Rick Wilson and David Brooks: MAGA to the Max

Hello and welcome to the Borg podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller.
I had a big think podcast planned for today with David Brooks about the meritocracy and we're still going to do some of that in segment two. But you know the news intervened and we were reminded that there is no big thinking in

Donald Trump's cacistocracy

of only raw power and absurdity. And so I turned to the man that would be helpful on that topic.
He's the co-founder of the Lincoln Project, host of the podcast, The Enemies List, and also writes at Rick Wilson's sub stack. It's Rick Wilson.
Yeah, The Enemies List. The attorney general is going to have one, it seems like.
Yeah, look yeah look i mean here's the the real talk and i think a lot of people need to reflect on this because most americans came to be aware of matt gates when he entered congress but you know folks like me i've known matt gates since his dad was the state senate president in florida many many years ago in my misspent youth same and matt matt'sate. Matt's a bad guy.
And a lot of people think, oh, he's that crazy smart ass on Fox. He's just one of those crazy Republicans now.
Matt's a bad guy. He's a dark figure.
Matt could not get, he could not pass the security clearance to run a waffle house, which is why Trump is about to make him the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America, most likely in a recess appointment because he cannot be appointed appropriately. Even in the compliance Senate that Trump will have, he can't get this guy through.
So as Tim, you and I and many, many other people have been banging the drum for years saying it's going to be much worse than you think. It's much than we thought i want to get into kind of uh the the particulars about matt gates as dark figure uh in a second and his traits because i think that some people miss miss underestimate him to borrow a word but just like the the biggest picture so since we're last together gates is nominated for attorney general trump uh puts that out in a release.
There was a report from Axios that this idea was hatched on the Trump plane, maybe as recently as yesterday morning, because the lawyers, the credible lawyers who also were going to be problems in their own right, you know, we're talking a little bit too high-minded legal theory from Trump, and Trump wanted a little bit more, you know, real talk about how they're going to go after his foes. In addition, he nominated for the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, somebody that, yeah, somebody that many people think might be rushing.
He might as well just put Medvedev at the DNI. But I mean, what did Vladimir Putin just not want to take the commute every week to D.C.? So, both of these happened yesterday.
And before we get into the particulars, I want to grab that comment you made about how they're not going to be confirmed, because I'm not so sure about that. I just don't know that our old friends in the establishment, the old, the pre-mega Republican establishment, have come to terms with their new reality.
And I hate to pick on Lisa Murkowski, because she's probably the best of a bad bunch, but I want to play a quick clip from her. I just said, I don't think it's a serious litigation attorney general.
We need to have a serious attorney general, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to consider somebody that is serious. This one was not on my bingo card card not on her bingo card really yeah if you missed yeah if you missed that it was audio is a little low it is a hallway walk-in talk she says she's not a serious nomination she looks forward to considering someone serious this was not on her bingo card you don't live in a serious time you're not in a serious party you're not in a serious senate this is what you're gonna get lisa all these guys on the hill even max miller is a maggie guy is like this guy can't get confirmed are we sure you just even said that right are we sure he can't get confirmed are you sure that they're not just going to confirm him look matt gates from the lowest up he's a guy with duis he's a guy with where they found a dead guy in his dorm room and it was never really explained completely.
He's a guy who is the subject of a current ethics investigation in the house over teenage sex trafficking. He's a guy who, because his friends went to jail for 11 years for him in Florida, just barely got out of being in a case where he paid his buddy, his running buddy, Venmo for teenage hookers that they took out of the country.
When he lived in Tallahassee in the state house, he was part of what they called the game. I think the game was a little after your time, but it was a group of male Republican legislators who kept score every year about who they screwed, who they fucked.
You get a point for a lobbyist because that's easy. You get two points for a staffer, three for an intern, four for the wife of a fellow member of the legislature, all this kind of stuff, right? Matt's a bad guy.
And even Matt will have trouble getting through the Senate. Now, will the people like Mike Walls or John Ratliff or even Kristy Noem have trouble? No, they'll be confirmed at a run.
They'll be confirmed. What about the weekend Fox and Friends host that's going to be in charge of the largest bureaucracy in the world? Having worked for a Secretary of Defense for some time, I can tell you that is a job for a serious person.
I think there are going to be people who push back on that one. I don't think it'll be in the ugly way.
I think it'll be in the way that puts the scope of the job in front of him and sets him up for failure in the hearings. Pete Hegseth is a lightweight.
He's a perfectly affable, friendly guy. And it's interesting to me that the MAGA response is, he served two tours, one in Afghanistan, one in Iraq.

Okay. There is nothing wrong with that.
I salute him. I honor him for that.
But you're running a $900 billion a year enterprise in which the lives of 2.5 million active guard and reserve troops are your purview, in which the lives of 700,000 civilian employees are your purview, in which you have to be a diplomat, an intelligence officer, the manager of one of the largest corporate enterprises in the world. And Pete Hexeth has never managed anything bigger than an army platoon.
And God bless him for it. But this is a complex, multivariate problem.
And he, I think, comes across into my mind, something as a sop to the fact that we're not seeing the Rick Grinnells and the Kash Patels getting A-tier jobs. And so they're going to say, okay, well, he'll be our guy who goes in and fights the woke military.
I still think he has trouble getting confirmed. You do? Yep.
Yeah. So this is where I just, I'm with you on like 97% of the words.
Every once in a while, we're not aligned, Rick. We're aligned often.
I think that a big wake-up call happened in the last 48 hours for the John Cornans of the world, for John Thune even, who's now going to be the Senate Majority Leader, for Mike Simpson from Idaho, who was caught in the hallway yesterday being like, holy shit, what is this? A lot of them, I think, thought that Trump was going to make it easy on them.

That he was going to put in somebody that they know,

like a Mike Lee at the DOJ,

and that then they'd put a Gates type

or a Cash Patel or a Rick Grinnell

in a non-confirmable position.

And they'd put them in there,

and that person would be able to create trouble.

And they'd be kind of clownish,

and every once in a while something would flare up. I don't think that they realized the ticket that they bought all right and the ticket that they bought is full clown show and donald trump per mark caputo's reporting uh donald trump expects matt gates to be his attorney general and expects pete hegseth to be his secretary of defense and he's gonna make those guys call his bluff.
And I don't think that they're going to do it. I mean, part of the problem is Matt could not pass the security screening for a GS nine clerk.
Neither could Donald Trump though. Well, neither could Trump.
But I think in Matt's case, some of the stuff is so egregious. Hegseth is just a lightweight.
There's nothing that I'm aware of in Hegseth's background that's disqualifying. Matt has things in his background that are disqualifying for the senior law enforcement officer of the country.
But in Trump's case, he doesn't care if he recess appoints Matt because he figures Matt could go there for the 210 days, I guess it is. He can be in a recess appointment and cause maximal chaos and launch investigations and launch special prosecutors and go through all this like array of all this array of, of punish Trump's enemies action that would make Trump happy.
And now the problem is Gates is not stupid and we should all recognize that also. Thank okay that is not a dumb guy that's a very bright guy yeah sociopathic i would argue but a bright guy and i think that's one of the problems that matt would probably rather fight a confirmation battle because it makes him more famous which is one of his big drivers big motivators and he would rather fight that confirmation battle and then lose it and have Trump recess appoint him so he can be even more unhinged.
He understands Trump's psychology very well. He's going to please Trump and cause chaos, cause trouble, cause pain, because Trump does have an intent to have revenge on people who have caused him harm, allegedly, in his brain.
So there is some limited time on the recess appointment, but you know, he can buy time. You can have an acting secretary for a little while and then a recess appointment.
I think it's 210 or 215 days. Yeah.
So you can kick the can though. You have an acting appointment, a recess.
And then over the course of that time, a bunch of other crazy shit pops up pops up you know the flooding is on with shit and if these guys find their spine which i which i do not expect in january nope are they going to have it in march are they going to have it in june when they want to get their tax bill through like are they going to want to keep having this fight i just don't think so i think that they're all going to fold and it's going to be crazier than they think. And they just, they did not let their imaginations run wild.
Like they thought that they were getting 2017 Trump. And what Trump has in store for them is beyond what any of them had even conceived, I think.
And I think that the Gates and Hegseth appointments and Tulsi for that matter are a wake up call to that. Well, what do you think about the possibility he uses Article 3 and just recesses? The entire cabinet? The entire cabinet.
Ed Whelan tweeted about this yesterday at EPBC. At EPBC, yeah.
And he's not as TDS inflicted at us, but as a conservative, anti-Trump conservative, a serious legal guy. And he said he's worried about this.
And he, at the end of a thread where he explained this, I'll put the thread in the show notes for people who want to read the particulars of how this would work in the rumor that he's hearing and he's like mike johnson needs to say no because my to recess yeah and my exactly my reply to him was like mike johnson's not saying no to anything mike johnson's not saying no to anything okay so yeah so it's possible they could reset you know chuck ton tweeted yesterday oh the cabinet hearings are going to be good tv maybe maybe maybe they're not going to have i don't i don't think they have a plan i think that they have optionality and i think they want to and donald trump thinks he's going to get what he wants and he's going to see what happens and that's how he lives man he lives off the land and if these guys try to stand up to him then he is going to bully them and if they fold which i expect then you know normal hearings. He owns them.
Yeah. I made a point to one of our old Republican friends yesterday who was like, oh, no, this is just, he's getting his yips out.
He's just getting, Susie's going to take care of this. I'm like, get the hell out of here, Susie.
Come on. She's the Reince Priebus of John Kelly's.
She is now completely done. Susie and Reince were both my boss.
So they've both been my boss. And I'm telling you, they're the same.
Reince is like two ticks more of a pathetic pleaser, you know? Right. So like Reince never said no one time, I don't think.
Maybe he didn't with mine. Maybe he said no to a proxy to Jared and made Jared go say no or to Bannon.
But I don't think ryan's ever looked at trump in the eyes said no suzy will do that but she's just picking her battles man like she didn't say no to the gates thing it went out it wasn't a bleat like it was an official press release like yeah she's on board with all this and and that's the thing is there were people there were people that that when the election was over it was like oh come on you know that was all just show. I'm like, have you been dead for 10 years? Have you been dead? Have you been in a coma for 10 years? Because it's not the show.
The show is the thing. It's astonishing to me how many people.
I was looking at Twitter yesterday, and it's like reporters, Hill reporters, this is going to be a tough confirmation. Okay, we'll see.
Maybe I'll be wrong. I've been wrong before.
We'll see how that goes in Januaryuary just on gates and tulsi and their personalities in particular i'm with you there uh ken white popat good guy uh he had a newsletter this morning about you know and i think you made one good point at one point i'll disagree with about how gates is less dangerous he said because gates is not that smart and gate doesn't know his way around doj and i agree with him on the right? Like you could have picked somebody who is like a Jeff Clark, who's been in the building, who knows, you know, and so Gates will need that. But Gates is not, is not Louie Gohmert or MTG at all.
This is a smart, savvy person. You know, we worked for when his dad was Senate president.
I've known Matt since he was like the freshest new member of the state house. And he got elected when he was like 21 or some bullshit.
Right. Yeah.
Matt is not dumb. Matt is capricious.
Matt is, again, I would argue sociopathic. I would certainly argue that Matt is driven by vanity and ego at a level that even for politics is extraordinary, but he's not stupid.
He is, he is not a dumb guy. Look, is he a great lawyer of any kind? No, but Matt has never had to have that.
He, he is incredibly wealthy. He is incredibly manipulative.
And I think one thing that's gotten lost in the shuffle, let's not forget Matt Gates was a guy just to troll the libs who invited Charles Johnson, a white supremacist to a state of the union address.

He has some darkness in him that I think hearings would be great to bring out.

But look, I think there's a real possibility.

He just Trump just wipes the slate, recesses it all and says, I can't wait.

We have to make America great again now. So I'm going to I'm going to do this because all my cabinet members, I need them on day one.
Yeah. Bring it John Thune.
We'll see. I know which side I know.
I think I'll win that one. As much as it was amusing to watch Mitch McConnell put a little ding on Donald Trump on the way out the door.
Do not expect John Thune y'all to be a profile in courage. He is not that guy.
He is a go-along-to-get-along guy. All right.
On the Tulsi side of it, both of us know Matt, and so I think can attest to his strengths and weaknesses with some credibility. I don't know.
I've never met Tulsi. Never met her.
In some ways, Tulsi worries me more than Matt because, well, I think Matt will act in predictably concerning ways across various verticals, which we'll be discussing for years if he gets his job. Tulsi is a little bit more of a wild card.
It could be a general Flynn. I can't tell if she is just a savvy and sociopathic or if she's got a screw loose like Mike Flynn.
I think that that choice is pretty alarming for me. I don't know where you land on it.
I am very alarmed by Tulsi and folks that both both active and retired folks from the intelligence defense community yesterday that i was in communication with were freaked out about her as one guy said you know john ratcliffe he's not very worldly he is you know just a trump guy he's not that smart he's just a trump guy bannon told me six months ago ratcliffe was going to get the job because they like to golf together like that's the kind of guy it is like that's a good guy together right he's a back slapper he's a he's a he's a you know beer after beer after 18 holes guy exactly yeah mike walls was a non-trump guy became a trump guy former green beret yeah he doesn't worry me in national security advisor he's not he's not qualified for, but he doesn't terrify me. Tulsi, remember, folks, when the Russians were backing Assad when he was using nerve agents on his own people, Tulsi was the one member of Congress who was pro-Syria.
She has routinely and repeatedly said, if we oppose Putin on anything, it's nuclear war. She has reposed trade sanctions and economic sanctions against Russia after the Ukraine invasion.
Whatever's broken in Tulsi's brain, she's like the RFK Jr. of foreign policy.
He has these beliefs that are at wild variance with what would be great for the country or what would be normal for any other elected or appointed position. But I think there's something really dark about her.
There are a lot of people in the intelligence world who are deeply concerned about her. And you put somebody like that, again, with no qualifications to speak of into that position.
She was an army major with an intel background, but not at the level. It's like, you know, I fly small planes.
I can't fly 747. That's the kind of jump you're going to see there.
But her at the top of the intelligence food chain with access to every single program out there, that should scare the hell out of people. All right.
So let's leave it at this. So what, I mean, a lot of potential things to be worried about.
What is it? What's at the top of your list right now? My biggest worry right now is that you've got a critical mass of folks inside Trump's universe who are going to cut off Ukraine immediately and hand Putin a major victory in Europe. I know that seems like a weird thing for like, because of all the threats and our personal safety and all that stuff.
I think that can happen almost on the first first day it's going to take them a while to spin up the machine to prosecute and persecute all of us but on the first day they can they can hand put in ukraine if they want to are you really worried about that the personal safety stuff on domestic side yeah i get enough death threats that aren't i mean look like you and 99 of them are just crazy people they're just shit talkers but i've shit talkers. But I've dealt with the FBI and a bunch of these guys just recently who, you know, here's your address, here's your house, here's your license plate number, I'm coming to kill you, blah, blah, blah.
I think that the people that were involved in the impeachments and the legal efforts that indicted Trump and maybe now Gates. I think those folks are in huge trouble.
Yeah. I, yeah, that, I, I don't know beyond that.
I think that's the one area where it's maybe my imagination that is yet to be fully formed, but, uh, we will see brother Rick, thank you for coming in at the last second. I just, uh, you know, when Matt Gates is in the news, I needed a Florida man who can, uh, shoot people straight about the kind of, the kind of products that the soil in your great state is creating for our

country.

Something's always trying to kill you in the great state of Florida.

Thank you to Rick Wilson.

Up next,

David Brooks.

Yeah.

Thanks,

Tim. All right, and we are back.

I'm delighted to be here with a contributing writer at The Atlantic,

a columnist for The New York Times and a commentator on PBS NewsHour.

He wrote the cover story of the December issue of The Atlantic,

How the Ivy League Broke America. The piece is now up at The Atlantic.
Go subscribe. David Brooks, how you doing, David? Good to be with you.
I think this is my first time on a Bulwark podcast, so I'm thrilled. Oh, is that true? I did not know if you'd been here with Charlie.
Well, welcome. I'm grateful to have you, and we'll see how you do.
Maybe we'll have you back. Okay, I'm a little nervous now.
You've turned up the pressure. I want to spend most of the time on the Ivies, but news has intervened, and Donald Trump, I think, requires us to at least pick your brain a little bit about the recent appointments.
Really, I think, some meritocratic appointments to get into the topic of your article. We have Pete Hegseth, Weekend Fox and Friends host running a three million plus bureaucracy in the United States military.
We've got Matt Gaetz as the attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard, I keep mispronouncing her name, Tulsi Gabbard running the American Intelligence Agency. So open floor just for any thoughts you have on that.
Yeah, I'm very curious. I've been curious about what the Trump administration will be like.
And so my going presumption is that it's not going to be fascist. It's just going to be incompetent.
And so I've been looking to, does he name people who are effective authoritarians or does he name people who are incompetent and will match his inability to have a policy process and in the beginning uh way back a couple days ago i thought oh pretty serious like marco rubio that's a legitimate secretary of state that's like pretty and it happened on the same day i think that john thune was elected majority leader of the u.s senate which i thought was a good thing too because, because he's a serious guy, normal Republican. But the good wishes didn't last.
And so Matt Gaetz and all and Tulsi Gabbard, all the new appointments have been maggot to the max. And the question becomes, and this will be a very early indicator of what kind of Senate we're dealing with.
Do they confirm Gaetz? There's obviously a lot of suspicion of him, host hostility he's held in maximally low regard but are they so beholden to trump they're just push him on through and so to me that'll be an indicator of how regular republicans are going to react to this second term yeah i think that gates is going to get through but we will see i guess i just wonder when you frame it that, like competent authoritarian versus incompetent clown show, I don't think you said clown show, but I'll fill that in. There's some ways that you could look at that and that lowers people's worries, right? That it's like, okay, well, how much trouble can we get in with people that don't know their way around the building at the Pentagon or at DOJ? Do you feel that way? Or I mean, incompetence can also yield to some pretty big threats as well, huh? I think it's better than incipient fascism, but it's not good.
During the first three years of Trump's first term, we lucked out. We didn't have much of an international crisis.
We didn't live in a particularly dangerous world. There was not a task that required a lot of complex heavy lifting.
Dealing with the Middle East right now requires a lot of complex heavy lifting. Dealing with China right now, same.
Obviously, Ukraine. And so, to me, the possibilities for just major screw-ups is out there.
And so, it makes me slightly more comforted, but not a lot.

And competence is really bad.

I've got some good news for you in the Middle East.

A different Fox News show host, Mike Huckabee, will be the envoy to Israel.

So we already have that appointment.

And so there's a lot of talent left on the Fox News bench to still be appointed for the

remaining slots, though.

So we'll see.

Between the House of Representatives and Fox News, he's pretty much emptying out both places. I guess this does kind of relate to the topic of the article and our sorting.
There aren't a lot of bureaucrats for him to be able to pick, right? Like when you totally sort the parties, I mean, I don't mean this to understate the threat. Our listeners know my concerns about the threat.
But like, part of the explanation is that Trump wants loyalists and watches a lot of TV. And so he wants people on TV.
Part of the reason is that like the bench is really thin, because the types of people who resorted into the Democratic Party are the types of, you know, college educated, Ivy League educated, bureaucrats, careers, that, you know, were maybe center-right that had you in our worldview and now wouldn't want to go work for Trump. I used to go to the end of terms when there was a two-term president, and I would go in to interview somebody in the White House.
I'd look around the halls, and I'd think, they're down to this? By the end of terms, administrations have tended to have exhausted the top tier talent. And so they're down to the B players and the C players.
But Trump never had access to the Republican A or B talent. And so their world is filled with conservatives who are really good at their job, really thoughtful, really good at weighing evidence.
And they work at places like the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Institute or the Hudson Institute or the Hoover Institution.

But those people are not in Trump administrations. And so in the first term, he had what they called the grownups like Jim Mattis and then a lot of people who didn't know their way around a policy world.
Now he's got probably more people who have more experience in policy world, but it remains to be seen of whether they actually can do the nuts and bolts of governing. I once asked the president, I can say who it is, it was George W.
Bush, what'd you learn being in the White House? You didn't know beforehand. And he said, I learned there's a lot of passive aggressive behavior in government.
And what he means by that, the president makes a decision and then nothing happens. And so it's up to the people under the president to actually execute the policy.
And that turns out to be quite hard. And if you don't have smart people doing that, then just nothing gets done because the president can make a decision and then just nothing.
Yeah. It seems like we could be seeing a worse option than a passive aggressive gridlock, which is like just stupid willingness to go along, right? Like the passive aggressiveness did a lot of protecting of us, I think, in the first Trump term.
And we might not be seeing that this time around. it's possible though it's possible the what's left of the career bureaucracy will put up a fight and i have to say like i've been in government or not in government i've been in washington for a

long long time and i know a lot of people who are career government people. And I've talked to a lot of Republican cabinet secretaries.
What do you think of your career people? And in most cases, they say that they're wonderful. They're not political.
They're not ideological. They're just trying to do their job.
And that's especially true, I'd say, at the Office of Management Budget.

It's especially true at the State Department.

It's especially true in the intelligence communities.

Certainly the Defense Department.

Military people want to stay out of politics.

It's probably less true in HHS and in housing and some of the other.

But the idea that they're all a bunch of ideological actors trying to, you know, be the deep state and take over America from the left, that's just not reality.

That's just not who these people are.

They just want to do their job and not be interfered by something that's nakedly political you seem a little bit more sanguine than me um which is good i like having a balance of views we don't need total hair on fire all the time what but what worries you the most as you look out a year or two years of a Trump 2.0? No, I tend to be irrationally optimistic. And so sanguine is my default state.
So sometimes that works out because people are too terrified a lot of the time. And sometimes I walk blindly into the disaster.
So you should know this is temperamental more than anything else. All right.
Well, just so you know, I think that you're falling on side two on this one but we'll see how it turns out just want to put my cards on the table i don't think that's a secret but anyway continue i think the worst thing i mean i think the tariffs will be truly terrible for america inflationary will kick up a lot of public opposition i think the deportations which are truly terrible for you america i think the potential of a war against China have certainly ramped up.

We're obviously going to get in a trade war, whether that leads to a shooting war.

I think it ramps up.

The thing that I'm genuinely curious about is, and a couple of people like Yuval Levin of AEI have been saying this, people tend to overread their mandates.

And in my experience, just covering the campaign, the kind of Trump voters who go to Trump rallies are quite different than the kind of voters, Trump voters who don't go to Trump rallies, which is to say the Trump rally goers are into MAGA full bore. They want the deportations.
They want, you know, they want the whole package. A lot of people who voted for Trump just want to return to the economy of 2019, and they do not buy into the broader agenda.
So if Trump starts pushing things like deportation, will those Trump voters flee from him? Will his approvals go down to the 30s, say? And will he, who cares about popularity more than anything else, react? Don't know the answer to that question, that's my somewhat sanguine approach that voters his own voters will will walk away it's fair i'm worried a little bit that we got in trump 1.0 administration that appealed to the that second group of voters more and this administration will be appealing more to the rally goers but um we will see we have some evidence of that the last two days. I want to get to the cover story, how the Ivy League broke America.
I guess I have, I sort of summed it up myself as the two main areas where I think that the Ivy League has failed us that you cover. But before we get into kind of breaking it down like that, why don't you give us like the Reader's Digest version of a very extensive case that you're making against the Ivy League? Well, America is divided.
We're obviously divided

politically, and the main political divide is the diploma divide, with high school educated voters

going for the Republicans and college educated voters going for the Democrats. So that's one,

just the massive political divide in our society. So how did that come about? But it's not only a

political divide, it's a social and moral divide. And so high school educated voters die nine years sooner than college educated voters.
They're 10 times more likely to die of opioid addictions. They're much more likely to be obese.
They're much more likely to divorce. They're much more likely to have kids out of wedlock.
And they're much more likely to have no friends. So the average 24% of people with a high school degree say they have no close friends compared to 10% with a college degree.
And so we've created a caste society and that society is changing. And our politics, that caste society is changing just our lives.
And so how did that come about? Well, it was created. It was created by people who had the best of intentions, but decided it would be a good idea to segregate the smartest people in America and concentrate them in a few elite universities.
And so this happened in the 1950s, and it changed childhood. Now people with college-educated parents, they practice a kind of manic childhood where they have to prepare and train to get into these elite universities.
It changed elementary schools. And so the schools do less recess art so they can do more standardized testing.
So it changed all of society and it created this vast social chasm. And the problem is that intelligence is not that important.
It's important, sure, But it's not the way we should be segregating society. It's not a good definition of human ability.
What matters is, are you curious? Do you have drive? Are you good at teams? And so the basic point of the argument, we've created a social chasm down the middle of our society based on stupid criteria. And we need to change the criteria so we're less divided and not a caste society i'm extremely hostile to elite universities and uh and so sympathetic to your argument and and the ways they failed i guess it's that last point though that i'm not i mean i'd love to blame harvard for everything but i guess i'm not sure that the the chicken and the egg on the creating of the increased division here falls on the higher ed universities.
I mean, isn't it true that technology and globalization made this sort of inevitable, that we are going to have a divide between people that could succeed more in the type of information economy that we have now versus types of people that could have succeeded in industrial- economies? Well, look at who succeeds. People with super high IQs do a bit better than people with normal median IQs, but not a lot better.
And there's pretty low correlation between how smart you are and how good you are at working at teams or how kind you are. Ask, why do people get fired? In 11% of cases, people get fired because they lack the intelligence or technical ability to do the job.
In 89% of cases, it's because they're not good teammates. They're uncoachable.
They have bad character. And so the things that lead to success in any company have nothing to do with or have little to do with how intelligent you are.
Second, we sort people by academic ability, by how they do well in school. What's the correlation between academic grades and life performance? It's practically zero.
Doing well in school is not the same as doing well in life. Because, you know, being in school is you're just following the instructions from a teacher.
In life, you have to steer yourself. Being good in school is pretty solitary, beating other people and ranking higher than them.
Being good in life is very social. You got to be good on teams.
And so Google doesn't look at college grades when they hire people because they don't matter. And so what I'm saying is that we have a system that sorts people by the things that don't lead to ability in the real information age economy.
And the problem with our society is that our social status structure is built around these elite universities at the top. I'm not talking about across society.
Of course, for most of Americans, what happens to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton is not important to them. But in the media, in the law, in Hollywood, in business, 52% or 54%, depending on which study you go to, of the people who work in these places went to the same couple dozen universities.
In the media, 52% of the employees of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal went to the same few universities. And so we've created this opportunity structure where our leadership positions over society are dominated quite unfairly by people who were sorted at age 18, according to certain criteria.
So it's not a necessary function of the information age. It's a necessary function of the sorting system we set up.
What are some alternative sorting systems? Well, first, the history of the meritocracy is the history of different definitions of the word merit. So in the 1930s, our social ideal was the well-bred man.
And so to get into Harvard, you didn't have to study hard. In fact, if you studied hard, you were a social outcast at Harvard.
But you had to be white. You had to be, it helped if your family came over on the Mayflower or the boat after that.
It helped if you were, if your dad went to Harvard. And so they had a social ideal the well-bred man and so if you want to think about franklin roosevelt he sort of personifies that there's no way how franklin roosevelt could get into harvard today because he was not a great student but he had a first-class temperament as oliver wendell holmes said then that was replaced by the cognitive elite doing well in scores so if i was given the keys to the merit, and I would say, how should we sort people? And a different way to ask, what is the true definition of ability? To me, the true definition of ability includes intelligence, but it also includes how motivated are you? How curious are you? How good are you at social intelligence? How good are you at teams? What's the ruling passion of your soul? Do you try hard? Are you calm in a crisis? And so to me, what matters is what they call the non-cognitive traits.
Cognitive traits are things that are easy to measure. What's your ICT score? How'd you do on the algebra test? Non-cognitive traits are the moral, emotional, and social abilities that really matter more than the cognitive traits.
And yet we've shunted aside the non-cognitive traits because they're harder to count and they're harder to quantify. I think that would be a smart thing for the elite colleges to do, to start looking at different ways to measure.
Obviously, you have to have some kind of rubric. You're not going to just randomly pick people via lottery.
I guess, I don't know, maybe some people think that would be preferable. I don't know that that gets to the underlying divide, like as to what is causing the underlying divide, because look at those traits.
How motivated are you? Do you try hard? How much do you care about this sort of stuff? How much do you want to work together? To me, that system would end up having the same fault lines that we currently do. The types of people that are upset about the meritocracy, working class people, people that have gotten left behind by society, jealous elites that don't feel like they're culturally ascendant, they're still going to be on the outside looking in of a system that ranks highly on those non-cognitive skills.
Like all those non-cognitive skills you just listed out to me sound like Pete Buttigieg. They don't sound like Pete Hegseth.
And I don't even mean this in a judgment sense. Generic MAGA person who's upset about society, I think, is also going to be behind in the non-cognitive traits.
Right? No, I don't think so. First, we decided we need a standardized system where we could measure everybody across according to one criteria, and they would be helpfully organized on a bell curve.
And intelligence met that ability. And so if you measure all of society according to one trait that's standardized along a bell curve, you're going to get a top 5%.
And you skim those, and those are your students. But my view, the ability to try hard, first of all, it's way more in your control than your IQ.
Second, the ability to be curious, the ability to be kind to people. In my experience, that's a more democratically distributed set of traits.
And if we had those traits, we wouldn't measure everybody by one criteria. We'd have multiple criterias and we'd have a thing called opportunity pluralism.
And opportunity pluralism is the belief that we shouldn't just have one mountaintop in society. We should have a lot of mountaintops.
All the colleges shouldn't be basically slightly less selective versions of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. We should have a lot of different kinds of colleges doing a lot of different things.
And the world I'm describing is not something I just made up. It's something that's already existing in nascent form all across America.
So for example, and there are schools across the country called project-based learning schools. And a lot of schools who are not do some project-based learning.
And in some of those schools, there's no report cards. There's no class periods.
Students work in groups, and they're assigned a big challenge. So I saw a movie once about high-tech high in San Diego.
And the students there had to analyze why civilizations decline. And then as a group, they had to build this vast wooden gizmo that would illustrate all the different factors that go into civilization that will decline with gears and levers.
And so we're studying that and working on that project is more like work than sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture. And in my view, those project-based learnings prepare students and measure students and show the different realms of ability that is better than filling in bubbles in a multiple choice test.
And when you leave a project-based school, you might have grades in SAT scores, but you also have something called a portfolio, a portfolio of all your projects. And in some schools, you have to do a portfolio defense.
You have to defend your project the way a doctoral student may defend a dissertation. And to me, that's just a broader way to educate people, a broader way to assess people.
And then you could have independent assessment centers that would help students make choices in the meritocracy. What's the right school for me? Or do it help admissions officers? What kind of kid are we looking for here? Everybody could make much better decisions.
Well, I think that we should let a thousand flowers bloom and have all kinds of different schools. And we could not be more aligned on the sort of one track you know you got your kid has to test well and do and give good grades uh because like when i think about it like my i'm middle age now like my friends from like high school that are the most or from younger life that are the most successful didn't really go to ivy's like went to colorado old miss gw rice middlebury bemidji state i just am thinking about like my friend group that they do have something in common right like they are good communicators they you know work well with others they most mostly had good parents right and like came from you know families that were you, where the family structure was supportive of them and their curiosity.
And so I think that it would, that the system that you're recommending, I totally support. I just do wonder if it doesn't like address the, you know, if the divide doesn't get addressed, really.
Is it like the, that you still get kids from the working class community that are the most, you know, that are the best communicators that have parents that support them, right? And like there still is a selection bias that's like unfixable. I don't know.
What do you think about that? There's probably some selection bias, but like I say, I don't think traits like kindness are particularly well distributed. I think they're pretty widely distributed.
If anything, if you look at some of the studies of who's a good worker, students who went to the Ivy League perform slightly worse than other students on how good a teammate are you. And so to me, that's just much more widely distributed.
The second thing, it's a mistake to think that we can sort people at age 18 and know what we're talking about. And one of the other assumptions of the system we have now is the belief that there's this one thing, we can measure it at a test at 18, and it's static through life.
And that may be true of intelligence. It's not true of most other traits.
Let's take curiosity. Kids asked zillions of questions when they're three.
Like if you're around a three-year-old, they're asking literally hundreds of questions an hour. You get them the same person at fifth grade, they're asking maybe one question an hour.
School squeezes curiosity out of them. Now, how does it do that? Because the teachers have to teach to certain state standards, teach to the test.
And if a second grader asks some random question, that threatens to take the class off in the wrong direction. The teacher has to quash it so they can cover the material.
And so curiosity is a very dynamic property. Some people can come in very curious, but if the system crushes it out of them by age 11, they'll probably stay incurious for the rest of their lives.
And so I think it's a mistake to judge people by static trait rather than nurturing developing abilities. One of the problems that jumped out to me from the article that I was like, yes, is actually what is happening to people that go to the Ivy League after they leave, right? And like how different that is from an earlier era.
I think one of our problems is that we have the smartest people and we're funneling them into jobs where they're doing mostly PowerPoints for big corporations. And maybe that's something about the types of people they're recruiting or maybe that's something about some other element of our society.
But you wrote about that a little bit too, how we're funneling these people into these big consulting firms. I should say, I think I like the Ivy Leagues more than you do.
I taught at Yale off and on for 20 years. I went to New York Chicago, kind of an elite place.
And I think they're wonderful institutions. And the people in them understand the problems that I'm describing.
We're just trapped in a system that was designed 70 years ago. Now, as for why so many students go into, say, finance and consulting, the PowerPoint business, i think it's in part and when i first started teaching at these places people would proudly go to bain and mckinsey and goldman right now they go to bain mckinsey and goldman but they're a little ashamed about it but they still okay that's progress are we done progress and one of the reasons they go is you're a college junior you have no idea what you were going to do with your life because you've really never asked the big questions like, what am I on this earth for? In comes a consulting firm or a finance firm, junior year.
And they say, you were a good intern here. We'd like to hire you after you graduate.
So suddenly you have instant security. You know what you're going to do.
You know it's going to be be well-paying and you have a nice answer when people say, what are you going to do after college? And so in my view, a lot of these consulting firms prey on the insecurities of the college grads and swoop in and provide very attractive. And they can always tell themselves, well, I'll work there for a few years.
I'll learn a few things and I'll move on, which is true from a lot of them. The recruiters focus on the elite, and they offer people emotional security, even if it's not what the student would be happiest doing.
What do you think about the Scott Galloway solution to this, which is that the existing elite colleges should be accepting like 10x more people, and that they're hoarding, you know, their endowments, and that, you know, we have a lot more qualified people for elite schools than we did 70 years ago. And that that would then allow you to have a more diverse type of recruitment class.
Both from different types of traits as well as not just racial diversity, but economic diversity and skill set diversity and all that. What do you think about that? I agree with that.
10X sounds like a big ask of these universities, but 2X. I think I made

that number up. I don't want to speak for Scott.
He thinks they should expand great. Yeah, and I

agree with that. They could go 2X and they would do some good.
But the way the system is rigged,

again, we're all stuck in a system. Schools gain cachet and prestige the more people they reject.

So a lot of the big schools send out these fancy brochures to prospective students. And believe me, there's nobody who could get into Harvard who doesn't know about Harvard.
But if you get a fancy brochure from Harvard, you think, oh, they're recruiting me. I should apply.
And so that allows schools to reject 96% of the applicants and boost their rejection numbers. And so the structure of the systems encourages maximum rejection.
Now, there are other schools, again, the future is not something we have to imagine. The future is something we can see right in front of us.
And so at Arizona State University, Michael Crow, the president there, longtime president, takes an entirely different approach. He said, I'm not going to judge the quality of my school by the number of people I can reject.
I'm going to judge it by the number of people I can accept. And as he says, he has more students in his honors college than in all of Stanford University.
He has more Jews than Brandeis University and more Muslims than Jews. Like it's a big place, but it's also, he has achieved the ability to have a very big university, but also a first-class university with great research facilities and things like that.

So ASU is an example of something that's selective, but still a very good university. And there should be more room for ASUs out there.
So how do you break the system, though? Is there a top-down way to do it? Because to me, I read the article, I'm listening to you,

and the answer is you break the system like me,

like my peers, the parents that just start caring about this less.

And finally... Because to me, I read the article, I'm listening to you, and the answer is you break the system like me, like my peers, the parents that just start caring about this less and find more fulfilling endeavors for their children.
But that's hard to do. Is there a top-down way to break it? I think the universities have to do it themselves.
Well, first, we can do it as a society and say we're not going to make schools the central segregation systems of our society. We're not going to sort people by 18.
But the universities right now have a strong incentive to change. First, the affirmative

action Supreme Court decision has taken away their ability to go outside the rigorous sorting system.

So if they want to keep diverse student bodies, they have to change. Second, the Republicans have

just won a big election. They're going to go to war on the universities, not only for the reasons

I'm talking about, but for Gaza and all the other stuff. And so it seems to me universities have a strong incentive to want to avoid an ideological attack on them.
Third, AI is here. And one of the things we know about AI, it's already good at taking standardized tests.
It can already write a paper, then get an A at Harvard. And so the qualities that schools sort for are about to become rendered obsolete by AI.
So they should look for other qualities. As I say, most of the university people I know understand the problem.
And every few years, books get written about how awful the meritocracy is, and nothing ever changes. And so my view is that the universities have to say, okay, this is finally a moment when change has to happen.
And collectively, they decide, well, U.S. News is not going to run American society with its ranking system.
And we're going to opt out of that, and we're going to try a bunch of different new things. Down with U.S.
News. Well, you led me into my final question on your second point there about the Republicans.
The interesting thing is, like, this is a, the conversation that you're having that you said there have been other books about, it's almost like an intra-small-l liberal, not liberal in the progressive sense, but kind of an intra-upper middle class elite, mostly people that voted for Kamala, probably conversation about how to best reorient the meritocratic society. the critique that comes from the right, at least like the Elon and Silicon Valley version of the

right of universities is not the like the meritocratic system has created fissures in our society it's that we need more meritocracy the universities have you know because of affirmative action and you know whatever caring about social justice have brought in too many people of diverse backgrounds and you should be judged just on your skills.

I mean, that's like the ascendant, you know, element of MAGA.

It might seem contradictory, right?

Because like on one hand, the MAGA voters are being left behind, but the MAGA elites want more meritocracy, right?

Like isn't that how they would want to redesign it? I want more meritocracy too. I just want it to be based on an accurate definition of ability.
And so there are some in the tech world, and I certainly know them, who think the only thing that matters is IQ. And they think I got to where I was because of IQ.
All that matters is IQ. And in some industries, frankly, IQ is more important than others.
If you want to be an inventor, it really helps to be really smart. If you want to be an astrophysicist, it helps to be really smart.
Rocket scientist helps to be really smart. But in most fields, that's not really what matters most.
And so there are other members of the tech community. I was interviewing a tech CEO a couple months ago now.
And I said, how do you hire people? And he said, I interview everybody in our firm, which is, big firm so i was a little surprised by that after the interview i say is this person a force of nature do they have willpower do they have a contrarian way of thinking like he asked them what's wrong with our industry and google if google's pretty good at hiring because they really do measure the outcomes and google is is not just looking for IQ. They are, but they're really looking for teamwork.
And so we needed, I think most tech people understand, have a more accurate understanding of ability than our current admission selection criteria to get into college. We could do three hours on this.
I like our temperamental balance, David. So we can hopefully keep the conversation going.

The article is How the Ivy League Broke America. There's a bunch in there I didn't get to.
So go check it out on The Atlantic. And I hope to have you back on the board soon.
A pleasure to be with you. Thank you.
Thanks to David Brooks. Thanks to Rick Wilson.
We'll be back here tomorrow with our pal Amanda Carpenter. See you all then.
Peace. Peace.
This is something people say

They don't really feel with our pal Amanda Carpenter. See you all then.
Peace. I was tired of waking up I was down to test my love Prep school gangsters barred the way

There was nothing I could say

Call me jealous, call me mad

Now I got the thing you had

Somewhere in your family tree

There was someone just like me

The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brough.