president should ever accept the gift of a crown. Someone gives you a crown, you hand it back to them and say, in the president of the United States,

we don't have crowns. Thank you very much. It's a very nice gesture, but no. But that's who this is, and that's just kind of where we are. So the Chinese have learned how to deal with this guy and how to deal with the United States and how to exploit, you know, pretty... With all due respect to the soybean farmers, who I love these guys, and it's an interesting

business, and I care about American agriculture, but it's a pretty small business in terms of the broader U.S. economy, but it's politically sensitive enough than they have just how to put their thumbs on it in a way that, yeah, cost them maybe a little bit in the short term, but they can always go back to it, but imposes from really serious political costs in the United States, and they're getting really good at manipulating us that way. And the more we do this stuff, the more they're going to learn, the more they're going to take these lessons to heart, and the better they're going to get at it. So we don't normally do, uh, like article assignments or commissioning live on the podcast, but I don't know if you saw it. Uh, on one of the Sunday

shares, I think it was meet the press. Scott Bissent, talking from Kuala Lumpur, wherever, was asked about the soybean farmers. And he said, well, as you know, I too am a soybean farmer. And I'm being hit really hard by this. But I'm doing this for blah, blah, blah, blah. I want to know more about the fact that the first openly gay, billionaire secretary of the treasury is also a soybean farmer. And I think Kevin could do a wonderful piece somewhere in there profiling dissent on his days off, toiling the fields at his soybean farm. Rising at dawn with him, strolling through the fresh plowed furrows, the sweet scent of the earth rising up through your nose as you look at the adorable little green shoots,

coming out of the ground, stretching, stretching, stretching towards the sun. His gaze fixed off, picturing how this will look when the verdant field overflows with soybeans. I think Megan is making a pitch to write it herself. Who says AI copy is bad? She doesn't want to leave this to Kevin. Kevin, you better pay heed. Do we know where best in soybeans are, where he owns a farm? I have no idea.

It'd be awesome if it turned out was in Brazil. He does have some farmland. I mean, this is a true thing. I mean, how he would describe himself. I'm sure it would be the weirdest thing in the world from the makeup. Well, I mean, there's a lot of rich people, though, who like to get agricultural exemptions on their estates. They will have like some sheep or they'll plant a little bit of acreage and something.

There was a really funny example of the chain. I forget which island it was in Maine, where the rich people got really massive. when they changed the rules and they couldn't have enough sheep on the island to keep their agricultural exemption. It was, it was, like, something, I think it was something to do with the runoff of, you know, the excrement. But it's like, so I'm not sure that Scott Besson really deeply, you know, is deeply invested in the soybean industry, but it would be fun to find out. The New York Times did a wonderful story about, it's probably 10 years ago now, but where they were

running down the addresses of where farm subsidy checks go to. And there were like 493 in Manhattan. Yeah. Yeah. Kevin, you better pay heed because, you know, Hondo is the editor-in-chief. So if he suggests the story to you, you better call him Hondo and actually do it. Well, I've actually been on a soybean farm within recent memory, so I can run out there and do it. Just let me know where to go. Megan, last word on this to you, You know, we spent a long time a couple weeks ago talking about soybean farmers and how they were sort of getting the raw deal in these fights and potentially devastating effects, certainly in the short term, but now those are off. Trump has those have been stepped back and the Chinese have agreed to buy lots and lots of American soybeans. Isn't that in and of itself a win of at least some sort?

By curious coincidence, I had a cold a few weeks ago. Trust me, this story is going somewhere. And this caused a little tube that runs from your ear into your sinuses called your eustacean tube to seal itself shut. This happens to those of us who have not been blessed with large, meaty eustacean tubes. But the result is it's basically like if you've gotten stuck, you know, when you're on an air, airplane and your ears, you land and your ears get full. It's like that, but for two weeks. And I was just getting to the point where I was thinking, I really, I probably have to go to the doctor and see, like, and get some steroids, basically, to reduce the swelling so that,

because there's air trapped in there, right? The pressure is not equalizing between the inside and the outside. So your ear feels full. It hurts a little bit. And then I was sitting in a meeting yesterday discussing the tariffs and Trump's trip to Asia. And my ear popped. And I cannot even describe the relief. It's like suddenly, for the first time in two weeks, I could hear out of my right ear. I didn't feel that feeling of pressure. It was great. And that sweet relief felt like, for a moment, felt like it was almost worth two weeks of having to ask people to sit on my left side.

And that is how I feel about this Asia trip. that I told you it was going somewhere, is that, you know, we were really worried that he was going to trade Navidias, highest-end chips, in exchange for the soybeans. Magic beans, magic beans. Literally, that is a deal that is literally not worth a hill of beans. And he didn't do that.

At least he said he didn't do that. He mentioned to the press gaggle that probably couldn't run for a third term, Glad to hear it, Mr. President. Welcome to the knowledge that the rest of us have been enjoying for the last 10 years. And so in that sense, it was a little bit of a relief. He didn't screw anything up in a way that is terrifying. But also, that is not, just as my ear popping was not actually worth two weeks of annoyance and discomfort,

getting those little crumbs of relief, not worth, not worth the squeeze. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. Now streaming on Paramount Plus. It's the epic return of Mayor of Kingstown. Warden? You know who I am. Starring Academy Award nominee Jeremy Runner. I swear in these walls. Emmy Award winner Edie Falco.

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Two big things. Exactly. The new iPhone 17 Pro on TELUS' five-year rate plan price lock. Yep, it's the most powerful iPhone ever, plus more peace of mind with your bill over five years. This is big. Get the new iPhone 17 Pro at TELUS.com slash iPhone 17 Pro on select plans. Conditions and exclusions apply. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. We have a rather meaty, not worth your time today. There was an article in the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard student newspaper, about grade inflation at Harvard and a new study that showed that there was indeed significant grade inflation at Harvard. You'll have to bear with me for a second to sort of set this up and give you some of the quotes from Harvard students. Here's the lead from the Harvard Crimson.

Harvard's students pushed back forcefully against a new university report condemning grade inflation, arguing that it misrepresented their academic experience and would add pressure to an already demanding campus environment. The 25-page report released Monday by the Office of Undergraduate Education suggested that Harvard's grading system had become so lenient that it no longer meaningfully distinguished between students. It warned that current practices were, quote, failing to perform the key functions of grading, unquote, and were, quote, damaging the academic culture of the college. So that was, that's sort of the, the big picture. That's the report. That's how it was written up. But I have to share with you some of the reactions that the Harvard Crimson got from students about this. Sophie 29 graduate said the report felt dismissive of students' hard work and academic struggles. And this is a quote from Sophie. The whole entire day I was crying, she said. I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because

I felt like I try so hard in my classes and my grades aren't even the best, end quote. It felt soul-crushing, she added. Katia or Kada said stricter standards could take a serious toll on students' mental health. It makes me rethink my decision to come to the school. I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into the school. I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies now rather than being killed by them. And the final one I'll share is Zara, also 29 graduate, added that grading already felt harsh and raising standards further would only erode students' ability to enjoy their classes. I can't reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I'm so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the

papers. And because I know it's so harshly graded, actually I have lied. I have one more. This one from Peyton who said, what makes a Harvard student a Harvard student is their engagement in extracurriculars? Now we have to throw all that away and pursue just academics. I believe that attacks the very notion of what Harvard is. So feel free to react to any and all of that. But my question to you is, did you ever benefit from grade inflation? And I realize that we risk here because we're all Gen Xers. I risk setting up a discussion that feels like the, you know, walking to school backwards through the snow kind of recollections.

But the question is, did you ever benefit from grade inflation? Was there a specific class in which you got a higher grade than you deserved? or one in which you got a bad grade despite what you thought was your strong performance. And Kevin, I will start with you. You know, I had a really great English teacher in high school. And I remember turning in an essay to her one time that she was so displeased about that she refused to grade it. And she handed me back the paper with a note on it that said, this is the skeleton of what I hope one day will be a pretty good essay.

And, and I redid it. You know, I went to the University of Texas, which has a really good academic reputation right now. I don't know if it deserves it or not. It didn't have such a reputation when I was there. It was kind of a school you went to because it was in-state and relatively easy to get into. And I remember I had a statistics class in which one of the final exam questions was, if not literally this, something very close to this, you've got 10 marbles and a a hat and three of them are red what are the chances of pulling a red marble out of the hat three and ten

would be my guess um so i don't know if there was great inflation but there were certainly low standards uh in in some things in college and um a sort of meta point here though i have a little thing i do where i track how often the new york times mentions ivy league school admission standards versus how often it mentions the new york city public schools and my conclusion from this is that the people who read the New York Times care about Ivy League administration admission standards about 21 times as much as they care about what's going on in the New York City public schools. You know, the policymaking discussion is always dominated by people like us who mostly went to pretty good schools and often went to elite schools. I think we pay

way too much attention in this kind of stuff. I don't care about whiny little children at Harvard. Megan? I think I care about whiny little children in Harvard because eventually they will become adults, and they will, because they're at Harvard, they will go out and do things in the world, and it matters. And I will say, look, we all benefited from grade inflation because grade inflation started during Vietnam when teachers were trying to protect their male students from flunking out of college and getting drafted. Cs were way more common before the 70s. They were a normal grade in the 60s. To get a C was just to say, like, yeah, you did okay. Not great, not special, but okay.

And by the time I was in college getting a C was like, whoa, dude, what's going on here? That just did not prevent me from racking up a couple of D's, but I was a late bloomer. But I actually think that it matters, I mean, first of all, it matters that you have conceived of college as the world's hardest summer camp to get into. and that is not a good way to think about it. There are cheaper. If this is how you think of college, just stick them on a cruise ship for four years. Why bother with the classes at all?

And I will also say that I think it is really beneficial and that schools have really been failing kids for kind of understandable reasons, right? There is this feeling that you have to get into a good college, that in order to get into a good college, you have to do well in high school. We've turned elite kids into these little resume polishers at the age of eight. In New York City, and in Washington, D.C. now, you can literally look at parents who are getting their kids coached for their preschool admissions.

Because if you don't get into a good preschool, not going to get into a good kindergarten. And if you miss out on a good kindergarten, how are you going to get into the right primary school? And if you don't get into the right primary school, I mean, forget about Harvard, right? So that process, that's really bad. It is a bad way to raise children, and I think the net result of that is that there is then this incredible pressure on teachers to raise grades at all levels because the results feel catastrophic if you don't get those good grades. I got a lot of bad grades at school. It was not ideal. Hilariously, not so hilariously at the time when I got into college. I applied to 10 schools because my grades were really spotty. They had improved and I had good test scores and essays, but the grades were hit or miss. And so I applied to what was then a really unusual number of schools. I applied to 10 schools, and I had three safeties, all three of which rejected me, one right after the other. They were the first three things I got.

The safeties rejected you? Yeah, I think actually two of them waitlisted me. One of them rejected me. So now the McArdle family is in a full-blown panic. Panic, yeah. And then I got into Penn and Pomona. which were much better schools on the same day. It was a very strange experience,

but it was actually a good experience that, like, my parents never grade grubbed for me. I had a teacher who was genuinely unfair and genuinely gave me an incredibly unfair and grade that would have been really harmful to me in the first semester of my senior year. My parents were like, this is a good opportunity for you to learn

how to deal with authority. And eventually an administrator stepped in. It was an English teacher, and she was like, you are not giving Megan McArdle a, like, a C in your creative readiness. class. That is not happening at my school. Was she an English teacher or was she a teacher who was English and she was taking it out on the Irish? No, she was just an English teacher. I had I had unwisely made the mistake of making fun of her favorite poet, who I did not realize was her

favorite poet. And it had all gone downhill from there. I think they might actually have had a relationship in the 60s. It was not, it was not good. So anyway, like that experience, Very helpful. And in fact, my favorite teacher in college was a guy who was my creative writing professor. And the first class we had, it was great. He got us to write and exercise. It was just like 200 words from a particular point of view described something for me. And the first kid that we had to read them aloud. And the first kid who does, he just sort of leans back at his desk. He closes his eyes and he listens and then eventually an eye pops open and he says, it's very interesting, Mr. Smith. But where may I ask was the narrator? And this poor kid is like, well, you know, it was only 200 words, I didn't really have space. He just looks at me and says, oh, I see. We're one of the exquisites are we. Let's kill off all the characters in the first chapter and talk about moss for the rest of the book. And that was, this was a very good model for how he taught that class. He said, like, I don't know how to teach you to write, except that you will write things and I will tell you about all the things that are bad.

and then you will do fewer of those things, and eventually it will get better. And about a third of his students loved him, about two-thirds hated him, but he was totally formative for me and improved my writing so much. And I think that kids today, I don't, there are no teachers like that. That teacher could not enroll students. I've talked to people like Stephen Pinker about this, right, where these are incredibly famous and also really dynamic and interesting teachers. They can't get kids in their class if they're hard graders.

and that attitude, I think, is it really hurts because you're going to go out in the real world and let me tell you, the ability to have someone absolutely lacerate the work of your heart that you have labored on mightily. The best. It's the best. And to just roll with that and be like, oh, well, okay, I guess that didn't work out back to the drawing board.

That is going to stand you in better stead than any extracurricular activity that you did at Harvard. Who is the poet you made fun of? May Sarton. I said, I didn't even make fun of her that much. I said it reminded me of Anne of Green Gables. That was not the right thing to say about May Sarton in front of my professor who loved her and had written a book about her. Jonah, did you earn every one of the A's that contributed to your 4.0 GPA? Yeah, so is that the question you're asking, passive aggressively, because you know the answer to this,

is I got rejected? No, Honda. I would never, I would never. be passive aggressive with you you're from Wisconsin you would lose your citizenship if you weren't passive aggressive I was rejected from every college I applied to was a massive underachiever my high school ran on the trimester system and all you needed to do to make honor roll for a trimester was have a great point average above 85% and I am the only student of my entire cohort who never broke 85% for a single trimester my entire time I was just so mad at my friend Michael Walden, who the fall of our senior year, because he was worried about

college, actually made the honor roll. And I was like, you left me behind. You never leave a man behind. And it was a pretty terrible experience in lots of ways. Were you just, if I could just jump, were you just not interested in classes? Were you doing other stuff? I did really, really well in some classes. The classes you cared about. I cared about. And, um, and I clung to to the side of the floating piece of wreckage for dear life in various math things and things I didn't care about. And I went to a very bad private school, by which I mean, there was always a debate about whether it was the worst school on the A list or the best school on the B list.

So in other words, if you got kicked out of or couldn't get into a really good school, you went to Dwight Prep, which was then on the Upper East side, and you had to be invited back every year. And I always was one of the last students to get to the letter to say, you can come back next year. And I will say that some of it was a useful experience for me.

I didn't get any A's I didn't deserve. I got a lot of passing grades I may not have deserved. Right? It was like, we got to keep this guy around because there's something about him, I like. And but one of the things that

was great training for like the G-File and a lot of the way I do stuff is I did a vast amount of my homework on the bus ride to school that morning. You did your homework? A vast amount of the homework that I did, I did on the bus ride to school that morning. And I learned how to write fast.

I learned how to like write in such a way as to make the teacher enjoy reading what I was writing, even if it didn't check every box about what the question was, which is actually a pretty useful skill for, like, Blue Book kind of things. I completely blew it on my college essay because I knew, I mean, I had good test scores, and I had great teacher recommendations, weirdly enough, but I decided to write my college essay on the moral and ethical, a swiftian essay on the moral and ethical ramifications

of the invention of Saran Wrap. And it went over like a lead balloon. I thought it was great. And so I ended up being an affirmative action baby and going to an all-woman's college where literally 10% of the freshman class, 10% of the male student body, because my freshman year was the first truly co-ed year. So just shy of 10% of the male student body at Goucher College came from my high school, three guys.

And about 7% were Korean-American. named Derek. And it was a very strange place to go to school. But I gave my lectures to my daughter about all of this were, were Megan McArdle-esque about insurance and uncertainty. And I just kept saying, trust me, you do not want to be the kid everyone is making fun of because you didn't get into any of the schools you want to get into or get into any school at all. You're doing the minimum needs to be more than the minimum that I did. Because you're going to want choices. And so just do the work.

And that's all we ever did about my daughter, about, you know, trying to do this bespoke plan their life ahead of them kind of thing. And she got mad at us because all of her peers started getting SATs tutors in like 10th grade and all this kind of stuff. And would yell at us about how come you didn't get me an SAT tutor? And last thing is we, this dilemma about. entry, about preschools and stuff. We applied, because when I had one kid, we looked at a lot of the private schools in D.C. If we had more kids, probably would have figured out a way to do public school.

And one of the, are you the best private, you know, K through 12 or K through 6 or K through 8, whatever, school in the city, they said, okay, you did your interview, you did the tour, we have your application. The only thing that we're missing is the standardized tests. And my daughter was three and a half, four. And my wife was like, I am not going to a school that requires standardized tests for kids who can't read yet. You know, what is this? Like how well you throw a ball at another kid?

I mean, like, I don't, you know, like, we're not doing this. And so we just didn't follow through on the application. But there's a lot of that out there. A lot of that. I once heard a traitor who was from Long Island and knew to all of this. He had taken his daughter to apply to a New York City preschool. And he said, do you know what they asked us? They asked us, what are her aspirations?

We're trying to get her to, we're trying to get a toilet train. That's our aspiration. Thank you all for giving me so many things to look forward to you, by the way. This is all in your near-furt. future. So I was as a college student at DePaul University in Greencastle, Indiana, was a double major in political science and mass communications. I loved my political science major. I love parts of my mass communications major, the rhetoric classes and a couple of the broadcast journalism classes. But being a double major, I had to take a seminar in each of my senior semesters. So I took

political science, my fall semester, which was, I think it was like, race, ethnicity, and the politics of American national identity, basically all of the things that we're talking about right now. That was my senior seminar there. And then the only seminar that was available to me for my MassCom major was in second semester. There was one choice and one choice only, and it was gender and communications taught by a Marxist professor whom I had had earlier. We did not get along, in part because she was a Marxist. And I did not want to take that class.

So I did everything I possibly could to get out of that as my senior seminar second semester. I went to the administration. I offered to do independent study. I offered to do some combination of an internship. Everything you could imagine that I could do to get out of the class, I tried to do to get out of the class. And I was rejected at every turn. So I ended up having to take this class, gender and communications from this Marxist professor. And we showed up on the first day of class.

And I don't know, there are eight or ten of us. And she went around the room and said, you know, why did you enroll in this class and what are your expectations? And I was pretty confident at the time she was asking that question of the class that she knew about everything I had done to avoid taking the class. So I was not going to BS her and my classmates about the level of enthusiasm I had for the class. So when it came to me, I said, I don't think this should be a class. I'm not enthusiastic at all about having you again as a professor. And I wish that I didn't have to be here. And she wasn't happy.

I ended up writing a thesis. She was her basic views on the genders were that all of the differences between the genders were non-biological. this was all imposed by society and what have you. And so I wrote a seminar paper sort of on the importance of a housewife and where that fit in society and, you know, the many good things that came out of, you know, mothers focusing on mothering obviously meant to sort of get her goat. I ended up getting a C in the class, which was passing, but it wasn't a very hard class. And there was another student in the class who, I won't go in detail about him, but he showed up, I think, three times all semester, wrote a thesis that very much catered to her point of view, but otherwise basically didn't participate in the class who got an A. So I finished my undergraduate education experience with the lowest grade that I've ever gotten C in gender in communications. Anyway, that's it.

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