MIT Dethrones Princeton as America’s Top School & The Viral Debate Over Bringing Iced Coffee to Job Interviews

0:28This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the best college in the United States is no longer Princeton. Then Peloton is out on cycling and all in on running. It's Wednesday, September 23rd. Let's ride.

0:48This is what happens when you hand your kid a Rubik's Cube instead of an iPad. A six-year-old girl in China just set the new women's world record for solving a Rubik's Cube, averaging under 4.5 seconds over five solves. It's not just talent, but a lot of hard work. Gigi, as she's nicknamed, practices every day for two to three hours and has mastered over 1 ,300 Rubik's Cube solving algorithms. Congrats to Gigi, but I am worried about her likelihood of developing carpal tunnel. I obviously went through a Rubik's Cube phase growing up. My fastest was sub one minute, which I was very proud of, but clearly not on Gigi's level.

1:28This also set up a debate amongst your friends, though, about what age you peak at certain disciplines in life. There's not a lot that you can reach the summit at age six, but chess is up there. Esports are up there. I guess speedcubing as well. It also got us thinking about what you peak at later in life because we're past six years old. Experience definitely helps in things like law and medicine. I'd toss crosswords out there, too, just an accumulation of knowledge. So your best days are still ahead of you, Neil. Thanks, Toby. And now a word from our sponsor, Roku Ads Manager. You know how adding salt to caramel makes a good thing even better?

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2:43That's advertising.roku.com slash MBD. Artificial intelligence is getting a rebrand. Not from a horde of McKinsey consultants, but straight from the mouth of the president. Trump told the United Nations General Assembly in New York yesterday that the U.S. government will start calling AI super intelligence, a.k.a. SI, arguing the artificial branding makes the technology sound fake. He also posted polls on social media asking if people preferred the term superior intelligence. They did not. He followed that up by dismissing the AI doomsday warning, saying America won't stifle something, quote, bigger than the Industrial Revolution.

3:22That came an hour after UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez kicked off the day by painting an ominous picture of what could go wrong with AI, saying life and death decisions must never be surrendered to machines. Killer robots must have no place in our future. The clash over AI was just one part of a combative 37-minute speech for Trump that also went on a meandering geopolitical tour. Trump called for the complete economic isolation of Iran and threatened to, quote, annihilate the country if it doesn't reach a deal, though he predicted one would come soon. And all eyes are looking ahead to tomorrow when Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the White House.

3:58On the menu are tariffs, rare earths, Iran, Taiwan, and, of course, AI, sorry, SI. Neil, a lot going on, but let's start back at super intelligence. It's a little unclear what Trump's motivations are here. Why do you think he's pushing for this rebrand? Because he is an AI bull, as we say, and the brand of artificial intelligence is so bad. We're seeing pushback against data centers all over the country. We're seeing pushback now against the AI safety implications. He understands that this is that AI has a marketing problem. And so Trump always changes the name of things. And hopefully, you know, he thinks he will get his way.

4:37He said in this particular speech, I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will bigger than the industrial revolution. We will only encourage superintelligence. We're going to encourage it, not rein it in. The issue with calling it superintelligence is that already has a very specific meaning within the broader AI community. It's very closely associated with this philosopher, Nick Bostrom. He described superintelligence as an intellect that exceeds human performance across all cognitive domains. Superintelligence is the apex of this field. it's not just another name for artificial intelligence so that is why a lot of people within uh ai are saying that trump is trying to borrow the prestige of a term that already carries a lot of weight within the ai community and that's why he's going about it probably not going to catch on though because it is already something that carries another meaning that isn't just basic artificial intelligence you know who does hope it catches on is the country of slovenia And here's why.

5:36So, you know how Anguilla is a small island in the Caribbean. They've made tons of money, about half of their total budget from the.ai extension. Anytime any website registers with a.ai at the end, they have to pay Anguilla. And now it's basically giving this country so many riches, 50 percent of their national budget. The extension SI refers to Slovenia. So if companies and people registering domains now start having the extension SI want to end their website with SI, then they'll have to pay Slovenia. So Slovenia is looking there probably in the building itself listening to Trump saying, let's rebrand it to SI and hoping, please, please, please do that because then they'll rake in a lot of money.

6:19And then just a quick rundown of other things that Trump talked about in his speech yesterday. something when it comes to Iran that has been floated is a diesel export ban from the U.S. and Trump had initially been against it. But yesterday he actually said he supports restricting U.S. diesel exports, which is a big shift for the administration. The idea behind a export ban is that the U.S. currently sells some of their diesel fuel abroad. If you restrict those exports, then more diesel stays inside the U.S., potentially increasing domestic supply and bringing prices down in the short term. Now, a lot of people push back against that because when you restrict it from the global market, that actually ends up sending price hikes throughout the entire globe, which will eventually make their way back to the United States.

7:06But it just shows how tight international supply is right now that an export ban could be floated as something that is popular now that wasn't popular even just a few days and weeks ago. Because prices are at a record high. And then finally, we have a denouement to the Greenland saga that has captured the better part of this year. Remember, President Trump wanted to take over Greenland, which is a territory of Denmark. But yesterday, Trump, Greenland and Denmark came to the table in very United Nations fashion, signed a deal that said that the U.S. will not actually take over Greenland. But the deal does pave the way for a larger U.S.

7:45military presence on the big island. So we do have a wrap up to the Greenland drama. It looks like everyone is pretty happy. Denmark keeps Greenland, but the U.S. has a greater military presence, will have a greater military presence on Greenland, which I think is very important given all of the strategic ambitions on the Arctic from people like China and Russia. Call it revenge of the nerds. Princeton has been dethroned as the number one college in the United States. According to the annual U.S. News and World Report ranking, MIT has taken over the top spot from Princeton after 15 years of the Tigers leading the list.

8:25But the changing of the guard may have to do more with a tweak in methodology than anything else. U.S. News introduced a new metric evaluating graduates' earnings by majors that MIT particularly excels at. It's part of an ongoing shift by the magazine to better account for how students do after graduating from a certain institution than their high school resume heading in, reflecting greater hesitation about the return on investment of going to college in the first place. Coming in third after MIT and Princeton is Harvard, then Yale, that stings, then Caltech and Stanford tied for fifth. The highest ranking public school was a tie between UCLA and UC Berkeley at 20, while Williams College retained its title as the best national liberal arts college.

9:04Whether or not this matters at all has come under scrutiny in recent years, with a growing chorus of critics bashing the rankings as a popularity contest and a cash grab by U.S. News. Princeton's own president about five years ago called the college rankings a game and a, quote, slightly daft obsession that does harm when college's parents or students take it too seriously. I don't think he's changed his mind after this latest report. The issue is, unfortunately, U.S. News has a big audience. A lot of people pay attention to their rankings. Their website attracts over 100 million users annually.

9:37And if you go back, a survey from 2024 found 58 % of college-bound high school seniors considered rankings to some degree. So that's over half of people coming into college saying, yeah, I do look at these rankings. And yeah, U.S. News has come under fire because an investigation by the New York Times last year found that University of Maine at Augusta paid$15 ,000 to market three U.S. News badges on its website. And this was not top college in the world. It's number 61 online bachelor's program for veterans, like very specific badges that you can just toss on your website so you have that validation.

10:13So anytime these rankings come out, and especially if there's a shift at the top, it renews the debate around US news. It doesn't look like it's going anywhere anytime soon. But especially because I'm throwing these rankings out. University of Maryland dropped seven spots to 49th place. So yeah, these are definitely not real. But it does come at a time when there's a broader reckoning around the value of going to college and whether you should go in the first place, whether you're paying up to$100 ,000 per year on these things. But yesterday, a VC firm, one of the biggest, introduced an alternative to college.

10:49We're seeing more and more of these. Andreessen Horowitz invested$35 million in a San Francisco-based two-year alternative to traditional college. They want to recruit kids age 16 to 22 to what they're calling the Horowitz Andreessen Academy. I guess they switched up the names as some sort of agreement. They're working with a bunch of corporate partners in the tech world like Anthropic, Meta, Google, and NVIDIA. And they're saying, look, at the CEOs of the biggest AI companies, they all dropped out of college. They didn't find that college was valuable to them. AI is changing everything about education.

11:24We want to give you an AI native education where AI starts from the ground up. It infuses everything that you do. So it's a very interesting alternative to the traditional four-year college that we're seeing. Yeah, they're giving students$5 ,000 for travel and research and then$50 ,000 in compute credits per student. So absolutely. You used to get dining credits. Right, exactly. That's exactly what I was thinking about. And some of the example courses that they floated are AI inference engineering, brand and visual identity development, and the geometry of luck. So it's very much in that Silicon Valley alternative college route.

12:00Housing is not provided or paid for to, which is interesting. So maybe there's some side hustles involved here. But the reason why A16Z wants to do this is because they want venture capital is an access game. You want access to the best founders. And if they feel like they can cultivate it through this university, then obviously they're going to have a leg up on the competition. So they'll invest in some of the people coming out of this cause. But it did have some people saying, where does it end? Do you need some sort of credentials in today's day and age? Taylor Lorenz, a internet writer said, I'm a huge proponent of homeschooling and using tech for education, but at some point a child has to receive some accreditation, right?

12:38Or are we just funneling kids straight from AI school into A16Z lectures to YC to et cetera? So she was basically saying, this is the tech line that you can go about, but what about just normal people? Do you need to have a resume that shows you went to college still? Is that still a part of the work culture here in America. So it opens up a Pandora's box of what does college mean right now? Do you actually need to go to University of Maryland or can you go to a two-year thing where you get$50 ,000 AI credits and employers look at that the same way? Or do you not even care about employers because you're gonna go start a company?

13:14All right, moving on. Peloton made its name in cycling, but it's chasing after runners now. Yesterday, the struggling at-home fitness company released its cheapest ever treadmill as it tries to ride the running wave to revive its anemic sales. The new TreadFlex will cost$2 ,195, about a thousand bucks cheaper than its current treadmill lineup, saving customers money but also space thanks to its ability to fold upright when not in use. What is not shrinking is the at-home running market, which Peloton CEO Peter Stern sees as a big opportunity for the company, set to grow 40 % to$5.6 billion by 2030.

13:51Peloton is known for its at-home bikes, but after peaking a few years ago, stationary bikes and spin classes have been stuck in neutral. It's all about running now as major marathons and run clubs see record participation. The issue with this new strategy is the fact that running is pretty much free. You can always lace them up and just go outside instead of spending over two grand on a budget treadmill option. But Peloton is hoping that packing their treadmill with features like gait analysis that measures your vertical oscillation and stride length to help increase efficiency will convince people to shell out.

14:24Neil, Peloton needed a growth story. Has it found it in running? Well, it does make sense to do this. Being an exercise company without leaning into running is like being a fast food company, not investing in fries. Like treadmills remain the most popular piece of exercise equipment. And Peloton thinks this is its next growth act. If you haven't been paying attention to Peloton stock recently, it is down 97 % from its peak, 40 % since this new CEO came on in January, 2025. So it's a lot smaller. However, it is far more financially healthy than it used to be. It's been repairing its balance sheet.

15:01It's been cutting costs. It's now back to profitability. So it is smaller, a healthier company. However, it wants to grow again. And it's looking to various avenues to do that. It wants to get into the B2B business, sell to hotels and gym chains. And then it also thinks that running has this cultural moment that it really wants to tap into. I think the only way that this really succeeds is if they are really packed with technology because, again, running is the most fundamentally simple thing you can do in the world. You do not need equipment. You need a pair of shoes. Some people don't even wear shoes.

15:34Just go outside and run. So I think that this gait analysis thing where some people are going to get really into the data of can I gain efficiency by being better with my stride length. There's going to be data nerds who want that. There's also this feature called reruns, which takes your outdoor runs that you log in the Peloton app and syncs their inclines to the treadmill. That's a very cool feature, in my opinion, where if you want to train for the first half of the New York City Marathon, see what the elevation gains are going to be like. You can log that into your treadmill and it will adjust elevation based on what it's going on outside.

16:08That kind of stuff will attract a very hardcore audience. And then I actually think that they're capitalizing on another trend here, which is high rocks, which we've spoken about. Their most expensive treadmill has a sled mode, which you can turn on basically 300 pounds of resistance and push. I mean, it sounds miserable, but pretend like you're pushing a sled, moving the slats very slowly. They think that the high rocks crowd is going to be into that. So I think that they are positioning themselves well for the hardcore runners, not necessarily even people like you and me who don't have space.

16:42But I see the vision here. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with a debate about iced coffee right after this. Toby, what do you do with a great product, but your brand can't seem to connect with customers? Beg? No, don't beg, but do check out Rising Stars. It's a docuseries that follows small business owners as they create their businesses, face real challenges, and scale their brands with the help of Amazon ads. Like crowned skin, they couldn't connect with customers in men's grooming until sponsored products on Amazon ads helped them reach the right audiences. Now they're doing over$500 ,000 in monthly revenue.

17:19Watch now at advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. That's advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. Neil, you ever stay in one of those hotels where you sleep in a human-sized birdcage? No. Well, don't. It's real sad. Sounds like you could use business preferences from Hotels.com. It helps travelers find the right hotel faster by remembering their go-to work trip requirements. Travelers set their preferences once, including fully refundable stays, Wi-Fi, breakfast, gym access, and more. Then future business trip searches automatically surface matching hotels. Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every work stay at Hotels.com slash Morning Brew.

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18:41That's nm.com. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A debate is raging online about iced coffee, but not the appropriate time to switch over to hot. The controversy concerns whether it's acceptable to bring iced coffee into a job interview. And it's got Gen Z fighting Gen X with us millennials unsure who to side with. It all started last week when a recruiter named Caitlin posted a TikTok video mentioning she sees Gen Z candidates pulling up to job interviews with an iced coffee. As someone with 16 years of experience, mostly placing applicants in super buttoned up Fortune 500 companies, she explained it comes across as unprofessional.

19:21When you show up with an iced coffee or an iced latte, it says that the interview is just a stop on your list of errands for the day, she says. It looks like you went to Target. You went to Starbucks. Now you're stopping by for your interview. and then you're on to the next thing. It looks a little too casual to me. This was the match that started a fire with everyone weighing in on a seemingly trivial issue. Some on the hiring end supported her take, arguing it reflects an unserious attitude. Others took a different tack, wondering why anyone would want to bring an iced coffee to an interview in the first place with the potential for condensation dripping down wet hands and spillage.

19:56And yet others, mostly young people, turned the table, saying they never want to work for a company so square They judge you for having an iced coffee during an interview. Toby, what in the Dunkin' Donuts is going on here? I have no idea where I fall on this debate because it would be so annoying to have someone squirreling a beverage with ice in it. And the condensation piece actually is the thing that really screams unprofessionalism. If you're going to go shake someone's hand and your hand is wet, it's just a bad way to start. But then I absolutely see that young people are saying this is just another arbitrary kind of standard of professionalism that is being applied to us that doesn't matter at all.

20:35What does drinking an iced coffee have to do with my ability to complete the job that you're hiring for? So I absolutely see it both ways. It's also funny too, that there is a generational divide between iced coffee and hot coffee. It's distinctly a Gen Z thing to like iced coffee. Only 43 % of Gen Z prefers hot coffee. That's compared with 89 % of adults over 60. So there's a subgenerational divide going on within the larger debate around if it's professional to show up with iced coffee. Here's my question. Is iced coffee the X factor here? Like if you bring in a hot coffee or something that's not going to drip on a wooden table or something that doesn't make your hand cold or there's more of a lid on it, is like iced coffee the reason that everyone got so upset and hot and bothered about this particular thing because this is the choice of beverage.

21:23But if someone brings in another type of beverage, like, yeah, a hot drink or tea or something, Does that just kind of negate the whole premise because of the less opportunity for spillage, condensation, wet hands, all of those logistical concerns? Absolutely. I think if you show up with a hot coffee, you're like, this guy's got it going on. And again, it speaks to that generational divide that more older people prefer hot coffee there. Zooming out here, though, it actually goes back to the story we were speaking about previously about college and what is going on with how it's preparing students for today.

21:57Cornell actually released this big report yesterday about how they don't think that they're preparing students very well for the workforce. They said that employers question students' ability to handle workplace demands, solve problems where there's no clearly defined answer, recover from setbacks. There's probably a wider debate here going on about Gen Z just being prepared in general for life after school. The hot, the iced coffee component is just the jumping off point to a much bigger conversation here. So I don't think that you can look as much into it or as least into it as you want. But there is something to be said about Gen Z, not necessarily knowing the norms of workplace culture and that causing friction against their older bosses.

22:41And they don't care about it. They're saying, you don't let me have an iced coffee in my interview. Don't let me bring a drink into wherever I'm going. Like, what am I doing here? I don't want to work for you. You're so square. So that is their perspective. I think where I come down on this, because I'm sure everyone wants to know is I think if I was hiring, if I was doing an in-person interview and someone came in with an iced coffee, like I would probably think a little. They would be dinged down the rankings just a little. What if I brought you one, though? Then you go up. Well, that'd be nice.

23:12I'd be caffeinated and very energetic for the particular interview. The final twist in all of this is I haven't conducted and probably a lot of you haven't conducted an in-person interview since COVID began. So that's another variable here, whether it's remote. Can you have an iced coffee when you are doing an interview over Zoom? We'll never know. We'll never know. Everyone actually. The debate rages on. Yeah. All right. Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Calci is asking federal regulators for permission to offer leverage on prediction markets, potentially bringing one of Wall Street's favorite tools to the event contract business.

23:47right now if you want to make a thousand dollar bet on the odyssey to win best picture you need a thousand dollars but with a margin traders can put down a fraction of that and borrow the rest allowing them to make much bigger bets with less capital calci says that it could be useful for long-term markets where traders otherwise have money tied up for months or years critics say uh do not let people borrow money to bet on the average temperature in pairs for november To be fair, this is very much directed at Wall Street. Margin would initially be limited to certain well-capitalized accounts with sports, culture, and mentioned markets excluded.

24:23But Neil, sounds like a bit of a dangerous idea. Yeah, I'm going to get all levered up to bet on who's going to get eliminated in the first episode of Survivor. No, this is a lot more buttoned up than just letting you or me bet on culture and sports on CalShe. You know, CalShe wants to be a real Wall Street company. You know, just raised money at a$22 billion valuation last month, which was double what it raised the valuation or last raised in December. It wants to draw in a lot of professionals, investors like brokerages and hedge funds to invest on its platform to use particularly as a hedge against particular outcomes like they would on the traditional derivative markets.

25:04And it thinks that by offering margin, you know, it's a crazy headline to see, oh, get margin, get leverage to wager on prediction markets. A little more narrow than that. It really wants to become the next Wall Street. And this is the next step to do that. This was the year we all chose Texas. Ella Langley's heartbreak country tune, Choosing Texas, just became the longest running number one hit of all time, reaching 23 consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. With her feet, Langley beat out the Queen of Christmas, Mariah Carey, whose bop All I Want for Christmas Is You held the previous record at 22 weeks.