Today on the podcast, we’re joined by an old friend, New York Times correspondent Katie Benner.We look back on our days covering tech together at The Information and our old podcast Dead Cat, before diving into her new book, Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises.
The book examines a school reform experiment that claimed a 100 percent college acceptance rate, and what happened when the pressure to prove success overtook reality. Benner’s reporting traces how race, politics, and institutional incentives shaped decisions that ultimately left students paying the price.
We talk about how incentives shape outcomes, why well intentioned systems often fail the people they are meant to serve, and what this story reveals about meritocracy, power, and institutional decision making in America. This conversation is not about ideology. It is about how systems behave when results matter more than reality.
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Today on the podcast, we're joined by an old friend, New
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York Times correspondent Katie Benner.
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We look back on our old days covering tech together at The
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Information, our old podcast Dead Cat, and dive into her new
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book, Miracle Children, Race, education, and a true story of
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false promises. And on the ground account of how
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race and politics shape who America's schools are actually
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built to serve. That conversation is coming up
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right now. This is the Newcomer podcast.
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I'm very excited for today's episode.
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It's a reunion, not even of sorts.
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It's a literal reunion. It's it's dead cat.
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This is what we did during the pandemic.
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Before literally everybody had a podcast, you know, we were like,
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oh, we used to have a podcast. It's it's our friend Katie
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Benner. We were all working at the
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Information at one point. And in in introing her book.
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I want to start off with this memory that I just struck me
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today thinking about this was I actually remember it was like 10
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PM, 11:00 PM on the West Coast. And I remember getting a message
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from Katie and I was like, man, it is really late where you are
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in DC and you were like, I have a story that's coming out in
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like a couple of hours and I can't sleep.
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And it's like, I, I want to be awake when it goes live.
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And I was like, oh, man, what's the story?
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And it turned out that story was this piece, this investigation
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about this charter school in Louisiana that kicked off a
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whole thing that they ended up becoming this book that has just
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finally come out. Whatever, four years later from
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from when you wrote the article. Is that right?
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More because we took two years. We had to hit pause for two
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years because of the pandemic and January 6th and then all the
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reporting that happened after that.
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Yeah, so when did the article come out?
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So the article actually came out at the end of 2018, I believe.
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And then we signed on to write the book in 2019 and had just
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started and we were writing follow-ups about an FBI
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investigation into this school, which I'll tell you more about
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in a minute. But and then the pandemic
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happens and Erica, my writing partner, was covering education.
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So she had to then cover every single school in the country as
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they were closing down. I mean, she was hit with a wave
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of work that was so insane and I thought, well, there's no way
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she can really dig into more follow up stories and dig into
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the reporting for this book, you know, so, and we're all.
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So I thought, I'll there's probably research I can do.
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And then the Justice Department began to fall apart pretty
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quickly in that fall leading up to January 6th and all of the
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insanity after. So then I was also sidelined.
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So from 2020 through basically the 2022, you know, we, we
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really picked up again in the summer of 22.
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So it it's taken us about three years to write the book.
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So we're, we're, we're talking about miracle children, race,
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education and a true story of false promises.
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And I think so we, we started off with the from the scoop at
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the New York Times to all the things in the world that
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intervene. But I think what's interesting
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reading the book, honestly, I mean, the world is sort of
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served the thesis of the book in, you know, in dark ways.
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Or it's like, obviously if you have this sort of like super,
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super relevant topic, which is, you know, the great lengths that
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people will go to to get into elite education.
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Now, now our society is being reshaped from the the other end
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of sort of the I don't know, I don't know, uncharitably the,
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you know, white supremacist effort to re reclaim the elite,
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elite education for home grown Americans as we're seeing
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anyway. So there are lots of big themes
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in the book, this book, which is what I'm enjoying.
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But why don't you just tell tell sort of the core story and then
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that sort of allows us to get into the big, the big topics of
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the book? Sure, absolutely.
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So there was a small private school in Louisiana called TM
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Landry. And it it's it's shtick was that
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it got black students into the most elite universities in the
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country, most of the Ivy Leagues, and it had this 100%
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college acceptance rate. As we all know, any private
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school that says it has 100% college acceptance rate and they
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can get students into elite colleges.
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There are plenty of them in this world.
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Horace Mann Crossroads in LA, you know, bajillion of them in
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Washington DC. These are really sought after
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high schools. This one seemed to be uniquely
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serving kids who are black in Louisiana who didn't.
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The feeder school for YEAH under underprivileged people in my in
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Louisiana. Exactly.
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But to the Ivy Leagues. And So what ended up and they
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there were these viral videos of students who when they got in
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the celebrations that they would have with their peers, they were
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so, so filled with joy. They were extraordinary.
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Anyway, we got a tip that in fact, the school was, was was
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lying and that the students themselves have been trading in
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racial stereotypes of hardship to get in.
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That they, you know, while they were most of them were from
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working class families, very few of them were impoverished.
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They hadn't grown up with drug addicted parents, they hadn't
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experienced homelessness and things like that.
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But these were the kinds of stories that were going into
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their applications to try to convince predominantly white
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admissions offices to let them into these spaces and that the
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school itself, that the founders of the school were really,
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really emotionally, verbally and in some cases physically violent
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toward the students to kind of keep them in.
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Line like criminally right? They've been charged at 1:00.
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Point well, they've they've been investigated and and one of the
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founders Mike Landry was charged and then ultimately the charge
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he plead guilty to lesser charges.
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So I mean, there is there. There was something going on
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there. And my colleague Erica Green and
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I, who was covering education at the time, I was covering the
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Justice Department, we decided that it was, even though it was
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a small school, the ideas behind it were so big that we wanted to
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really better understand how this had happened.
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And so we read a story about it for The New York Times, which
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severely impaired the school itself, even though it didn't
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shut it down. And then we ended up turning it
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into a book. And the larger story that you're
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trying to tell here beyond just this school and like the ways it
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treated its students or like the ways that they kind of game the
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system emotionally or otherwise, to get their students into
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school, like what was the bigger story you're trying to tell
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here? Well, there were a few.
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You know, One was this historic kind of sweeping history of
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segregated education and the role that race plays in
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education and the role education plays an opportunity.
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So, you know, we go way back in history, but when the Founding
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Fathers say education is what makes you a citizen, they really
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meant it. Especially in a democracy, in
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order to vote, to understand your rights, to fight for your
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rights, to use the court system, education is so essential.
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And it's really the difference between having power and not
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having power in America. No matter what era you're in,
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what year you're in, it really doesn't matter.
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That has remained true for the hundreds of years America has
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existed. And what what for all his
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faults, Mike Landry, the guy, you know, founds the school,
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makes the point, you know, he makes a lot of compelling
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points, I guess, because that's how he won everybody over.
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But he's sort of like, oh, they, you know, the elites are willing
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to let, you know, minority children in through sports, but
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they're not really interested in letting them in through this
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sort of like the permanent resource, which is, you know,
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learning to sort of think and, and getting in through your
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academics. Exactly which has historic
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analogs right? Like, there was a reason why not
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just black students, but many other minorities in this
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country, places like Harvard, places like Yale, spent so much
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of their history. These are schools that were
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founded, you know, in Harvard's case, before America was
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founded. And they spent basically up
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until 1960 fighting very, very hard to keep out black students,
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to keep out Jewish students, to keep out, you know, Native
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American students and Asian students because they had an
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understanding that they were a gateway to power.
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And they also had a, you know, eugenics, for example, was
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really the heart and soul of of the academic and intellectual
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underpinnings of eugenics grew out of Harvard and Harvard
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Medical School. So these were institutions that
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until very recently had a beyond conservative bias towards who
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should have power. And it was not any of the groups
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I just mentioned. They they talk about like
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accepting, I forget it was Harvard or Princeton where
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you're like the for the alumni standard is like, as long as we
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think you'll pass like you, we'll let you in.
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You know, we can get through the school work at all.
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You know, you can hang out with the other like real meritocrats.
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You know that we're starting to let in here.
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And there were so many things that we're startling to
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understand about not just like I said, one of the themes is a
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sweep of segregation education and white exists.
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Another one is kind of the role that Ivy League universities
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have played in terms of gatekeeping power.
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And so many of the mechanisms we think of as like neat race blind
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admissions, holistic admissions, all the things that came after
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affirmative action and admissions were actually created
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at the turn of the 20th century to keep power in the very, very
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cloistered communities of America's elite.
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So yes, this was a time. It's like the turn of the
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century before World War One. You, you have lots of Jewish
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immigrants coming into the country.
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They believe in education and they want to get ahead.
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Columbia University is accepting more of them than others.
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Because somebody immigrated to New York City and you have
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schools like Yale and Harvard really freaking out.
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They're like, this is what we don't want.
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We don't want to be overrun by Jewish students.
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This will ruin society. So instead of relying on test
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scores, which, you know, you had a lot of Jewish students really
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acing these tests, they, they created a holistic look at a
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student. So what if you're good at, what
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if you're good at athletics? What if you're just a really
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good citizen? What if you bring other
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qualities where you would just get along well with the other
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boys? What if there were all these
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things that they could do so that you could take this Jewish
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student with perfect test scores and not accept him?
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So you could take a student who had gone to Choate or Phillips
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Exeter, who'd gotten straight CS, and say, but he will add to
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this community in ways that are ineffable but important.
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It's really a story of how people contort themselves to
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systems. So you have that holistic
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process. And so then Landry is like, oh,
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people love this idea of grit. What if we can really make grit
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something people can understand in terms of, you know, the
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African American experience and the type of grit that you expect
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this sort of minority student out of Louisiana to have.
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And that's where it's like, oh, we will, we will sell you the
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grit the same way you know, your prep school, you know, kid is,
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is trying to show it the. Grit, you want to, you know, I
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don't think he was. He's a really complicated figure
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because some of the things that he does, you know, when he's
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accused of hitting children, when he's arrested, these things
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are I I truly believe you children should not be ruined in
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that way. However, as one of the students
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said, Mike is really hard to dismiss out of hand because he
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diagnosis correctly so many things about society.
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He has such a a Spidey sense for what people's like desires are
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underneath what they're saying. So when he encounters Ivy League
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admissions officials, he's like, OK, these are people who ran
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extremely socially conservative institutions and in just a
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matter of 50 years have tried to undo hundreds of years of of
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this like cloistered ultra elite system.
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These are the tools they have, right?
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It's holistic process. These are the things they seem
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to want. It was not hard for him to
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figure out ways to give them those things and the students
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that he had applied to their schools.
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Yeah, I, I want to take a, a step back to talk about
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meritocracy or meritocrats because this is like a text
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show, right? And that's like still one of
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the, you know, like major currencies in the valley is like
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this belief in the meritocracy and how that is like the only
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real way for people of, of, of skill and, and intelligence and
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capability to like rise up in the world here.
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What's like, as you were investigating or, or researching
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for this book, like, can you talk to me about like the
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history of meritocracy and the role that it played with the Ivs
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and like creating AI Have my opinions on it.
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But I'm, I'm curious like what you kind of realized as you were
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looking into like the role of meritocracy and, and the Ivs
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'cause it's like a 20th century phenomenon, right?
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Yeah, this is all the 20th century.
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This is all pretty recent history.
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It's there. There's a an extraordinary New
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Yorker article from the early 60s, nineteen 60s where the
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writer, forgetting the woman's name, she shadows the Yale
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admissions department. And these are people who they,
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they, when they're speaking to her, they are not saying things
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that they think are controversial or things that
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should be hidden or things you only say behind closed doors.
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So they're talking about meritocracy, and they don't
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believe in meritocracy as a concept in the way we would
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today. You know, this idea that you
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take the people with the best grades.
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The quote from the head of admissions is if we only took
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people who did well on test scores, we wouldn't.
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We would lose all these presidents, future presidents.
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We would lose future heads of industry.
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We can't just take people because they do well on their
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tests. We have to take people because
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they have a certain kind of background.
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Like this idea of meritocracy was considered somewhat insane
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because they were like, if we take people who, who get in on
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merit, we're going to take in just a bajillion Jewish students
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is basically the fear. And keep in mind this is also
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when Yale, they measured every, it was all men.
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Of course, you know, all these schools were all male.
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They measured every quote. They called them boys.
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Every boy their freshman year gets measured and it was the
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year after they started. You know, it was in the years
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after they started becoming more meritocratic, IE admitting
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students who weren't necessarily, as they called it,
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but pale Male and Yale, that the student body as the average
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height started to go down. And the the head of admissions
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really bemoans this in the interview and just is so sad
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that the students are getting shorter because they're not big,
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tall, kind of waspy white guys 'cause.
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They're letting in the Jews, they're letting in the like, you
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know, the, the, the, the Mal, not, not malnourished.
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It's clear they're. Well, fed Jewish, let's fly,
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yeah? The Jews are bringing down the
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hype. It's like all these Wasps are
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being. Particular facts I feel like our
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like our biographies need to be flagged to all these very
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difficult. He's also very two Jews, so we
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can as are you. This is like a highly Jewish and
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Jewish inflected podcast. It's interesting.
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I'm like, I guess I went to Harvard in the the brief
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meritocratic window. I'm just I'd say all this only
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to explain that meritocracy has gone through a lot of
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iterations. No, no, no, I could dig it.
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The well, what do you I mean to, to get to a core question of the
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day. It feels like people are
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mourning sort of the no bless oblige.
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You know, it's sort of like people in some ways.
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I mean the Trump people, obviously, it's all sort of
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incoherent. It's like the Ivy League people
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don't represent them, but they sort of want to.
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They miss sort of the white elites, like, I don't know, what
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do you make of the elements in our society that sort of want to
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bring that back, even though they don't seem to know, I
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guess, like which white elites they're really like talking
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about. There are a lot of people who
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now like fall under the umbrella of whiteness.
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So we're seeing that fight play out on the far right.
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It's like our Jewish people white, you know, there's some
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people who say yes, some people say no, you know, does this
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include Catholics? Like, you know, there's the the
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idea of whiteness is really contested right now.
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But you're right, there is this belief that if we only go back
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to this past where we could better predict who would run
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things and whose ideas would win, and we had a less contested
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world, things would be better. And so, yes, we rejected
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meritocracy when it created more diversity.
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When we got more diversity, then we embraced meritocracy again
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because we figured it would end diversity.
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So it's like we hated meritocracy when we thought it
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would, you know, and elitism. And then we embraced meritocracy
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when we wanted to end diversity, you know?
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So the idea of meritocracy is a useful tool that you can bend to
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almost any ideology. Right.
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And it's like very woven into, you know, you, you cover DC like
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the, the the culture there is very much like influenced by
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meritocracy. And you have presidents like
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Clinton and Obama who were not of the manner born, but are kind
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of prime examples of maritocratic achievement.
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And they sort of get plucked from their you.
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Know Obama goes to Columbia and Harvard Law School and feels
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very of those institutions. I mean, you know, he's an
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outsider when he comes in, but then by the time I'm, you know,
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going to business feels like he's like typifies sort of the
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what the Ivy League is, which is, you know, I, I don't know.
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Right. And it and it ends up upholding
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the system too, right. I mean, part of the theory
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behind meritocracy is that you can pluck these people from
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their, you know, economic obscurity and then train them to
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be able to support the system that otherwise keeps their
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brothers and sisters and family down.
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But they can kind of like be existing within this system and
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and propagate it or or prop it up.
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Your true belief? Give us a non arch version.
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What it was your actual view? Oh, I 100% believe that, yeah.
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Do you not think that's the case, that that's like a huge
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component of meritocracy is to sort of take certain people
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that. Takes the best out of their.
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Community, I mean, I think it it, it reduces revolution, it
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reduces radicalism. Like people that otherwise would
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be angry about their their their lot in life.
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A. Relief valve A release valve.
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Yeah, yeah. It's like it's steam control,
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you know, it's like you have this rest of population of of an
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underclass, racial or economic. And if you just pick enough of
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them out of it and put them in these institutions that have for
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hundreds of years been like keeping in the system in in its
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current place, it kind of keeps things a little bit more stable.
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Now I think that's a very controversial way of thinking
00:18:45
about things. No, I was going to say there's a
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lot of scholars out there, including Imani Perry.
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She was at Princeton, but now she, I think she is at Harvard
00:18:54
too. Who who talked about this in
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terms of American exceptional exceptionalism and then racial
00:19:02
exceptionalism, that there is a release valve element.
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You need some people to succeed, you know, in the world where no
00:19:10
one succeeds. And then you get and you then.
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We've been diagnosed part of our problem as like the bourgeoisie,
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you know, you need they need to be able to strive and hit sort
00:19:21
of their class ambitions. But in some ways the Trump thing
00:19:25
is like by letting in, you know, non new people into the striver
00:19:30
class, you're denying the existing striver class or
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meritocratic or however were euphemistically calling this
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like you're denying them spots. And so it creates resentment
00:19:40
from the Stephen Miller's of the world that it's like, I should
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have been treated as, you know, I'm a genius instead of like
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laughed at. You know what?
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I'm not capturing it totally. But yeah, I get that you need to
00:19:51
deliver like elites in a society.
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They're elite function. And if you don't, they get
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really resentful and they say I should be an elite and like this
00:19:59
society isn't doing it. And therefore I'm going to like
00:20:01
try and destroy the society. But that's just like, that just
00:20:04
seems like human nature. It doesn't seem like that
00:20:05
cynical. It's like if people feel like
00:20:07
they're not living up to their expectations, they're going to
00:20:10
get mad and 'cause you all sorts of trouble.
00:20:12
Like any functioning society needs to solve the problem of
00:20:16
like delivering people to what they think they can.
00:20:19
You know, you know their their natural capacity at the same
00:20:23
time while finding you know, new people to bring in into that I
00:20:25
don't know. Yeah, we've seen labour
00:20:27
uprisings obviously that speak to exactly to that.
00:20:30
We've seen, you know, you saw the general strike happen on
00:20:33
college campuses across the country in after Kent State, not
00:20:37
only protesting the Vietnam War, but being like, you know, like
00:20:41
we deserve. There's a if enough people feel
00:20:44
they deserve better, they will rise up.
00:20:47
Also, I just wanted to say, Tom, I think that it's so interesting
00:20:49
you bring up Clinton and Obama. I mean, there's there is a
00:20:53
historic argument to be made that they are outliers in terms
00:20:56
of the academic acuity of our presidents.
00:20:59
And I say like we have the founding fathers and we always
00:21:02
remember them. But the people we don't remember
00:21:05
other presidents that kind of fall between, you know, Chester
00:21:09
Arthur and probably like Calvin Coolidge, you know, you have
00:21:14
this like, sort of depressing string of 10 presidents who are
00:21:20
not covering themselves in glory, who are letting massive
00:21:23
scandals happen underneath their noses, who are supportive of
00:21:26
massive scandals, who are rolling back the Reconstruction
00:21:29
Era, who are reinstating white supremacy laws, who love Jim
00:21:33
Crow, who are embracing the KKK. Like, and they weren't like
00:21:37
stellar students. And then even in our modern era,
00:21:39
you know, George W Bush, God love, I think.
00:21:43
This doubt it was a good student.
00:21:45
Right, we all know. It's like.
00:21:48
A middling student. And so when you think about that
00:21:49
New Yorker article where the head of admissions in the 60s is
00:21:52
saying if we were only to let good students in, we would be
00:21:55
missing out on future presidents, it's almost like
00:21:57
he's talking about George W Bush.
00:22:00
It's like he's spawned to the future that George W what's?
00:22:03
Your ideal, I mean, yeah, what was the ideal system here?
00:22:08
Well, I mean the ideal, This is one of the other things.
00:22:10
And I think that this is a way, way to think about systems,
00:22:13
because when we think about institutions and systems,
00:22:15
they're just people. And so we're only just managing
00:22:18
desires and we're, it's always competing desires.
00:22:21
So like when we have a system of Jim Crow and you have segregated
00:22:26
schools and it's very easy to keep black people out of school,
00:22:28
which means it's very easy to keep black people opportunity.
00:22:32
Everybody understands how that system works.
00:22:35
And for those people who want to educate black children, they
00:22:39
find ways, right? They'll either set up special
00:22:42
schools for them, but they're working within a system.
00:22:43
The system changes after 1954. You have, you know,
00:22:46
desegregation of busing and this these fights that last for 20
00:22:50
years. Well, in those cases, if you
00:22:53
want to keep black children out of, of educational opportunity,
00:22:56
you have to be more creative. You have to create new systems.
00:23:01
OK, that era passes and then you have a more egalitarian world in
00:23:04
some ways. And the Reagan era comes and
00:23:07
kind of like undercuts all the funding for these systems.
00:23:10
You see what I'm saying? It's like, is there?
00:23:12
It's it's not so much as what's the ideal system.
00:23:14
I think it's more like saying what is the outcome that we
00:23:17
want? What do we think is the outcome
00:23:19
we want? Some people will say, especially
00:23:22
today in 2026, there are people who will say we think that white
00:23:26
people should be on top and we want our systems writ large to
00:23:31
advance that agenda. That would include education.
00:23:34
Some people would disagree with that.
00:23:36
And everybody is kind of always going to be RE organizing or
00:23:42
creating systems that are getting to whatever ideal it is
00:23:45
they want. And so I will tell you that if
00:23:49
my preference, my belief is that it is better to have a world
00:23:54
where people, no matter what they look like.
00:23:56
Right, exactly. And it's pro meritocracy.
00:23:59
I'm just saying Tom seems anti meritocracy.
00:24:01
Katie, you're you're pro meritocracy is an aspiration.
00:24:05
I get that these things are wielded, that we, that race
00:24:07
outcomes and white supremacy loom large behind the scenes.
00:24:11
Whatever system you create, believe me when I say will be
00:24:15
undermined by people who don't want that.
00:24:18
And so the most important thing is for people to understand the
00:24:22
goals they want for society and to be nimble enough to
00:24:26
understand when a system is no longer really working.
00:24:28
Like, you were actually pretty decent arguments to be made that
00:24:31
affirmative action kind of stopped.
00:24:33
If if what your goal with affirmative action was in the
00:24:36
60s and 70s was to create better outcomes writ large for black
00:24:40
Americans. I think there's an argument we
00:24:42
made that those outcomes stagnate in the 90s.
00:24:44
I. Didn't believe that until Trump
00:24:46
era. And then you're like, wow,
00:24:46
there's a lot of racial resentment that we're fostering
00:24:49
with this and. And so it's like, well, you
00:24:52
know, would it have been when you read the argument for why
00:24:55
affirmative action struck down? I do not agree with those
00:24:58
arguments. I will say, though, that if
00:25:02
you're looking at the effectiveness of affirmative
00:25:06
action, there is a plateau where suddenly black, black America as
00:25:11
a whole doesn't continue to make gains, where it does somewhat
00:25:16
plateau. And so you say to yourself, OK,
00:25:18
maybe affirmative action in terms of what we want as a
00:25:21
bigger goal has run its course to some degree.
00:25:23
What are some other things we can do?
00:25:25
That's not how the left really was thinking after, you know,
00:25:28
40-50 years of of having all these big federal level wins.
00:25:33
And so now I think people are thinking about this.
00:25:35
But like I said, no matter what system you create in order to
00:25:39
advance racial equality, trust me when I say there will be
00:25:43
powerful systems created to tear it apart.
00:25:45
So you have to always be willing to work towards something new.
00:25:50
I think that the the meritocracy, especially like in
00:25:54
the collegiate level and I don't claim that I have nearly enough
00:25:57
knowledge as, you know, someone who went to an Ivy League school
00:25:59
or someone who spent years studying how it works.
00:26:01
But it seems like it exists to propagate itself and it's how
00:26:05
can we keep the system of Ivy League educated students running
00:26:09
America? And there's just various ways in
00:26:11
which you can kind of rejigger the system in order to make sure
00:26:13
it has the right admixture of races and education and and
00:26:17
wealth to be able to keep it going.
00:26:19
Whether that's the best way to run America, that no matter
00:26:21
what, we know that the Ivy League need to be running
00:26:23
things. So if we make sure that they're
00:26:25
successful, doesn't seem like it's always going to benefit a
00:26:29
large number of people. And so you have like these
00:26:31
situations like Obama and, and, and Clinton, who I'll be very
00:26:35
generous about them and say they nominally care about poor people
00:26:38
and thinking about how they grew up and how they can enact.
00:26:41
I'm being incredibly generous about it.
00:26:44
And then you have someone like JD Vance, who is also a, an
00:26:47
example of the meritocracy, right?
00:26:49
Super relative, you know, poor, like hardship goes, gets
00:26:52
accepted by Yale and basically turns his back on that entire
00:26:56
world that he came from and, and, and exists as a member of
00:26:59
the system. And that's the meritocracy
00:27:02
working very effectively in in in some respects.
00:27:06
And I don't a system that can produce ajd Vance and an Obama
00:27:10
seems inherently flawed to me if it's about actually.
00:27:14
People, I mean, we're I. Guess they're successful.
00:27:17
Schools. Schools don't.
00:27:20
Schools are not designed to make everybody alike.
00:27:22
That's the thing. I mean, I understand that the
00:27:24
right and sometimes the left accuses education of like,
00:27:27
brainwashing people and making them all the same ultimately,
00:27:30
like we are all individuals with different subjectivity.
00:27:33
And so yeah, of course, like and.
00:27:35
Yeah, the, the student body at any school to me defines itself
00:27:39
far more than the academic. The faculty and administrators
00:27:42
are able to actually control those students.
00:27:44
So it's like the assembling of the students to me is the main
00:27:47
thing that they are able to do. And then the students mix it up.
00:27:50
I mean, I, I agree with you, Tom, that there's like banks and
00:27:56
financial firms that like do very, you know, want to recruit
00:28:00
sort of Ivy League students in sort of maintaining class.
00:28:03
But in some ways I think they're seen as like the holdover of,
00:28:07
yeah, the sort of presidents going to Harvard and Yale and
00:28:09
everything era. I mean, if you like a newcomer,
00:28:13
right? Like just look at her like
00:28:15
nobody working for newcomer right now.
00:28:17
I think. When do I leave school?
00:28:18
I like recruited. Somebody.
00:28:20
Just the guy who started it. Yeah, just started it, but it's
00:28:23
and I have a network from it, you know, but like it's people I
00:28:27
know, you know what I mean? It's just like I, I think
00:28:29
Harvard excels at being like a network of people who all stay
00:28:33
in the mix, like want to do stuff.
00:28:35
It's like I'd network with people from my high school if
00:28:37
they were in the mix, Like they're not, you know what I
00:28:39
mean? It's just sort of like, the
00:28:41
thing about going to Harvard is just like there's so many people
00:28:43
who are just like hustling. They're trying to be at the top
00:28:46
of their career, Like and then it's a self reinforcing network
00:28:49
because the best way to hire somebody is to sort of have the
00:28:53
real dope from somebody. You know, it's like you want
00:28:56
somebody to say like, oh, like, is this person like a good
00:28:59
worker? What's their deal?
00:29:00
Like if you know what they're about South, them being in your
00:29:02
network is is super valuable to vetting.
00:29:05
Like it's not a conspiracy. It's like how human beings work.
00:29:08
You know, you know, I have this theory, my Anna Dolvey theory of
00:29:12
the elite. Like the elites are like the
00:29:15
easiest to fool. Like they're the easiest people
00:29:17
in the world to fool because all you have to do is walk in with
00:29:20
somebody who's already a member and then you're accepted.
00:29:23
And trust me when I say that's not how it works.
00:29:25
And like the blue collar part of the country where I grew up, you
00:29:28
can walk in to a party with somebody, but they're still
00:29:31
going to want to ask you a lot of questions.
00:29:33
You are why you should be there, why they shouldn't kick you out,
00:29:36
why they should trust you. Like there's a lot where it's
00:29:38
like if you walk in on the arm of the right person and and
00:29:42
it's, you know, Anna Delphy, you, you're just accepted with
00:29:47
almost with so with with far fewer questions.
00:29:51
Sometimes it's a breakdown of the elite or it's like that the
00:29:53
elite isn't isn't so rooted and that it's like anyone rich
00:29:57
person could make you fantastically wealthy.
00:29:59
Then you're like, whatever, I'll gamble a little bit, you know,
00:30:02
be positive some here. And so like, because Harvard,
00:30:06
Yale, it's just something, you know, MIT, Stanford are such
00:30:09
powerful signifiers. People are like, well, if you
00:30:12
have that signifier that they've ascribed so much meaning to it,
00:30:17
that if you are a con artist it, it takes a real long time to
00:30:20
figure it. Out right, Right.
00:30:23
But it, it it's so interwoven into like, institutions beyond
00:30:26
like, like, OK, you work at the New York Times.
00:30:29
Like that is a newsroom that is full of Ivy Leaguers, right?
00:30:33
Yeah. It is just that that newsroom is
00:30:35
overflowing with Ivy Leaguers. It's crazy.
00:30:39
It's totally. Crazy Kitty, you're on the board
00:30:42
of Bowden I. But but you know, that's what's
00:30:45
so interesting and like, back to your book.
00:30:46
Like, Colin's the only one he's got the real like, not top UC
00:30:50
chip on his shoulder here, you know?
00:30:51
I have no chip, though. Like, we're all in the same
00:30:54
place. That's The funny thing, Skip.
00:30:58
Oh, yeah, sorry. There are chips.
00:31:00
There are chips, but that's not even one I ever cared about
00:31:02
because you know what? Because I'm white.
00:31:04
There are so many others. Yeah, dude, because I'm white.
00:31:07
I was upper middle class and I knew things, and I'm Jewish.
00:31:09
I knew things were gonna be fine.
00:31:11
They were gonna be fine, right? Right.
00:31:12
And handsome. He always leaves that off the
00:31:14
list. I really.
00:31:15
Yeah. It's well thing about Tom
00:31:18
because everybody talks about how handsome he is and I'm like,
00:31:21
well, it's funny. He carries himself as somebody
00:31:23
who is not, which I think is like, very disarming and
00:31:27
interesting, but also exceedingly weird at some point.
00:31:31
Like, it's one thing for it to be a charming tick, but it's
00:31:33
another when it just feels like dysmorphia, like face.
00:31:36
Just. Yeah.
00:31:37
Yeah, exactly. Where do we get into it now
00:31:39
this? Conversation has taken a
00:31:40
horrible turn. We're working on Tom's dating
00:31:43
profile right now. This is I can't endorse the
00:31:48
progression of this conversation.
00:31:52
Katie, you're so well, actually, no, let's go.
00:31:56
The the the students that you were writing about here.
00:31:58
They, I'm assuming, saw this elite system and it was why,
00:32:03
like the promise of TM Landry, Landry was so incredible to
00:32:07
them. Because if you're on the
00:32:09
outside, everything looks like an, you know, an amazing
00:32:11
opportunity. And you know, if this school was
00:32:13
just getting these students into LSU, which is a decent enough
00:32:17
school, it would have seemed like a failure to to a lot of
00:32:20
them. Interesting thing and I think
00:32:22
that this is like a moment where you have to think about like
00:32:27
what does life look like for a white middle class lens.
00:32:29
So for the earliest students of TM Landry, Mike was getting them
00:32:33
into places like University of Louisiana, some HBCUS.
00:32:38
And these were school that can I tell you, these kids were
00:32:40
thrilled to go to, right? But it's interesting the the
00:32:45
reception he gets when he gets a student into an Ivy League
00:32:48
school, the amount of interest he gets from outside of his
00:32:51
community, the amount of interest he gets from parents
00:32:54
who, unlike early students, actually know more about college
00:32:58
and know more about the ways that elite colleges open doors.
00:33:02
That is a money making opportunity that that that Mike
00:33:06
really, really takes advantage of.
00:33:10
And so that's, you see the growth of TM Landry as he
00:33:12
understands that top tier universities convey something
00:33:17
that is really important that for some of the families he has
00:33:20
to teach them about. Like there are some families who
00:33:22
do not believe that going to any college is a failure.
00:33:25
And there's some families that don't believe that you failed if
00:33:28
you don't go to college. You know what I mean?
00:33:29
He almost has to like, indoctrinate them into this
00:33:31
world view that unless you've gone to an elite school and have
00:33:35
a certain kind of job, your life is not very worthwhile, which is
00:33:38
such a specific world view. It is not the world view of the
00:33:42
majority of Americans, by the way, but it is one we're
00:33:45
familiar with because we work in the media.
00:33:48
We covered technology, we covered Wall Street, We cover
00:33:51
elite people. We're.
00:33:52
I think a core problem with society, like it's just, you
00:33:55
know, my grandmother like thought idealized, like the
00:34:00
local judge in York County of Pennsylvania.
00:34:02
You know, it's like that was like, if I think about who she
00:34:05
was building up to me is sort of like the great man that I should
00:34:08
aspire to be. It was like sort of a community
00:34:11
figure, someone, you know, wise and respectful like locally.
00:34:15
And I think over time as I grew up, there was just much more
00:34:20
like, oh, you know, and I'm competitive.
00:34:21
So maybe I'm not representative, but there is just sort of a, a
00:34:24
national like that. You need to aspire on sort of a
00:34:27
national level that the, it's not that these schools are that
00:34:31
you can't get in, right? It's stories of how you could
00:34:33
get in. And so there is a sort of dark
00:34:36
side to this. Like Mayor, anybody can go to
00:34:39
the top in that. Like it creates such an intense
00:34:41
focus on on the very top that it undermines being the best in
00:34:47
sort of your community, which again, becomes a subtle argument
00:34:52
for not having these schools be meritocratic, not letting people
00:34:57
in from all and just sort of saying, oh, well, there it's
00:34:58
just the elite self perpetuating.
00:35:00
The best you can do is like, you know, win your local community
00:35:03
race. That's not the world I'm
00:35:04
advocating for, but it is sort of a consequence of, you know,
00:35:08
that that evolution. It's interesting Eric and I did
00:35:11
an interview with a very fancy, very posh.
00:35:14
Erica Green, your co-author. Sorry, I'm Erica.
00:35:17
Yeah, she's Erica. It was very, very fancy, posh,
00:35:21
very brilliant British podcast person.
00:35:25
And when we were talking about the outcomes of some of the
00:35:28
students, I mentioned that there was one student who was very,
00:35:30
very happy that while he had not ultimately gone to Wall Street,
00:35:37
he didn't take a Wall Street internship.
00:35:39
And he ended up at home in Louisiana with his daughter.
00:35:44
And he started a power washing business with his brother and
00:35:47
was very, I mean, he all of them.
00:35:49
He's probably in many ways, he has a great sense of self and he
00:35:53
he's doing financially well. The man said, wow, So you're
00:35:56
really advocating that failure is OK.
00:35:59
And I found it fascinating that in his world, being at home,
00:36:05
owning a power washing business with the brother you love,
00:36:09
taking care of the daughter you love and having a life that you
00:36:12
really enjoy is a failure. I thought so that's how far.
00:36:17
Like I said, when we think of what successes or what people
00:36:20
need to do or have a good life, it's like so they're they're.
00:36:24
Telling a terrible story. It's has them because I'm like,
00:36:29
wow, that is a huge, huge chasm that that was his reflex.
00:36:33
And it also follows, I think Thomas Piketty would say it
00:36:39
follows an economic gap that we have seen perpetuated by, you
00:36:47
know, a loss of ways to have a middle class life without a
00:36:50
college degree. And like, this is where people
00:36:52
are going to me and be like, nobody wants to work in a
00:36:55
shoelace factory in America. I'm not advocating for that.
00:36:58
I'm just saying that we see this scramble for college.
00:37:03
We mentioned this in the book. We can't get into it too much.
00:37:06
But like, this number of colleges that exist in 2026 is
00:37:09
basically the number of colleges that existed in like 1920, OK
00:37:13
2020, 1920. It's basically the same number
00:37:16
of schools who want to go to College in 1920 versus 2020.
00:37:23
Very, very different. Because the new schools are
00:37:26
provided by like community colleges.
00:37:28
But like, yeah, I mean, I. Know it's just.
00:37:30
Also probably like the death of like the like the the rural
00:37:33
America and like the farm ones that people probably, yeah.
00:37:36
If you wanted to be able to afford a car and a house
00:37:40
payment, you didn't have to go to college for most of the
00:37:44
history of this country. And then starting in the 90s you
00:37:48
did because all of the jobs that allow you to have house, a child
00:37:54
and a car go away. So now it's like you either
00:37:59
there's only one Ave. to house child car job and it is through
00:38:02
the same number of doors that have existed forever, or you get
00:38:08
caught up in this maw of like part time jobs working in the
00:38:11
service industry, financial insecurity, maybe you don't have
00:38:14
healthcare, etcetera. How binary is that?
00:38:17
Like there's middle ground. And so when you and so we've
00:38:21
started to also think of not having a college educated life
00:38:25
as failure, in part because the economic consequences have
00:38:28
become so dire. But we can't we can't put more
00:38:32
people through the college system.
00:38:34
Like this is one of the reasons why the middle class has shrunk
00:38:36
so much. And so like college has become
00:38:38
do or die Hunger Games. Do you wanna be in the middle
00:38:41
class or do you wanna be in like the Oh my God, wow, that's.
00:38:46
Right, right. And which is why I get so
00:38:47
frustrated when you see this argument about, you know, the
00:38:50
amount of debt that students have to take in order to go to
00:38:52
college now being this like onerous thing that's gonna, you
00:38:55
know, burden them for the rest of their life, which is true.
00:38:58
I mean, like this is incredibly difficult financially for most
00:39:01
of these people. It.
00:39:02
Was a long time. It took a long time, 20 years.
00:39:05
But like people that's like lucky, like there are people
00:39:07
that will probably take longer than that now.
00:39:09
And, you know, you're gainfully employed, you know, working
00:39:11
among Ivy Leaguers. So like, you made it, but like,
00:39:16
you know, the, the, the, the knock is like you're taking on a
00:39:19
whole bunch of debt to get like, some degree in like a bullshit
00:39:23
liberal arts, you know, degree, like, you know, where Harry
00:39:26
Potter studies and and you have nothing left, you know, to offer
00:39:31
after all of that. And it's like, yeah, but what
00:39:32
alternative do these people have?
00:39:34
If you're going to say going to college is a waste of your time
00:39:37
and you're going to be stuck in debt for the next decades of
00:39:39
your life, you've not provided an alternative of any sort of
00:39:43
like respectable middle class life that they can have.
00:39:45
And So what do you want these people to do?
00:39:47
And it to me, it seems like it also perpetuates the obsession
00:39:50
with college, which is something that the elites, you know, I
00:39:53
mean, that continues. I mean, you look at someone like
00:39:55
Bill Ackman, who seems like his entire political theory is based
00:39:59
around the fact that he's really pissed off that his daughter
00:40:01
went to, I don't know which Ivy League and like became super
00:40:04
woke and and there's like a huge amount of bitterness from people
00:40:07
about like the. Social impact of like what
00:40:11
colleges do like just like. The more time that gets spent
00:40:14
people thinking about college, the more importance it gains and
00:40:17
the more like significance it has in our political life.
00:40:20
Yeah. And when you say these people,
00:40:22
that includes like me and Eric, very much like when I applied to
00:40:25
college, I grew up in a blue collar home with very little
00:40:30
money. I was a good student.
00:40:34
I don't know, I got good grades. But at the same time, the
00:40:36
competition to get into College in 1994 and 1995 was night and
00:40:42
day versus trying to get into College in 2025.
00:40:45
The number of people applying for spots at Bowden is now
00:40:48
exponentially more our. 2008 was again we were getting.
00:40:52
It was, it was starting to really heat up when Eric was
00:40:55
applying, which is what this is also Eric's way of saying he's
00:40:57
much smarter than I am. I'm not smarter.
00:40:59
I. I did every extracurricular you
00:41:01
could do in Macon, GA I was the head of the Obama campaign.
00:41:05
And for high school students in Macon, GA, yeah, I can go.
00:41:08
Yeah. But it's becoming a much harder
00:41:11
go. You know, the idea of an elite
00:41:13
school having a double digit acceptance rate, which happened
00:41:16
all the time in the 90s, very, very good schools had double
00:41:19
digit acceptance rates. Part of the reason is because
00:41:23
especially through, you know, it was waning in the 80s and 90s,
00:41:26
but there had been a world where you didn't have to go to college
00:41:30
to have a middle class life. If I were trying to get into
00:41:33
college today, growing up in the same exact circumstances I grew
00:41:36
up in, wow. I can't even imagine how much
00:41:39
anxiety I would feel looking around at a burn like a a rusted
00:41:45
out industrial town saying to myself.
00:41:47
But the the real next elite what you know I'm reading my I was
00:41:50
reading my 3 month old your book prepping for this interview,
00:41:55
getting her education going and I was about to say so.
00:41:57
That she can be prepared for an even more rigorous college
00:42:00
admissions process. But I think the I'm always
00:42:02
saying to my wife, like, you want to be elite.
00:42:05
So she doesn't even, I want her to be, you know, a musician.
00:42:07
You know, it's like you, you know, it's like you, you raise
00:42:10
Gracie Abrams or whatever, you know, that'll.
00:42:11
Look good on her preschool application, which you should
00:42:13
probably be filling out soon. What?
00:42:15
No. I they said that'll look good on
00:42:16
her preschool application. She's successful enough that
00:42:18
you're escaping some of the credentialism rat race.
00:42:22
Like, isn't that the point of being truly successful That
00:42:25
you're like, we have the credentials?
00:42:28
Like what does she need credentials for?
00:42:29
Credentials matter so much more to people who don't have them.
00:42:32
So you have this, like, weird world where for folks like the
00:42:36
kids in this book and for people all over the country, they're
00:42:38
like, I just need that credential and that will give me
00:42:40
security. And then there's a swath of
00:42:42
people who are like, I already have them but still want it for
00:42:45
other reasons. Right?
00:42:46
There aren't survival, but they have a lot of social capital on
00:42:50
their and then that's when you get Varsity Blues, right?
00:42:54
Everyone using what it is they have what they have.
00:42:57
Varsity Blues is paying people to get them on fake teams to get
00:43:01
recruited. There are people in my life that
00:43:04
I wonder if they were Varsity Blues.
00:43:07
I, I mean, I know when people are really upset about
00:43:09
affirmative action and I, I'm like, OK, fine.
00:43:12
But there is a way in which other forms of admissions
00:43:16
processes, looking at you legacy admissions.
00:43:20
Sometimes athletics really, really does save spots for
00:43:25
students who might not have hit that meritocratic bar.
00:43:29
Right, right. They fell in between the gap,
00:43:31
right? It's like they're still, you
00:43:34
know, related to rich people, but they didn't have the exact
00:43:36
legacy that would have allowed them to get into this school.
00:43:39
And so they don't have like the the the grit story to tell, but
00:43:42
they also don't have the legacy thing.
00:43:43
And so they're weirdly in the middle and suddenly they, you
00:43:45
know, they apply to USC as like a, a kicker or something play.
00:43:49
This forward like OK for. The golf team.
00:43:52
If JD Vance becomes president and like, succeeds.
00:43:55
I mean, The funny thing about the Conservatives is like, they
00:43:58
don't know how to, they talk about building, building,
00:43:59
building, but they don't know how to build any institutions,
00:44:02
right? It's like.
00:44:03
University of Austin. University of Austin.
00:44:06
Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, let's see.
00:44:09
But so it's like, are they able to reform the elite institutions
00:44:14
in America? And then if a Democrat wins,
00:44:17
like do we just go back to Obama era sort of aspirational
00:44:22
meritocracy or how do you see this playing out depending on,
00:44:26
you know, a few thousand American voters and how they how
00:44:30
they swing and therefore how we set the cultural and political
00:44:33
power of, you know, the next 10 years?
00:44:36
And I want to add, add on to Eric's question, like how does
00:44:39
like the war that the Trump administration has waged on
00:44:43
institutions, you know, you know, elite institutions during,
00:44:47
you know, his term, Like how is that affected all of this as
00:44:50
well? The first question is really
00:44:52
interesting because it the impact it's had.
00:44:55
I understand there were free speech on campus issues before
00:44:57
Trump became president in 2016, even that there were people who
00:45:01
are very worried about a group think around progressive ideas.
00:45:06
And, you know, it's just reading Jill Lepore's book.
00:45:08
She's professor at Harvard. And she was like, you would be
00:45:10
lying if you said that there wasn't a lot of social critique
00:45:14
around people who did not hold specific sets of liberal ideas.
00:45:19
And the Crimson, you know, I like follow the Crimson over the
00:45:21
years and there was definitely a period where I was like
00:45:24
terrifyingly like boring and sort of, you know, woke and
00:45:27
like, but you just felt like, I just felt like an out of touch
00:45:30
alum, like I guess like, oh, the times change and I but then but
00:45:33
none of. The kids was lifting up their.
00:45:35
Coverage gets much better and it feels like, oh, this is the
00:45:38
Viron place, sort of, I remember.
00:45:40
So there was that. Period.
00:45:42
The Trump administration is brought to bear over how you're
00:45:44
allowed to think in higher Ed is that they will put you in jail
00:45:47
if you. Could right?
00:45:49
Exactly, just letting the woke period play out, which it would
00:45:51
have burned off on its own. It was.
00:45:53
Burning off on its own. But now it's like we will arrest
00:45:57
you and might prosecute you and we're going to use the Title 6
00:46:01
process, Title nine, Title 3, all the titles to bring
00:46:04
investigations to bear, frustrating investigations.
00:46:07
And we'll cut off your federal funding if you stray from a
00:46:11
certain set of ideals. So I think that the degree to
00:46:14
which we're seeing ideas in the Academy flow or not flow has has
00:46:21
certainly the Trump administration has a big impact.
00:46:24
And the reason why that's important is because a lot of
00:46:27
the ideas that come out of the Academy, even the ones that we
00:46:29
think of as the most absurd in their moment, right?
00:46:33
Whether that is liberalism, whether that is postmodernism,
00:46:36
whether that is certain kinds of gender, you know, gender study
00:46:42
in their moment in the 50s, seventies, 80s might seem
00:46:47
absurd. They become really important
00:46:50
underpinnings for how we think as a society, whether we want
00:46:52
them to or not. We always do flow.
00:46:54
It's like it's tough in the Devil Word Prada, like I knew.
00:46:57
You were going there. I knew you were going there.
00:46:59
Yep. It's like a.
00:47:00
Sweater that you're wearing was like a decision that was made.
00:47:03
By both brilliant. OK, so here I was like which
00:47:05
color was it? I was?
00:47:06
Going to want we do not want this for our universities
00:47:09
because it is it's it is such a compass for where we're going to
00:47:14
go. And we have seen historically
00:47:15
that you can roll back progress like progressive ideas much
00:47:20
faster than people expected. And again, that the
00:47:23
Reconstruction period, which is understudied I think in American
00:47:26
history you have huge gains made for black people after slavery
00:47:30
is abolishing after the Civil War.
00:47:31
You have many, many black people elected to federal office, to
00:47:37
Congress. You have.
00:47:39
The establishment of the public school system came during.
00:47:43
Public schools, especially all over the South, you have a push
00:47:46
for more equal education, you have a push for desegregation.
00:47:49
You have colleges like Oberlin, you know, accepting black
00:47:54
students. They're one of the earliest.
00:47:55
They're all sorts of things that are flourishing in the wake of
00:47:59
the Civil War, right in like the late 1860s.
00:48:03
And then from then you have this sort of like golden couple
00:48:06
decades. And then you have the rise of
00:48:10
Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, militarized white supremacy and
00:48:16
a very, very repressive Supreme Court coinciding with an
00:48:20
extremely socially conservative Academy that is that believe
00:48:24
strongly in things like eugenics.
00:48:27
So, you know, these things can move pretty quickly.
00:48:29
So that's a long winded way of saying depending on who wins the
00:48:33
next election, can we see even forgot the next election just in
00:48:37
the next three years? Can we see the way we think of
00:48:40
rights for immigrants, black people, gay people, women,
00:48:44
insider, outsider? Who is us when we think of who
00:48:47
is. Going to.
00:48:48
Change. Absolutely.
00:48:49
This doesn't. Even include the fact that I
00:48:52
think and people used to think that America should be the
00:48:55
global meritocratic elite, not the American meritocratic elite.
00:49:00
And they were denying, perhaps most importantly, like all the
00:49:04
every talented person all over the globe, all to come to
00:49:07
America and, you know, yeah, great things here and.
00:49:11
What was that forward US or whatever like Mark Zuckerberg
00:49:14
once had a pro immigration nonprofit dedicated.
00:49:19
Well, we'll see how the midterms go, could come back, or at least
00:49:21
the next election. But but a point behind your
00:49:24
point is just that they even if they haven't built institutions,
00:49:27
you know, we're not getting the next intersectionality or there
00:49:30
there's lots of ideas that the Academy could have had that
00:49:33
they're probably afraid to have and that could have lasting.
00:49:36
Well, I also like wonder what, like what social, how social
00:49:39
media fits in all of this too, because like all of these ideas,
00:49:42
the, the, the, the, the terminology, like the kookiness
00:49:45
of the way people discuss social issues on college campuses.
00:49:48
It's existed for decades, right? I mean, like, hey, you went to
00:49:51
school in like the mid to late 90s.
00:49:52
Like all this political correctness that has been
00:49:55
rebranded as woke ISM has been here before.
00:49:58
None of it's very new, but social media has allowed it to
00:50:01
kind of break containment where you have random people in, you
00:50:04
know, maybe never went to college and what whatever parts
00:50:07
of the country getting extremely angry about, you know, trans
00:50:12
rights or heteronormativity or I mean, pick whatever terminology
00:50:16
that like they're pissed off about because Tucker Carlson
00:50:18
told him to be mad about it. Like, I think that the fact that
00:50:22
it can kind of exist in this very accessible information
00:50:25
system, it's kind of allowed the debates that happen on college
00:50:28
campuses to become things that people get super fucking mad
00:50:31
about, you know? Because they're taken so out of
00:50:34
context, right? So like a fierce debate over the
00:50:37
way that commerce and feminism work in, you know, a book like
00:50:43
Pamela or like Tom Jones, the rise of 18th century novels, as
00:50:50
people are debating fiercely some postmodern ideals about
00:50:53
Marxism and feminism. They make sense in the context
00:50:57
of those academic environments, right?
00:50:59
They make sense in the context of that specific classroom where
00:51:04
you're are basically just trying almost to train your mind to be
00:51:07
agile around difficult concepts and to see a different worldview
00:51:12
in a narrow setting in a narrow set of goals.
00:51:15
Yes. Does it sound absolutely absurd
00:51:18
outside of that context? Yes.
00:51:20
And did it have a way to migrate outside of that context before
00:51:23
social media? No, it most certainly did not.
00:51:25
I went to school in May and trust me when I say the
00:51:27
conversations that I had in random lecture halls and not
00:51:30
leave not only did. They not I mean.
00:51:32
Obviously they didn't move that building.
00:51:35
The things we're talking about super important.
00:51:37
But like I do, I do wonder like how much smartphones do or do
00:51:41
not destroy our brains. The shift to like video, some of
00:51:44
the like stuff around how techno technology is changing how
00:51:48
people think might end up being the larger force.
00:51:51
Like, obviously there's this sort of, I don't know, the
00:51:54
social force ebb and flow of, you know, how much racism is
00:51:57
accepted, who are the elites? But like, if everybody stops
00:52:01
reading like that's going to be, it's going to be a dark force.
00:52:06
Well, yeah, I mean, think about someone like Charlie Kirk, like
00:52:08
his whole shtick was going onto college campuses and basically
00:52:12
exposing old people to the kinds of things that, like young
00:52:16
people are talking about on college campus.
00:52:17
And it made them so mad. Like there's there's so much
00:52:20
salience to like these kinds of conversations.
00:52:22
And like, that is the core of definitely the conservative or
00:52:25
like reactionary movement is, is like, how can we make people
00:52:29
really mad about the things that people were talking about in
00:52:31
college? And Charlie Kirk, who's kind of
00:52:33
like a young, you know, social media savvy, but also, you know,
00:52:36
he's conservative in his, you know, traditional family values.
00:52:39
He's a perfect, you know, perfect like vessel for, for all
00:52:43
of that. It, it is amazing to me how
00:52:46
much, you know, during the pandemic there was sort of like
00:52:50
the Peter Thiel's of the world saying the thing.
00:52:52
You can't say it's probably true.
00:52:54
And it's like people like us were like, what could that be
00:52:57
besides racism, right? Like the thing And now we have
00:53:01
like Elon must be like apartheid was, you know, terrible for
00:53:05
society and you're. Coming after the whites.
00:53:08
Right. I mean, literally, yeah.
00:53:10
There was another big one where somebody retweeted like, you
00:53:12
know, just a list of like Rhodesia.
00:53:14
Obviously I'm not I'm not necessarily scholar in all the
00:53:17
societies that were once white ruled and then were were no
00:53:21
longer but. You're yeah.
00:53:23
Now I you have to know him, you know, but not even a dog.
00:53:26
But literally today, like Homeland Security in the
00:53:29
Department of Labor are tweeting this sort of like, you know,
00:53:32
clearly echoing sort of Nazism, like what is the homeland for
00:53:37
the United States? Like, I don't, I don't
00:53:38
understand what a heritage American is.
00:53:41
It's totally incoherent. I don't know.
00:53:42
That's, that's a rant. But Katie, take from whatever
00:53:45
you can from that. Like what where's this headed?
00:53:48
Like, besides that, people feel really emboldened, I guess, at
00:53:51
least to be honest with what they must have been feeling
00:53:54
before. And I was naive enough to think
00:53:56
like, surely racism if not solved.
00:54:01
Like I, I understood that people were like, you know, we would
00:54:04
fight about like the pipeline problem and say, well, there
00:54:06
just aren't enough talented candidates.
00:54:07
Like we can't get anybody. Like the the fight I took the
00:54:10
fight to be sincerely on those terms rather than no, we just
00:54:16
like are sort of, we are pretty much racist or we, you know, we
00:54:20
yeah, I, I, I don't know, like what?
00:54:22
I guess people harbored much darker views than I, I, I
00:54:25
realized growing up. Yeah.
00:54:26
I mean, I think it's, it's interesting kind of see the
00:54:29
country, the ID of the country kind of take over because again,
00:54:34
it's, it's it whether you're talking about this, the
00:54:39
institutions, whether you're talking about systems, it is
00:54:42
just people. And so we've had a long time
00:54:45
where there was a consensus view, whether people liked it or
00:54:48
not, but consensus view based on the law, based on legal changes,
00:54:52
that there was going to be some sort of racial equality.
00:54:55
Once that is dismantled, especially once the legal
00:54:58
underpinnings for that are dismantled, Voting Rights Act,
00:55:01
Civil Rights Act, that we will see a big fast change.
00:55:08
And we're already seeing it. So I think you're making a very
00:55:11
correct observation about the world we're entering, even
00:55:16
though that sounds very depressing.
00:55:17
I will say again, these systems are just people.
00:55:20
Our society is just people and people have different opinions,
00:55:24
but everybody, it's, it's a mass of people, but only really truly
00:55:30
of that mass, a small percentage really want to change things.
00:55:33
So we are watching a small percentage of people make big
00:55:35
changes. There's going to be a small
00:55:37
percentage of people, as there always has been, who are willing
00:55:40
to push back against that, right.
00:55:42
So we had slavery, you had abolitionists, you had people
00:55:46
create the, I don't even know how the Underground Railroad
00:55:48
could be created today because people can't keep secrets and
00:55:50
they want to put everything on the Internet.
00:55:51
But you had a small, all number of people, proportionally who
00:55:56
were like, we need to make a serious change.
00:55:59
And they fought for it and fought for it and fought for it.
00:56:01
Many of them died before they saw their work really changed
00:56:04
the world. But it, it did change the world,
00:56:07
right? And then we saw it again in the
00:56:09
abolition of Jim probe. We've seen it as people have
00:56:11
fought for the rights of Native Americans.
00:56:13
We have seen it and, you know, like all sorts of venues where
00:56:17
there's been this huge regression.
00:56:19
So I it's impossible for me to believe that in this vast
00:56:24
country, everybody is going to roll over and say, I guess we
00:56:28
just do immigrants anymore. And one thing that does make me
00:56:31
optimistic, you know, this, Renee, good murder, you know, is
00:56:35
obviously terrible and, you know, looms very large in my
00:56:39
heart and mind. And I mean, I do think in
00:56:43
another world, there would be many, many more of those people
00:56:46
before it became so visible. But in a world of video and
00:56:51
social media at once, I feel like we're more miserable, are
00:56:56
made miserable because we're forced to face reality of
00:56:59
terrible situations. But I think one thing that gives
00:57:01
me hope is that at least that, you know, it takes one.
00:57:05
I mean, and obviously there are other people who've been killed
00:57:07
by ice, but it, you know, it doesn't take as many of these
00:57:10
horrific things for them to reach mass visibility in the way
00:57:14
that, you know, obviously during segregation, as you talk about
00:57:17
miracle children, like, you know, you needed Freedom Riders
00:57:19
and you need all this concerted effort to really build like make
00:57:23
these things visible. Whereas right now, I guess
00:57:25
everybody's a social media influencer.
00:57:27
So there's almost like an effort.
00:57:28
Anything horrible is being surfaced to our society.
00:57:33
And I I think that honestly, it makes for depressing living, but
00:57:36
I do wonder if it will protect us more than it hurts us.
00:57:41
Yeah, I mean, if somebody had told me pre social media that
00:57:48
that Gaza would become a a 'cause that young people.
00:57:53
A mainstream cause. In the United States would care
00:57:56
about, you know, every the Palestinian rights movement has
00:57:59
been around robustly since the 70s, like there were.
00:58:03
And on college campuses specifically, like it was a
00:58:05
product very much of of undergrads mostly kind of like.
00:58:09
Absolutely. UCLA, like University of San
00:58:12
Francisco, Berkeley. And yet what mainstreamed it was
00:58:16
probably to Eric's point. Watching videos of children
00:58:20
burning to death, starving people, people being shot at as
00:58:24
they try to get food, like those are very, very searing images.
00:58:28
Yeah, Can maybe like close this in talking about Silicon Valley
00:58:33
again a bit because you spent, how many years were you covering
00:58:36
tech when you were in San Francisco like 54?
00:58:38
Years. Five I think. 55 maybe no.
00:58:42
Five. And then you got like the you
00:58:44
got the fuck out of Dodd. You were like done with San
00:58:45
Francisco. You're like, I'm out, I'm gone.
00:58:50
My formative tech, you know, the early days.
00:58:53
Kate, Katie and I worked across from each other at The
00:58:55
Information. Then she went to Bloomberg View.
00:58:57
I was at Bloomberg. Tom joined us at The
00:59:00
Information, so we all covered tech together.
00:59:03
You'd been at Fortune writing about business generally before.
00:59:06
That was it. It wasn't as pure tech right
00:59:09
before. You.
00:59:09
No, it was more Wall Street. Right.
00:59:11
Yeah. It was like finance, I thought.
00:59:12
Yeah. Then you covered Apple for the
00:59:14
New York Times and you covered the Justice Department.
00:59:17
So now that you know, that listener like you can go back
00:59:19
and oh, every the legal dismantling point was very the
00:59:22
New York Times Justice Department reporter was worried
00:59:25
about this, but anyway. What do you think about like
00:59:28
where Silicon Valley sits in the kind of college conversation?
00:59:34
And and you know, Eric mentioned Peter Thiel earlier.
00:59:37
Obviously the thing that made him famous for a a bit was
00:59:39
encouraging people to drop out of college and they're at at a
00:59:44
surface level. Is this like anti college
00:59:46
mentality here that like the time that you spend in a
00:59:49
university reduces your creativity and your ability to
00:59:52
create the kind of startups that would actually disrupt the
00:59:54
world? I've made my point clear, and I
00:59:56
think you guys probably agree that like the elite institutions
01:00:00
run most of Silicon Valley. There there is not truly a huge
01:00:04
amount of disruption in that system around here.
01:00:07
But yeah, I mean, looking at someone who's been in DC, which
01:00:10
is the ultimate, you know, lanyard elite, you know, part of
01:00:14
the country, Like, what do you, what do you sort of see looking
01:00:17
at this industry now and like the way it's dealing with
01:00:19
college and all of these issues? It was interesting.
01:00:22
I've always wondered when Peter Tell said that, how much of the
01:00:25
reason he said that was because he hated the direction that
01:00:27
higher Ed had taken in terms of social issues.
01:00:30
He was famously one of the cofounders of Stanford.
01:00:33
It's more conservative publication.
01:00:36
He felt like the college prey to vocalism before that term was
01:00:41
popular. And so, yes, when he was telling
01:00:44
people not to bother with college, it was certainly
01:00:46
because he was like, you have a lot of energy and creativity,
01:00:48
and you can work for 20 hours a day when you're 19.
01:00:52
But also, there was something about college that I think he
01:00:55
had always been uncomfortable with.
01:00:56
And now that there's this bigger crackdown happening, I do wonder
01:01:01
if he would still see college is not valuable or if he would if
01:01:06
if he would change his mind on that, I mean.
01:01:08
He's still doing the Teal Fellows.
01:01:09
I don't know. I don't think he's about to
01:01:10
become pro college. There, there.
01:01:14
But would he be more likely to hire a student who'd gone to
01:01:17
Yale now? Maybe like if he, that kid
01:01:21
hadn't, you know, been talking about trans rights.
01:01:28
I don't know. Tech has changed so much in
01:01:30
terms of how DC sees it. Under the Obama administration,
01:01:33
it was seen as this force for good.
01:01:35
After the 2016 election, it was seen as they.
01:01:37
All went and worked. All the Obama people went and
01:01:39
worked. It's like flax for tech
01:01:40
companies. Yes.
01:01:41
But what's interesting now is that there's almost like a very
01:01:46
unvarnished view of the technology industry under this
01:01:48
administration, which is a very transactional administration.
01:01:51
Now the tech industry is seen as a source of funds, capital for
01:01:57
the administration, so for the industry, and we've seen which
01:02:01
exactly. For the East wing expansion, pay
01:02:03
for. It's, it's like now it's no
01:02:06
longer like, are you good or are you evil?
01:02:08
It's do you financially help this group of people?
01:02:12
Right. Literally what?
01:02:13
Mark Zuckerberg? Facebook just appointed a new
01:02:15
president who is the wife of Republican.
01:02:19
Dina Powell. She's like a total creature of
01:02:22
DC. Yeah, yes, she is.
01:02:24
She was like, was it Dick Army? I forgot which congressman she
01:02:28
was. She she was like one of his
01:02:29
admins. I mean, she's been there forever
01:02:31
and. The conservatives would say
01:02:32
what, you know, Sheryl Sandberg, you know, very cozy with the
01:02:37
Democrats. You know, it's like it's one
01:02:39
thing for the other, you know? And it's one of the differences,
01:02:42
though, is that while the Democrats or Republicans before
01:02:45
them may have sought the power, money and influence of an
01:02:50
industry, they tried not to talk about it so openly.
01:02:55
You know they did it the old school way.
01:02:57
You know I. Actually don't know if this is
01:02:58
better or worse, I won't say that.
01:03:00
It's definitely worth because it's just like, you know, it
01:03:02
accelerates it. You know, I, Matt Iglesias, had
01:03:04
something somebody sent me, which is just like, I haven't
01:03:07
actually pulled up. This seems to me like a pretty
01:03:09
profound difference from contemporary society these days.
01:03:12
I feel like the general vibe even, perhaps especially in
01:03:14
elite circles, is that the worst thing you can be is a sucker.
01:03:18
You don't want to break the law or directly steal from or
01:03:21
physically injure other people, but you are seen as holding some
01:03:24
kind of obligation to yourself and your family to exploit every
01:03:28
angle available, not just because you want to gratify
01:03:30
yourself, but because everyone is doing it.
01:03:32
And I do. As a member of elite of the
01:03:33
elite, I think that is one of the most corrosive things
01:03:37
happening right now. I think most elites still scoff
01:03:40
at the classless law breaking of the Trump people.
01:03:44
But I do think there's this pressure of like, man, get yours
01:03:48
like because it's sort of like it's like, I don't know, crypto
01:03:51
ad part of it, you know, just who's winning, you know, in
01:03:54
Silicon Valley, like it's yeah, it's a crazy.
01:03:58
You don't want to be a sucker. Is is, is.
01:04:00
And I think that's going to be a corrosive force to the elites.
01:04:02
And I think as somebody with a microphone, you know, I will,
01:04:06
I'm going to hold against that. I'm not encouraging our
01:04:08
listeners to have that view. And I'm not going to embrace
01:04:10
that view. And, you know, I think there is
01:04:13
the moral capacity to resist the view, but it's definitely one
01:04:17
that looms large. And I literally, I think I said
01:04:19
on one of our team calls that I got the nihilism of 2025 made
01:04:23
life so hard as a reporter. You know, it's like if your job
01:04:28
is to call balls and strikes and view some meaning some of the
01:04:32
time, it's like if everyone's nihilistic, like that's a, it's
01:04:35
a Dark World to write and opine. But I, I do think honestly, in
01:04:39
some ways, the Trump administration becoming so
01:04:42
horrifying is a return to morality.
01:04:45
These are like, Oh, no, I I believe in things like this is
01:04:48
terrible. Like, and then if you once
01:04:50
you're activating sort of that moral like alarm bell, I think
01:04:54
it's easier to be like, Oh, I'm operating on other things and
01:04:56
just like winning some, some game.
01:04:59
So I don't know. My hope is the horribleness of
01:05:03
2026 awakens people to some degree and doesn't allow for
01:05:08
this sort of slippage and to just you don't want to be a
01:05:11
sucker, you need to get yours and graft everything.
01:05:13
Which I guess sort of brings you back to your book, right?
01:05:16
I mean, that's the ultimate graft, right?
01:05:17
It's someone who recognized the system as it was, exploited it
01:05:20
to benefit obviously himself. But he was maybe arguing the
01:05:23
people that went to his school obviously was abusive in in the
01:05:27
way he did it. But it's sort of like a proto
01:05:29
Trumpian or or Trump era mentality of like there is a
01:05:34
real problem in the way the system works.
01:05:36
But I could get mine by. Engineering, Denzel Washington
01:05:40
and Training Day. I will do anything you want me
01:05:42
to do. Come on.
01:05:49
Oh, I haven't gotten to that party.
01:05:50
I'm, you know, not that far. But that's I'm excited to get to
01:05:54
that line. That's I'm fascinated in what
01:06:00
way he like gives us. What's he expound on that?
01:06:04
There are people, the people he heroizes and he loves, the art
01:06:08
of war. He loves but the art of.
01:06:11
War isn't. I feel like the people who love
01:06:13
the art of war didn't read the Art of War.
01:06:15
The actual art of. War, you know, he, he, he, he
01:06:21
talks to the students and says you're warriors in a war against
01:06:24
black people and we're going to fight and win.
01:06:25
You know, he could see how his messages were somehow compelling
01:06:28
to people who did feel like were unfair.
01:06:30
But then he'd be like, you know, he loves Denzel Washington
01:06:33
Training Day, like he loves the principal in New Jersey.
01:06:40
Why am I blanking at his name? Oh, stand the stand and deliver,
01:06:43
guy. Yeah, stand.
01:06:44
You know who? Who?
01:06:45
I may ask Joe Harp who? No Joe Clark, who would walk
01:06:49
around with a baseball bat. You know, like Clark would.
01:06:51
Not stand in, not the inside user.
01:06:53
Played by Lean on Me. Lean on Oh, sorry.
01:06:56
Yeah, OK. Yeah, so it's like he, he, he,
01:07:00
he heroizes like the principal who walked around the halls of
01:07:04
his high school with a baseball bat, kicking students out, you
01:07:08
know? So like, he has a very specific
01:07:09
vision of power, you know? What I love about these people
01:07:12
is they never fucking finish the story.
01:07:16
It's just like Denzel Washington.
01:07:18
Yeah, Denzel Washington's character dies in training.
01:07:21
Alfonso Harris is dead. And you know what happened to
01:07:24
Joe Clark? He ended up getting pushed out,
01:07:28
and he became a prison guard at a juvenile detention center
01:07:32
where he was investigated for torturing students.
01:07:34
It's like. You know who my personal hero
01:07:37
is, by the way? Icarus, because that guy flew
01:07:38
really high. That guy was so good at flying
01:07:42
high. And I'm just like, that's me.
01:07:43
I want to fly high too. Don't tell me what happens, but
01:07:47
he's cool. Katie, great to have you on the
01:07:50
show. I miss the dead cat days.
01:07:52
This was a lot of fun. And the New York Times needs to
01:07:55
cut everybody loose. You know, it's a world of
01:07:57
influencers now, but. I mean, let them do what they
01:08:00
want, not fire people, right? That's me, yeah.
01:08:02
Read read yeah, not let them keep their jobs and.
01:08:06
All freelancers. It's all just yeah.
01:08:09
Miracle children, race, education and a true story of
01:08:12
false promises by Katie Benner, who we've been talking to and
01:08:15
her co-author Erica Green. Also the New York Times
01:08:17
wonderful book important to read.
01:08:19
Especially important now is we've all all morals who are the
01:08:26
elites. How colleges work are up for
01:08:28
debate. I guess so understand your
01:08:30
history. And I think, you know, obviously
01:08:33
this is about once it's, you know, it's school.
01:08:36
But I think the, you know, the book is clearly about the
01:08:39
broader story of how American elite education has changed over
01:08:43
the decades. Thank.
01:08:44
You. Thank you.
01:08:46
Thanks. Thank you for tuning into this
01:08:48
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