Katie Benner on Meritocracy, Race, and American Education Reform

28:03But in some ways, I think they're seen as like the holdover of, yeah, the sort of presidents going to Harvard and Yale and everything era. I mean, if you like a newcomer, right, like just look at like nobody working for a newcomer right now, I think, went to an Ivy League school. I like recruited somebody. the guy who started it yeah just the guy who started it but it's yeah and i have a network from it you know but like it's people i know you know what i mean it's just like i i think harvard excels at being like a network of people who all stay in the mix like want to do stuff it's like i'd network with people from my high school if they were in the mix like they're not you know what i mean it's just sort of like the thing about going to harvard is just like there's so many people who are just like hustling they're trying to be at the top of their career like and then it's a self-reinforcing network because the best way to hire somebody is to sort of have the real dope from somebody you know it's like you want somebody to say like oh like is this person like a good worker what's their deal like if you know what they're about so them being in your network is is super valuable to vetting like it's not a conspiracy it's like how human beings work you know you know i have this theory my anna dalvi theory of the elite like the elites are like the easiest to fool.

29:17Like they're the easiest people in the world to fool because all you have to do is walk in with somebody who's already a member and then you're accepted. And trust me when I say that's not how it works in like the blue collar part of the country where I grew up. You can walk in to a party with somebody, but they're still going to want to ask you a lot of questions for who you are, why you should be there, why they shouldn't kick you out, why they should trust you. Like there's a lot. Whereas it's like if you walk in on the arm of the right person and it's the you know anadolphe you you're just accepted with almost with so with with far fewer questions in some ways it's the breakdown of the elite or it's like that the elite isn't isn't so rooted and that it's like any one rich person could make you fantastically wealthy they're like whatever i'll gamble a little bit you know be positive some here and so like because harvard Yale, MIT, Stanford are such powerful signifiers.

30:11People are like, well, if you have that signifier that they've ascribed so much meaning to it, that if you are a con artist, it takes a real long time to figure it out. Right. Right. But it's so interwoven into institutions beyond just... Okay. You work at the New York Times. That is a newsroom that is full of Ivy Leaguers. right yeah definitely it is just that newsroom is overflowing with ivy leaguers it's crazy it's totally crazy kitty kitty you're on the board of bowden i but but you know that that's what's so interesting and like back to your book like calm's the only one he's got the real like not top uc chip on his shoulder here you know i have no chip though like we're all in the same place that's the funny thing maybe not about that oh yeah sorry there are chips there are chips but That's not even what I ever cared about because you know what?

31:02Because I'm white. There are so many others. Yeah. Because I'm white and I was upper middle class and I knew things and I'm Jewish. I knew things were going to be fine. They were going to be fine. And handsome. He always leaves that off the list. I feel like. Yeah. This is a funny thing about Tom because everybody talks about how handsome he is. And I'm like, well, it's funny. He carries himself as somebody who is not, which I think is like very disarming and interesting people but also exceedingly weird at some point like it's one thing for it to be a charming tick but it's another thing when it just feels like dysmorphia like face yeah yeah exactly where we get into it now this conversation has taken a horrible turn we're working on tom's uh dating profile right now this is um i i can't endorse the the progression of this conversation um uh So Katie, the students that you were writing about here, they, I'm assuming, saw this elite system.

32:02And it was why the promise of TM Landry was so incredible to them. Because if you're on the outside, everything looks like an amazing opportunity. And if this school was just getting these students into LSU, which is a decent enough school, it would have seemed like a failure to a lot of them. The interesting thing, and I think that this is like a moment where you have to think about like, what does life look like through a white middle class lens? So for the earliest students of TM Landry, Mike was getting them into places like University of Louisiana, some HBCUs. And these were schools that, can I tell you, these kids were thrilled to go to.

32:42Right. But it's interesting the reception he gets when he gets a student into an Ivy League school, the amount of interest he gets from outside of his community, the amount of interest he gets from parents who, unlike early students, actually know more about college and know more about the ways that elite colleges open doors. That is a money-making opportunity that Mike really, really takes advantage of. And so that's, you see the growth of TM Landry as he understands that top tier universities convey something that is really important that for some of the families he has to teach them about. Like there are some families who do not believe that going to any college is a failure.

33:25And there are some families that don't believe that you failed if you don't go to college. You know what I mean? He almost has to like indoctrinate them into this worldview that unless you've gone to an elite school and have a certain kind of job, your life is not very worthwhile, which It's just such a specific worldview. It is not the worldview of the majority of Americans, by the way. But it is one we're familiar with because we work in the media. We covered technology. We covered Wall Street. We cover elite people. I think a core problem with society is just my grandmother thought – idealized the local judge in York County, Pennsylvania.

34:02You know, it's like that was like if I think about who she was building up to me is sort of like the great man that I should aspire to be. It was like sort of a community figure, someone, you know, wise and respectful, like locally. And I think over time, as I grew up, there was just much more like, oh, you know, and I'm competitive, so maybe I'm not representative. But there is just sort of a national like that you need to aspire on sort of a national level that the it's not that these schools are that you can't get in. Right. It's stories of how you could get in. And so there is a sort of dark side to this.

34:37Like anybody can go to the top in that like it creates such an intense focus on on the very top that it undermines being the best in sort of your community, which, again, becomes a subtle argument for not having these schools be meritocratic, not letting people in from all and just sort of saying, oh, well, it's just the elite self-perpetuating. the best you can do is like, you know, win your local community race. That's not the world I'm advocating for, but it is sort of a consequence of, you know, that evolution. It's interesting. Eric and I did an interview with a very fancy, very posh. Erica Green, you're a co-author, sorry.

35:16I'm Erica. She's Erica. It's very, very fancy, posh, very brilliant British podcast person. And when we were talking at the outcomes of some of the students, I mentioned that there was one student who was very, very happy that while he had not ultimately gone to Wall Street, he didn't take a Wall Street internship. And he ended up at home in Louisiana with his daughter. And he started a power washing business with his brother and was very, I mean, all of them, he's probably in many ways, he has a great sense of self and he's doing financially well. The man said, wow, so you're really advocating that failure is okay.

35:59And I found it fascinating that in his world, being at home, owning a power washing business, the brother you love, taking care of the daughter you love, and having a life that you really enjoy is a failure. I thought, so that's how far, like I said, when we think of what success is or what people need to do to have a good life, it's like so there's a terrible story because i'm like wow that is a huge huge chasm that that was his reflex and it also follows i think oh thomas pickety would say it follows an economic um gap that we have seen perpetuated by you know a loss of ways to have a middle class life without a college degree right like this is where people are going to me and be like nobody wants to work in a shoelace factory in america i'm not advocating for that i'm just saying that we see this scramble for college we mentioned this in the book we can't get into it too much but like this number of colleges that exist in 2026 is basically the number of colleges that existed in like 1920 okay 2020 1920 it's basically the same number of schools the number who want to go to college in 1920 versus 2020 very very different because the new schools are provided by like community colleges but like also probably like the death of like the like the the rural america like the farm life but people probably if you wanted to be able to afford a car and a house payment you didn't have to go to college for most of the history of this country and then starting in the 90s, you did.

37:49Because all of the jobs that allow you to have a house, a child, and a car go away. So now it's like you either, there's only one avenue to house, child, car, job, and it is through the same number of doors that have existed forever. Or you get caught up in this maw of like part-time jobs, working in the service industry, financial insecurity, maybe you don't have health care, et cetera. How binary is that? Like there's no middle ground. And so when you, and so we've started to also think of not having a college educated life as failure in part because the economic consequences have become so dire, but it's, but we can't educate, we can't put more people through the college system.

38:34Like this is one of the reasons why the middle class has shrunk so much. And so like colleges become do or die hunger games. Do you want to be in the middle class or do you want to be in like the, oh my God, wow. That's really right. And which is why I get so frustrated when you see this argument about, you know, the amount of debt that students have to take in order to go to college now being this like onerous thing that's going to, you know, burden them for the rest of their life, which is true. I mean, like this is incredibly difficult financially for most of these people. It was a long time, 20 years.

39:05But like people, that's like lucky. Like there are people that will probably take longer than that now. And, you know, you're gainfully employed, you know, working among Ivy leaguers. So like you made it, but, um, like, you know, the, the, the, the, the knock is like, you're taking on a whole bunch of debt to get like some degree in like a bullshit liberal arts, you know, degree, like, you know, where Harry Potter studies and, and you have nothing left, uh, you know, to offer after all of that. And it's like, yeah, but what alternative do these people have? If you're going to say going to college is a waste of your time and you're going to be stuck in debt for the next decades of your life, you've not provided an alternative of any sort of like respectable middle-class life that they can have and so what do you want these people to do and it to me it seems like it also perpetuates the obsession with college which is something that the elites you know i mean that continues i mean you look at someone like bill ackman who seems like his entire political theory is based around the fact that he's really pissed off that his daughter went to i don't know which ivy league and like became super woke and and there's like a huge amount of bitterness from people about like the social impact of like what colleges do.

40:12Like just like the more time that gets spent people thinking about college, the more importance it gains and the more like significance it has in our political life. Yeah. And when you say these people, that includes like me and Eric very much. Like when I applied to college, I grew up in a blue collar home with very little money. I was a good student. I don't know. I got good grades, but at the same time, the competition to get into college in 1994 and 1995 was night and day versus trying to get into college in 2025. The number of people applying for spots at Bowdoin is now exponentially more our acceptance.

40:502008 was again, we were getting. It was starting to really heat up when Eric was applying, which is what, this is also Eric's way of saying he's much smarter than I am. I'm not smarter. I did every extracurricular you could do in Macon, Georgia. I was the head of the Obama campaign for high school students in Megan, Georgia. Yeah, I can go. It's becoming a much harder go. You know, the idea of an elite school having a double digit acceptance rate, which happened all the time in the 90s. Very, very good schools had double digit acceptance rates. Part of the reason is because, especially through, you know, it was waning in the 80s and 90s.

41:26But there had been a world where you didn't have to go to college to have a middle class life. If I were trying to get into college today, growing up in the same exact circumstances I grew up in, wow. I can't even imagine how much anxiety I would feel looking around like a rusted out industrial town saying to myself. The real next elite. I was reading my three-month-old, your book, prepping for this interview, getting her education going. I was about to say so that she can be prepared for an even more rigorous college admissions process. Right, exactly. But I think the, I'm always saying to my wife, like, you want to be elite.

42:05So she doesn't even, I want her to be, you know, a musician. You know, it's like you, you know, it's like you, you raised Gracie Abrams or whatever. That'll look good on her preschool application, which you should probably be filling out soon. What? No. They said that'll look good on her preschool application. My hope is that she's successful enough that you're escaping some of the credentialism rat race. Like, isn't that the point of being truly successful that you're like, we have the credentials. Like, what does she need credentials for? The credentials matter so much more to people who don't have them.

42:32So you have this like weird world where for folks like the kids in this book and for people over the country, they're like, I just need that credential and that will give me security. And then there's a swath of people who are like, I already have them, but still want it for other reasons, right? That aren't survival, but they have a lot of social capital on there. And then that's when you get Varsity Blues. Right. Everyone using what it is they have, what they have. Varsity Blue is paying people to get them on fake teams to get recruited. There are people in my life that I wonder if they were Varsity Blue.

43:06I mean, I know when people are really upset about affirmative action and I'm like, okay, fine. But there is a way in which other forms of admissions processes, looking at you, legacy admissions, sometimes athletics, really, really does save spots for students who might not have hit that meritocratic bar. Right. They fell in between the gap, right? It's like they're still related to rich people, but they didn't have the exact legacy that would have allowed them to get into this school. And so they don't have the grit story to tell, but they also don't have the legacy thing. And so they're weirdly in the middle and suddenly they apply to USC as a kicker or something like that.

43:49forward like okay so the golf team if jd vance becomes president and like succeeds i mean the funny thing about the conservatives is like they don't know how they talk about building building building but they don't know how to build any institutions right it's like university of university of austin university of austin yeah exactly like who yeah let's see but um so it's like are they able to reform the elite institutions in america and then if a democrat wins like do we just go back to Obama era sort of aspirational meritocracy or how do you see this playing out depending on you know a few thousand American voters and how they how they swing and therefore how we set the cultural and political power of you know the next 10 years and I want to add on to Eric's question like how does like the war that the Trump administration has waged on institutions, you know, elite institutions during his term?

44:48Like, how has that affected all of this as well? I think the first question is really interesting, because the impact it's had, I understand there were free speech on campus issues before Trump became president in 2016, even that there were people who are very worried about a groupthink around progressive ideas. And, you know, I was just reading Jill Lepore's book, she's a professor at Harvard, and she was like, you would be lying if you said that there wasn't a lot of social critique around people who did not hold specific sets of liberal ideas and the crimson you know i like follow the crimson over the years and there was definitely a period where i was like terrifyingly like boring and sort of you know woke and like but you just felt like i just felt like an out of touch alum like i guess like oh the times change and i uh but then but none of the kids listen up your coverage gets much better And it feels like, oh, this is the virum place sort of I remember.

45:40So there was that period. The Trump administration has brought to bear over how you're allowed to think in higher ed is that they will put you in jail. Right. Instead of just letting the woke period play out, which it would have burned off on its own. It was burning off on its own. But now it's like we will arrest you and we might prosecute you. And we're going to use the Title VI process, Title IX, Title III, all the titles to bring investigations to bear, reflustrating investigations, and we'll cut off your federal funding if you stray from a certain set of ideals. So I think that the degree to which we're seeing ideas in the academy flow or not flow has certainly, the Trump administration has a big impact.

46:24And the reason why that's important is because a lot of the ideas that come out of the academy, me, even the ones that we think of as the most absurd in their moment, right, whether that is liberalism, whether that is postmodernism, whether that is certain kinds of gender, you know, gender study in their moment in the 50s, 70s, 80s might seem absurd. They become really important underpinnings for how we think as a society, whether we want them to or not. They always do flow. It's like, Tom, in The Devil Wears Prada. I knew you were going there. I knew you were going there. Yep. That ugly ass sweater that you're wearing was like a decision that was made by Vogue.

47:03Okay, thank you. I was like, which color was it? We do not want this for our universities because it is such a compass for where we're going to go. And we have seen historically that you can roll back progressive ideas much faster than people expected. And again, the Reconstruction period, which is understudied, I think, in American history, you have huge gains made for black people after slavery is abolished and after the Civil War. You have many, many black people elected to federal office, to Congress. You have black people. The establishment of the public school system came during Reconstruction.

47:42The establishment of public schools, especially all over the South. You have a push for more equal education. You have a push for desegregation. You have colleges like Oberlin, you know, accepting black students. They're one of the earliest. They're all sorts of things that are flourishing in the wake of the Civil War, right? Which is in like the late 1860s. And then you have this sort of like golden couple decades. And then you have the rise of Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, militarized white supremacy, and a very, very repressive Supreme Court. coinciding with an extremely socially conservative academy that believes strongly in things like eugenics.

48:27So, you know, these things can move pretty quickly. So that's a long-winded way of saying, depending on who wins the next election, can we see even, forget the next election, just in the next three years, can we see the way we think of rights for immigrants, black people, gay people, women, insider, outsider, who is us when we think of who is an And that doesn't even include the fact that I think and people used to think that America should be the global meritocratic elite, not the American meritocratic elite. And they were denying, perhaps most importantly, like all the every talented person all over the globe to come to America.

49:08And, you know, great things here. And what was that, forward U.S. or whatever? Like Mark Zuckerberg once had a pro-immigration nonprofit. dedicated right well we'll see how the midterms go it could come back or at least the next election but but a point behind your point is just that they even if they haven't built institutions you know we're not getting the next intersectionality or there's lots of ideas that the academy could have had that they're probably afraid to have and that could have lasting well i also like wonder what like what social how social media fits into all of this too because like all of these ideas the the the terminology like the kookiness of the way people discuss social issues on college campuses, it's existed for decades, right?

49:50I mean, like Katie, you went to school in like the mid to late nineties, like all this political correctness that has been rebranded as wokeism has been here before. None of it's very new, but social media has allowed it to kind of break containment where you have random people in, you know, maybe never went to college in whatever parts of the country getting extremely angry about, you know, trans rights or heteronormativity or, I mean, pick whatever terminology that like they're pissed off about because Tucker Carlson told them to be mad about it. Like, I think the fact that it can kind of exist in this very accessible information system, it's kind of allowed the debates that happen on college campuses to become things that people get super fucking mad about, you know, because they're taken so out of context, right?

50:34So like a fierce debate over the way that commerce and feminism work in, you know, a book like Pamela or like, you know, Tom Jones, you know, the rise of 18th century novels, as people are debating fiercely some postmodern ideals about Marxism and feminism, they make sense in the context of those academic environments, right? They make sense in the context of that specific classroom where you're are basically just trying almost to train your mind to be agile around difficult concepts and to see a different worldview in a narrow setting with a narrow set of goals yes does it sound absolutely absurd outside of that context yes and did it have a way to migrate outside of that context before social media no it most certainly did not i went to school in Maine and trust me when i say the conversations that i had in random lecture halls and leave not only did they not i mean obviously the things we're talking about super important but like i do i do wonder like how much smartphones do or do not destroy our brains the shift to like video some of the like stuff around how technology technology is changing how people think might end up being the larger force like obviously there's this sort of i don't know the social force ebb and flow of you know how much racism is accepted who are the elites but like if everybody stops reading like that's gonna be it's gonna be a dark force yeah i mean think about someone like charlie kirk like his whole shtick was going on to college campuses and basically exposing old people to the kinds of things that like young people are talking about on college campus and it made them so mad like there's there's so much salience to like these kinds of conversations and like that is the core of definitely the conservative or like reactionary movement is like, how can we make people really mad about the things that people were talking about in college?

52:31And Charlie Kirk, who's kind of like a young, you know, social media savvy, but also, you know, he's conservative and it's, you know, traditional family values. He's a perfect, you know, perfect, like a vessel for, for all of that. It is amazing to me how much, you know, during the pandemic, there was sort of like the Peter Thiel's of the world saying the thing you can't say, it's probably true and it's like people like us were like what could that be besides racism right like the thing and now we have like elon musk being like apartheid was you know terrible for society and you're coming after the whites right i mean literally yeah there was another big one where somebody retweeted like you know just a list of like rhodesia obviously i'm not i'm not necessarily a scholar in all the societies that were once white ruled and then were no longer but None of us are colonialism experts.

53:23You have to know them. But not even dog whistle. But literally today, like Homeland Security and the Department of Labor are tweeting this sort of like, you know, clearly echoing sort of Nazism. Like what is the homeland for the United States? Like I don't understand what a heritage American is. It's totally incoherent. I don't know. That's a rant. But Katie, take from whatever you can from that. Like where is this headed? Like besides that people feel really emboldened, I guess, at least to be honest with what they must have been feeling before. And I was naive enough to think like surely racism, if not solved, like I understood that people were like, you know, we would fight about like the pipeline problem and say, well, there just aren't enough talented candidates.

54:07Like we can't get anybody like the fight. I took the fight to be sincerely on those terms rather than, no, we just like are sort of we are pretty much racist or, you know, we. Yeah, I don't know. Like what? I guess people harbored much darker views than I realized growing up. Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting to kind of see the id of the country kind of take over. Because again, whether you're talking about the institutions, whether you're talking about systems, it is just people. And so we've had a long time where there was a consensus view, whether people liked it or not, but consensus view based on the law, based on legal changes, that there was going to be some sort of racial equality.

54:55once that is dismantled especially once the legal underpinnings for that are dismantled voting rights act civil rights act that we will see a big fast change and we're already seeing it so i think you're making a very correct observation um about the world we're entering even though that sounds very depressing i will say again these systems are just people our society is just people and people have different opinions, but everybody, it's a mass of people, but only really truly of that mass, a small percentage really want to change things. So we are watching a small percentage of people make big changes.

55:36There's going to be a small percentage of people as there always has been who are willing to push back against that, right? So we had, you know, slavery, you had abolitionists, you had people create the under, I don't even know how the Underground Railroad could be created today because people can't keep secrets and they want to put everything on the internet. But like, you know, you had a small number of people proportionally who were like, we need to make a serious change. And they fought for it and fought for and fought for it. Many of them died before they saw their work really change the world.

56:05But it did change the world. Right. And then we saw it again in the Abolishim Jim Crow. We've seen it as people have fought for the rights of Native Americans. We have seen it in, you know, like all sorts of venues where there's been this huge regression. So it's impossible for me to believe that in this vast country, everybody is going to roll over and say, I guess we just do immigrants anymore. And one thing that does make me optimistic, you know, this Renee Good murder, you know, is obviously terrible and, you know, looms very large in my heart and mind. And I mean, I do think in another world, there would be many, many more of those people before it became so visible.

56:49But in a world of video and social media, at once I feel like we're more miserable. We're made miserable because we're forced to face reality of terrible situations. But I think one thing that gives me hope is that at least that it takes one. I mean, and obviously there are other people who've been killed by ice, but, you know, it doesn't take as many of these horrific things for them to reach mass visibility in the way that, you know, obviously during segregation, as you talk about Miracle Children, like, you know, you need a free time. writers and you need all this concerted effort to really build, like, make these things visible.

57:24Whereas right now, I guess everybody's a social media influencer. So there's almost like an effort, anything horrible is being surfaced to our society. And I think that honestly, it makes for depressing living, but I do wonder if it will protect us more than it hurts us. I mean, if somebody had told me pre-social media that Gaza would become a cause that young people all over the world in the United States would care about, you know, the Palestinian rights movement has been around robustly since the 70s. And on college campuses specifically, like it was a product very much of undergrads mostly kind of like.

58:09Absolutely. UCLA. Like University of San Francisco, Berkeley. And yet what mainstreamed it was probably to Eric's point, watching videos of children burning to death, starving people, people being shot at as they try to get food. Like those are very, very searing images. Yeah. Can we maybe like close this in talking about Silicon Valley again a bit? Because you spent how many years were you covering tech when you were in San Francisco? It was like five, four years? Five, I think. five maybe no and then you got like that you got the fuck out of dodge you were like done with san francisco you're like i'm out i'm gone um my formative tech you know the early days kate katie and i worked across from each other at the information then she went to bloomberg view i was at bloomberg tom joined us at the information um so we all covered tech together you'd been at fortune writing about business generally before that was it it wasn't as pure tech right before No, it was more Wall Street.

59:11Right. Yeah, it was like finance, I thought. Yeah. Then you covered Apple for The New York Times and you covered the Justice Department. So now that you know that, listener, you can go back and, oh, the legal dismantling point was very – The New York Times Justice Department reporter was worried about this. But anyway, what do you think about where Silicon Valley sits in the kind of college conversation? And Eric mentioned Peter Thiel earlier. Obviously, the thing that made him famous for a bit was encouraging people to drop out of college. And at a surface level is this anti-college mentality here that the time that you spend in a university reduces your creativity and your ability to create the kind of startups that would actually disrupt the world.

59:54I've made my point clear, and I think you guys probably agree, that the elite institutions run most of Silicon Valley. There is not truly a huge amount of disruption in that system around here. But, yeah, I mean, looking at someone who's been in D.C., which is the ultimate, you know, lanyard elite, you know, part of the country. Like, what do you what do you sort of see looking at this industry now and like the way it's dealing with college and all of these issues? It's interesting. You know, I've always wondered when Peter Till said that, how much of the reason he said that was because he hated the direction that higher ed had taken in terms of social issues.

1:00:29You know, he was famously one of the co-founders of Stanford's more conservative publication. He felt like the college was prey to wokeism before that term was popular. And so, yes, when he was telling people not to bother with college, it was certainly because he was like, you have a lot of energy and creativity and you can work for 20 hours a day when you're 19. But also there was something about college that I think he had always been uncomfortable with. And now that there's this bigger crackdown happening, I do wonder if he would still see college as not valuable or if he would change his mind on that.

1:01:08He's still doing the Teal Fellows. I don't know. I don't think he's about to become pro-college. Fair. Fair. But would he be more likely to hire a student who'd gone to Yale now maybe? I don't know. Like if that kid hadn't been talking about trans rights. I don't know. Tech has changed so much in terms of how DC sees it. Under the Obama administration, it was seen as this force for good. After the 2016 election, it was seen as a force for good. They all went and worked. All the Obama people went and worked. It's like flax for tech companies. Yes. But what's interesting now is that there's almost like a very unvarnished view of the technology industry under this administration, which is a very transactional administration.

1:01:50Now the tech industry is seen as a source of funds, capital, for the administration. So for the industry, and we've seen which executives - Pay for the East Wing expansion. It's no longer like, are you good or are you evil? It's, do you financially help this group of people? Right. Literally what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook just appointed a new president who is the wife of a Republican. Dina Powell. She's like a total creature of DC. Yeah. Yes, she is. She was like, was it Dick Army? I forgot which congressman. She was like one of his admins. I mean, she's been there forever. The conservatives would say what?

1:02:33You know, Sheryl Sandberg, you know, very cozy with the Democrats. You know, it's like it's one thing for the other, you know. And one of the differences, though, is that while the Democrats or Republicans before them may have sought the power, money and influence of an industry, they tried not to talk about it so openly. You know, they did it the old school way. I actually don't know if this is better or worse. I won't say that. It's definitely worse because it's just like, you know, it accelerates it. You know, I'm at Iglesias head signings somebody sent me, which is just like I haven't actually pulled up.

1:03:08This seems to me like a pretty profound difference from contemporary society. These days, I feel like the general vibe, even perhaps especially in elite circles, is that the worst thing you can be is a sucker. You don't want to break the law or directly steal from or physically injure other people. But you are seen as holding some kind of obligation to yourself and your family to exploit every angle available. Not just because you want to gratify yourself, but because everyone is doing it. And I do as a member of the elite. I think that is one of the most corrosive things happening right now. I think most elites still scoff at the classless lawbreaking of the Trump people.

1:03:44But I do think there's this pressure of like, man, get yours. Like, because it's sort of like, it's like, I don't know, crypto ad part of it. You know, just who's winning, you know, in Silicon Valley. Like, it's, yeah, it's a crazy, don't want to be a sucker. And I think that's going to be a corrosive force to the elites. And I think as somebody with a microphone, you know, I want to hold against that. I'm not encouraging our listeners to have that view and I'm not going to embrace that view. And, you know, I think there is the moral capacity to resist the view, but it's definitely one that looms large.

1:04:17And I literally I think I said on one of our team calls that I feel like the nihilism of 2025 made life so hard as a reporter. You know, it's like if your job is to call balls and strikes and view some meaning some of the time, it's like if everyone's nihilistic, like that's a it's a dark world to write no pine. But I do think honestly, in some ways, the Trump administration becoming so horrifying is a return to morality. because you're like, oh, no, I believe in things. This is terrible. And then once you're activating sort of that moral alarm bell, I think it's easier to be like, oh, I'm operating on other things than just winning some game.

1:04:59So I don't know. My hope is the horribleness of 2026 awakens people to some degree. It doesn't allow for this sort of slippage into just, you don't want to be a sucker. You need to get yours and graft everything. Which I guess sort of brings you back to your book. right? I mean, that's the ultimate graft, right? It's someone who recognized the system as it was, exploited it to benefit obviously himself, but he was maybe arguing the people that went to his school obviously was abusive in the way he did it. But it's sort of like a proto-Trumpian or Trump era mentality of like, there is a real problem in the way the system works, but I could get mine by engineering something.

1:05:38I mean, his hero is Denzel Washington in training day. I will do anything you want me to do.

1:05:49I haven't gotten to that far. I'm, you know, not that far. But that's I'm excited to get to that line. That's I'm fascinating. In what way he like gives us what's he expound on that? He says there are people, the people he heroizes and, you know, he loves the art of war. He loves the art of war. I feel like the people who love the art of war didn't read the art of war. The actual art of war is, you know, he, he, he talks to the students and says, you're warriors in a war against black people and we're going to fight and win. You know, he could see how his messages were somehow compelling to people who did feel like it was unfair, but then he'd be like, you know, he loves Denzel Washington training day.

1:06:34Like he loves, um, uh, the principal in New Jersey. Um, why am I blanking on his name? Oh, the stand and deliver guy. yeah stand uh you know who who joe clark who no joe clark who would walk around with a baseball bat you know like not stand and deliver not the inspiration these are played by lean on me lean on me oh sorry yeah okay yeah so it's like he he he heroizes like the principal who walked around the halls of his high school with a baseball bat um kicking students out you know so like he has a very specific vision of power you know what i love about these people is they never fucking finish the story it's just like denzel washington yeah denzel washington's character dies in training alfonso harris is dead and you know what happened to um joe clark he ended up getting pushed out and he became a prison guard at a juvenile detention center where he was investigated for torturing students it's like you know who my personal hero is by the way icarus because that guy flew really high that guy was so good at flying high and i'm just like that's me i want to fly high too don't tell me what happens but he's cool katie great to have you on the show i missed the dead cat days this was a lot of fun and the new york times needs to cut everybody loose you know it's the world of influencers now but that means let them do what they want not fire people right that's yeah read read yeah not gonna let them keep their jobs and all freelancers it's all just yeah miracle children race education and a true story of false promises by katie benner who we've been talking to and her co-author erica green also the new york times wonderful book important to read especially important now as we've all all morals uh who are the elites how colleges work are up for debate i guess.

1:08:29So understand your history. And I think, you know, obviously, this is about once, you know, school, but I think the book is clearly about the broader story of how American elite education has changed over the decades. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you for tuning into this week's episode of the podcast. If you're new here, please like it, subscribe. It really helps out the channel. Listen in for new episodes every week, wherever you get your podcasts.