What does it really mean to be a neighbor? It's just everyday people, you know, it's just people who are retired. They have a couple hours in the afternoon, so they're going to do patrols. And it's people who are, you know, real estate agents, you know, driving around, like, trying to track how ICE is moving and alert neighbors when things are not safe. The rise of mutual aid in times of crisis. That's this week on Explain It To Me. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. YouTube page to get up-to-date coverage on everything happening, where you'll find hot decks you can only find on our YouTube page. So please, if you think of it, subscribe. All right, let's get into it. Over the weekend, two very different versions of America were on display, one on stage. Bad Bunny turned a major pop moment into a celebration of joy and unity, naming every country across the Americas and reminding audiences that America is bigger than any one flag or administration. At the same time, Donald Trump was doing what he's done for years, picking cultural fights. He went after an Olympic skier for expressing mixed feelings about representing the U.S., amplified a racist video depicting the Obamas, and once again leaned into grievance and division. And the timing matters. Because as Trump fuels these outrage cycles, Congress is quietly reviewing unredacted Epstein files. We should put unredacted around in quotes. Jelaine Maxwell is publicly floating clemency for silence, and senior figures tied to Trump, including his Commerce Secretary, are facing bipartisan calls to resign over their Epstein ties. Jess, before we get into Epstein, what stood out to you about the wave of cultural war fights Trump picked over the weekend? What really stood out to me is how ineffective I feel like he's become. Like, he's really lost his fastball. You know, I think they call it the weave that he does, right, where he, like, finds a way to get a question that he doesn't like. And then he goes some other path and, you know, somehow his base plus the extra 10 percent that voted for him or whatever, like understands what he really meant and all is forgiven. And it doesn't really feel like that's happening anymore, or at least when it comes to these culture war things on Epstein, which we'll get into. People actually do care about it, even though he continually tells them not to on the Bad Bunny performance. You don't spend a lot of time on Twitter. I think he spends zero time on Twitter, actually. But it was really interesting to see prominent conservatives coming out and defending Bad Bunny's halftime show, including Alexis Wilkins, who's Kash Patel's girlfriend, the one that he's flying all over the country to see on our dime. But she said Republicans need to unite and get on better messaging because this branding is fantastic and allows all Dems to get behind it. Also super aesthetic. Chris Rufo, super white wing, defended it. Nick Fuentes, who does go through many phases. But he said, it's literally fake outrage, self-ghettoizing, being overly political, pretending to like the things. We have become the far left. That's about the obsession with, you know, the Kid Rock show. And he said, that looked like me familia. That's like all my cousins. I think I recognized a few people there. and on the horrible racist video of the Obamas depicting them as apes that came out, Laura Ingram, who hosts the 7 O'clock show on Fox, had Caroline Levitt on and asked her about it, said, can you really throw a staffer under the bus? And Levitt tried this, oh, well, this is a leftist media narrative. And she's staring at Laura Ingram, right, saying that this is a leftist media narrative. So it feels like the bullshit is being called a bit more. I'm not predicting some downfall of the Trump administration, but it does feel like he is not hitting his marks in the same way and he's not able to dangle like one trans swimmer in front of people to get them to come over to his side. And the people are actually observing what's going on on the ground and formulating a not so positive view of Trump and co. as a result. What did you think about the outrage over all the culture war stuff that's going on? Well, first off, I have absolutely no interest in Bad Bunny. I couldn't name a song that he sings. But at the same time, I look at the economics of it. It was a brilliant move by the NFL. The NFL is investing in the future. Now, people under the age of 18, the majority are non-white. And this is the most popular artist in the world. So, of course, they should have him as their halftime show. and I thought the halftime show was optimistic and well-produced. I watched it the next day. So I think this was a big win for the NFL. And I just, no one on the Republican side has asked me, but for them and their carnival barkers to come out and say, he wasn't speaking English. And how's that going to help them with a Latino vote? And these cultural icons have such a huge followership. And then I think what was even worse, and again, I'm biased here, but Kid Rock's thing looks so sad. It just looked like, okay, you know, this is sort of what, like, if meth had a concert, it just felt really desperate. It felt really, you know, not very well produced and kind of weird. I think you picked the wrong culture war. They picked the wrong culture war here. Other observations, the things I found most fascinating about the Super Bowl had nothing to do with Bad Bunny. But by the way, I think the Threads account of Elmo had it perfectly that Elmo just hopes both teams have a really fun time. And he said, Bad Bunny isn't a bad bunny, he's a good bunny. Both of those made me laugh. But the thing I noticed was that a quarter of the ads were AI. So it was sort of the AI bull. And the last time tech dominated was in 2022. It was called the crypto bowl because a quarter of the ads were crypto things like ftx and finance we know what happened there and then the time before that where you breached 25 of the super bowl ads being from tech companies was in 2000 and we know what happened there so if economic history repeats itself we're about to see a major drawdown in ai and the other thing that the super bowl kind of connoted for me was i think there's been enormous transfer in power and value from the betting sites remember the big ad a few years ago with Salma Hayek as Cleopatra and I forget the guy's name from Curb Your Enthusiasm Larry David. Not Larry David his sidekick, the guy who lives with him talented funny guy, he played Caesar J.B.'s move. There you go it was bet MGM and companies like Flutter have been on a roll. Flutter shit the bed and missed its earnings. I think everyone's basically moving from wagering to the speculation markets and I think you saw that in the Super Bowl but I think they're on. And again, I'm biased here. I think they're on the wrong end. I think it would have been genius for them to say love the Super Bowl was great. Bad Bunny was was great. I just think that they can't being associated with Kid Rock. You just look lame. Yeah, but they like there is an inability to ever be graceful about absolutely anything. I mean, they couldn't even I'm talking about the administration, not the examples that I read out, but they couldn't even deal with reality that like a straight couple got married at the Super Bowl show. Right. Like there's nothing more pro pro family. And a lot of people are pointing that out. Like this is your quote unquote conservative values. values and you know I've seen the translations of the lyrics like yeah Bad Bunny says some dirty things like Kid Rock sang one of his original hits which is completely profane I know it was supposed to be his redemptive arc for when he found Jesus or whatever but like it's just fucking entertainment you like some shows you don't like other ones I certainly thought it was less politically hostile or whatever you want to call it than Kendrick Lamar's was I mean his message was together we are America, God bless America, led with the American flag. It seemed lovely. Yeah. It reminded me of Ronald Reagan's great speech where he said, you can be an Italian and move to Switzerland, but you'll never be Swiss. You can be Japanese and move to Mexico, but you'll never be Mexican. But all of these people can move to America and be Americans. And I just, I love that. And it's true, right? And seeing all those flags, our strength is essentially we're the operating system for every other country that aspires to be democratic and prosperous. The U.S. used to be the operating system legally, morally, economically for the entire West and people who aspire to be like the West. And when I saw those flags, I just thought of it as their different cultures mostly operating or aspiring to our operating system. Let's move on. Trump's Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, is under bipartisan pressure over alleged lies about his relationship with Epstein. I don't know if you've seen here in the UK, Kelsey thinks there's a 70 percent chance that Keir Starmer is going down. Not because he's in the Epstein files, but because he recommended a cabinet post for someone who's in the Epstein files. I mean, that's that's the bar here versus versus our president. And by the way, this is just some fun facts. Trump is mentioned in the Epstein files more than Jesus is mentioned in the Bible or the term meth is mentioned in all eight seasons of Breaking Bad. That's my fun fact for the day. Has the main character energy. Any thoughts on what's going to happen with Secretary Lutnick here? Well, we're recording this mid-testimony, so I don't know what else will come out, but people are going to be looking into whether he perjured himself, whether he said in any sort of official forum that he didn't associate with Jeffrey Epstein past 2005. I think it was in his confirmation hearing, but he went to the island to have lunch, brought all his kids there in 2012. And I really think that, you know, it needs to be a far bigger part of the discourse on this, that so much of this is happening after Jeffrey Epstein is a convicted sex offender. He is a registered sex offender in 2009. And business continued as usual in many respects. So, you know, I think Lutnick would be an easy person to push out. He seems dug in about Kristi Noem. But Lutnick doesn't really bring a lot of positivity or glow to the administration. And remember early on, we were talking about how he was giving the worst interviews of anybody, and they actually had to take him off of TV because he was doing such a crap job. So I could see that happening. But it's all part of just this overwhelming narrative that's taking shape. And, you know, three million documents is going to take months and months to be able to sift through and then also to be able to connect dots between things. Because sometimes, you know, you see an email and you don't know what it's a response to, right, or where it fits into the whole story. But I was watching, Ro Khanna has done a couple long-form podcast interviews with Sean Ryan. Have you ever watched The Sean Ryan Show? I haven't. He really interesting He a former Navy SEAL was a Blackwater contractor with the CIA He has a podcast and they have like 5 million subscribers on YouTube Very conservative guy. And he is part of this new cadre of traditional Trump supporters that are losing their minds over the Epstein files. And not looking at this at all through a partisan lens, but just saying, how is it possible that people in positions of power are not interested in getting to the roots of all of this, to understanding what went on here, especially when it has to do with the abuse of children in many cases? Jamie Raskin came out of the viewing room and said that the youngest victim that they saw was nine years old. Right. We're talking a nine year old. Right. And I was thinking back, remember, Megyn Kelly a few months ago made that crazy comment like, well, we're not talking about five-year-olds. We're talking about 14-year-olds. And she said, oh, I'm not justifying it. But, well, now you're talking about a nine-year-old. So a nine-year-old is more like a five-year-old, right, than is like a 14-year-old. They haven't gone through puberty, right? You're talking about a kid. and Ro Khanna was talking about how he and Thomas Massey want like a truth and reconciliation committee to be enacted to get to the bottom of this Epstein web which I think would be interesting it doesn't get people any solutions right off the bat but it feels like it's very necessary because the questions you're getting more questions than answers from all of this like who is Jeffrey abstinent. Sean Ryan thinks he is a Mossad agent. I mean, the connectivity to other nations. Russia. You're talking about Kyrsten. Oh, my God. And the difference also in his business pre and post conviction is fascinating, too, how he shifted to older girls, a lot of Russians and Eastern Europeans, and was working in that part of the world, the kind of business deals that he was doing with heads of major financial institutions, his relationship with the Rothschilds, for instance, these titans of tech. I mean, Ro Khanna said he's I represent a lot of these guys, right? He's the Silicon Valley congressman and they're splattered Elon Musk, Peter Thiel all over it. So, you know, questions. Was he a foreign intelligence asset? Was he a U.S. intelligence asset? He had access to the CIA, for God's sakes. Like he was in skiffs. So, like, who is this guy? And I've also shifted, and I don't know if you have as well. Like, we were talking about pedophile last week. And now, I guess my tinfoil hat is on a bit more. And you're looking at all of the stuff that's coming out in the emails and thinking, was this guy also just like a straight-up murderer? Like, ordering 330 gallons of sulfuric acid? Do you know that he had a trap door in his house that went to the sea, which is like the perfect place to dump bodies? We now know that the FBI never searched his New Mexico ranch, where it's rumored that he has bodies buried there, that the FBI wiped the footage from his prison cell and that they might have taken a dummy body and put it in the cell and that they slipped him out so no one would notice. quarterly payments to the head of Ohio State's gynecology department that he was paying him thousands of dollars. Like, what the fuck is going on here? And also, this is very QAnon, but like all of the code words that they're using, things like white tuna potentially meaning a dead white woman, jerky, like, I feel a little Claire Danes in Homeland. Yeah, I think this is such an erosion and degradation of our institutions because my understanding is the FBI files or the Epstein files were compiled and aggregated by a law enforcement agency. And my sense is when a law enforcement agency aggregates a file, the output is supposed to be indictments, not a 1% sclerotic release, non-release redaction. We didn't redact things we did such that millions of bloggers with a ring light could interpret it to their political advantage and find outrage where there shouldn't be any or excuse child rape as being mixed in with other outrage. And having Silicon Valley tech bros say, oh, well, you were there more times than me. And this is an unpopular opinion, but I think a criminal file should speak to the public. I think it's their job to use all their tools and go through and say, okay, what warrants public disclosure and what doesn't? Because I think what we've ended up doing is diluting all the crime. Now, whether or not information on Howard Letnick, a cabinet secretary who lied about his involvement, and it was clearly more than that, whether that should be released, I can see justification for releasing that. But did he commit a crime? And if he didn't commit a crime and it's a criminal investigation, then it's fun to shame these people. And it's great fodder for interpreting it. It makes for great media and great clicks. And it's great for the Trump administration because it's diluted, you know, the fear here that the president was involved in potentially enabling a pedophile ring. But this has just eroded these institutions where it's like, okay, who can we trust to parse through this and figure out who is criminally liable here and get a subpoena or indictment from a grand jury and who is on the wrong invite list? I think this whole thing has just been handled so poorly and will be looked back on as something that absolutely molested and dented and just perverted the reputation of our institutions because we don't even know how to conduct an investigation and then parse it out and what the outcome should be. And it's something that I've been thinking a lot about. Derek Thompson, who I had on Prof G Conversation, said, we've only been skirting along the surface of the atmosphere at seven-tenths the speed of sound for about 30 or 40 years. 95% of the public was not taking subsonic travel. Jet lag, and I know jet lag really well, our species just doesn't know how to react to the sun coming up five hours before it's supposed to. So our bodies get whacked with jet lag. Eventually, over, I don't know, 100, 200, 500 years, we'll adapt. Is our species ready for all of us to be broadcasters and for files like this to be released to all these people who think of themselves as people who can parse through this stuff and then broadcast it in a thoughtful way? They can't. And so this just seems like a melee where who gets caught in the scrum is our institutions. And I think the FBI under a competent president with distinct branches of government charged with fidelity to their oath and what they're supposed to do would have come out with a sub report saying, OK, today we are announcing 24 criminal indictments against the following people. And this is the evidence against them. I think so much of this is just gossip and people not gossip, but people who just love. One of the things I don't like about our brothers and sisters on the left is we seem, I think we need a massive redistribution of income, and they're much more interested in a massive redistribution of virtue. And yeah, this person's a creep. Yeah, it makes your skin crawl. But the FBI isn't in the business of disclosing things that make your skin crawl and make people look like creeps. That's not what they're there for. They're there for criminal indictments. And all of this, what I'll call redistribution of virtue, is diluting from the premise, from the whole shooting match here. And that is, we need to put in place a series of incentives where no matter how rich and powerful you are, if you in any way provide the infrastructure, traffic, or enable or conduct child rape, we're coming for you. and everything else. It strikes me that this is the best thing that happened. The way this has been parsed out sclerotically was a gift to the people who have actually committed crimes here because it's diluted the whole thing. Let's talk about Jelaine Maxwell. Where do you think her case goes from here? I don't think anywhere that she wants it to. It's been really interesting to see the folks coming out of the DOJ's reading room. So I don't know if you know about how it's designed, but it has just four computers in it. And there's no way, to your point, about how poorly this has been done or rolled out, that there's no easy way to search through it. I mean, people are basically just taking what they can and reading it, and you have to do it in the room. So people are spending, you know, hours in there. Raskin said that by his his team's calculations that it would take seven years to get through the files in the current conditions established by the DOJ. So you have that going on, which basically allows the administration to say it's all out there, even though redactions were done apparently by just like blurring out any female's name, which is certainly not how to do this when someone like Colleen Maxwell is such a central player in this. But she's over there saying, oh, I want clemency and pleading the fifth to everything. And you're seeing the response of people coming out like Lauren Boebert, remember, was really out front about the Epstein files. And that's where she was breaking with the Trump administration. Then he personally called her, asked her to pull back. She had been quieter. She's not quiet anymore coming out of that room, saying that obviously she can't be granted any kind of clemency. Representative Paulina Luna said, according to the files we saw, Galene Maxwell was engaged in trafficking and rape. I don't think she deserves special treatment. She's a monster. So I think that if the administration was thinking that they could pull another move like what Todd Blanche did in getting her to that cushy prison because she, quote unquote, was going to exonerate both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, because I guess they think that the two sides are as partisan dug in, which I have not seen to be the case. Obviously, Bill Clinton, and I'm not alleging that either of them did anything with an underage girl, but you don't see liberals getting their back up against the wall in a partisan crouch, right? They're just saying, let the chips fall where they may. Let's just find out what's going on here. But I hope that there is some world in which Maxwell is moved back to the bad prison and has to rot in there for the rest of her life. I don't think you can trust a single word that comes out of her mouth. I think her testimony is meaningless at this point. she committed psychological and physical torture on these girls I don't know if I really mean this but to some degree the person who is recruiting and feeding these girls to Jeffrey Epstein almost feels worse in some way and you know how I am about women that do things like this where I just think that there is something built into us as the people who bring other people into the world that you should not be this depraved and sick. And I think that if Trump is reading any tea leaves or Susie Wiles is, she knows that there can be no kind treatment for Ghislaine Maxwell and that no one trusts anything that she says. Let's leave it there. We're going to take a quick break. Stay with us. Before Minnesota, Illinois basically wrote a playbook on how to fight back against Trump's ICE crackdown. Governor J.B. Pritzker told everyone in the state to take action when ICE came to town. Pull out your phones Film everything They shooting moms in the face Yeah So peaceful protest seems like the least you could do And what we should be encouraging people to do They've shot somebody here in Chicago five times for just observing from her car. Illinois created an accountability commission, took ICE agents to court. And when Trump sent in the National Guard, they blocked them from the streets and they won. A model for Trump resistance on the state level. Today Explained, drops every weekday and now Saturdays too. low and some of his growth claims are inflated. As Trump rolls out this barnstorming economic message ahead of the midterms, the question is whether voters will buy it or if rising costs and skepticism about his numbers could undercut Republican prospects. What do you think Americans think about the Trump economy? They don't like it. Yeah. Everybody doesn't like it. I mean, maybe the richest of the rich, but it doesn't matter the survey, the pollster. I mean, This has been an interesting week because right-leaning polls have now moved squarely into negative territory about Trump. Rasmussen's pollster has been posting a lot on Twitter about how dangerous the territory is that they are now. So his net approval is minus 18, 26 points lower than it was in his first term, 53 points lower with the independents. House and now Senate is widely talked about as being in play. We assume that about the House, obviously. But Senate is a big deal. Tax Foundation just came out with their appraisal of the Trump tariffs. American households paid $1,000 more last year because of the tariffs. The journal did an analysis that the American consumer is bearing up to 43 percent of the burden. So, yes, the corporations are taking some of the hit, but the average American is feeling it, too. And there were big special election results for Democrats. Again, you know, 30 point plus over performances in Louisiana and Texas. Right. Like this wasn't happening in deep blue territory. So I think that people know what's up. What are your observations about the economy and how how people are reacting to it? Well, 36% of adults say they approve of his handling of the economy, while 59% disapprove. That's according to NPR and the Marist PBS News survey. About 3 in 10 adults rate economic conditions in the country as excellent or good, while roughly 7 in 10 rate them as only fair or poor. and 71% are concerned about the cost of healthcare. 71% also say the income gap between the richest and middle class in the U.S. is increasing and consumer confidence is as low as since 2014. In addition, the Gini coefficient, which measures, I guess, variance and it's applied to wealth, zero would be everyone has exactly the same. Everyone has the same would be zero. If one person owned everything, that'd be 100. when the french revolution happened or the kind of you know let them eat cake era uh the genie coefficient was at about somewhere between 80 and 85 today in america the genie coefficient around wealth is 83 we are literally at the point where revolutions happen uh the number of billionaires has surpassed 3 000 for the first time the level of wealth is higher than any time in history Meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger. Billionaires are over 4,000 times more likely to hold political office. The one I like is that if you're a kid from a top 1% income earning household, you're 77 times more likely to get into an elite university. It's just, it really is becoming... What I don't get, though, is that the billionaires themselves seem to be handling their own PR really poorly, that they shitpost America or they seem to think that they don't come across as really grateful or civic-minded. The ones that get the most press are the tech bros who credit their grit and character for their success and then blame the markets for anything that's gone wrong or blame the country. Trump families pocketed more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts since the 2024 re-election. But for other things, as you pointed out, or other people, things have gotten better. Tariffs show that only about 4% of the tariff burden is shouldered by foreign firms and that a near complete pass-through of 96% to U.S. buyers. So folks, this notion that the firm itself or the exporter shipping goods into the U.S. would pay for tariffs, no, 96% of those tariffs are being passed on to American consumers. The other big winners have been Silicon Valley's tech titans. Musk spent at least $55 million on supporting conservative candidates last year, and he accumulated roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars under Trump in terms of wealth growth. Yeah, it's pretty bleak. And I think that that's the reason that their PR has not been going well, because I think those stories are actually being covered and that people are very conscious of it. And people feel it. Yeah. Well, they feel it. They feel what's going on in their pocket And that the upper class is walking around like nothing happened. And I wanted to get your take on this. So John Ossoff, who's a vulnerable Democratic senator in Georgia, he kind of appears every few months and does a great rally and reminds people that he's awesome. But he's been talking about income inequality and going against the billionaires and, you know, the corporate class. But he rolled out the Epstein class at his rally over the weekend. And he said— You remember, we were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. You remember that? But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It is the wealthiest cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class ruling our country. They're the elites they pretend to hate. If you're Steve Bannon, how do you sell any of this? He's literally closing rural hospitals to cut taxes for George Soros. So he threw in the left-leaning billionaire, right, into all of this, who pays, puts a lot of money into those DA races across the country, etc. And I thought it was such smart framing, right? Really putting this as us versus them and we're willing to sacrifice Soros in pursuit of that. What do you make about the Epstein class as a term? And then also, how do you think, do you think Democrats are doing a decent job of seizing the moment or we're kind of still just like receiving results rather than going out and making them ourselves? Yeah, I think it's brilliant. And the reason it's brilliant is that I think if Democrats try to say all men are violent, all white people are racist, and all billionaires are evil, well, don't be surprised if you're stuck with very left-leaning female non-whites, which you cannot win an election with. Those people will leave you. The donors will leave you. They'll believe you. Are you saying I'm evil? I thought Mark Benioff took way too much shit. He said something off, you know, dumb in my view about San Francisco politics. The guy's been an incredible civic donor. And there's this notion that, OK, all billionaires are evil because we have some tech billionaires that just seem incredibly weird and ungrateful. So I love the idea. And not only that, I think Democrats should wrap their arms around successful people and people who make a lot of money. And what they need to do is, all right, you've controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House for periods of time. And yet every time you're in there, you lower taxes on these people. So stop bitching about the officiating. You're wearing a black and white striped shirt. You're, you know, figure out more progressive tax structure and stop demonizing people who make a lot of money. Stop demonizing young men. stop demonizing or having a bias against white people. That's just not a winning recipe for elections. What is brilliant about this is what he manages to do is say there is a virus in America amongst people who tend to be wealthy, tend to be white, tend to be male, not all of them, who believe they're not subject to the same standards as everybody else and believe they can get away with anything and believe they're entitled to a level of depravity that no one else would dare take these sorts of risks. And he's classified them as the Epstein class, which I think is brilliant because what it's saying is, no, not every rich white guy is a pedophile. I get that. But there is amongst this group of people an Epstein class. So I think it's brilliant positioning because what it does is it doesn't alienate the Howard Schultzes of the world. You know, it doesn't alienate wealthy white guys who have traditionally been supporters of the Democratic Party who at some point are like, you know, I'm sick of trying to be your ally and you want to hang me at dawn because I'm pointing the gun incorrectly. So I think it's brilliant positioning. He's been very – I think he's very good. He's very votogenic. I'm going to give him some money just to bring it up. I like him. I hope. He's had the before and afters. They're really fun discourse online about his glow up. We had a glow up. Oh, yeah. Oh, really? He definitely lifted some weights and his hair is a bit different. I mean, it looks good. Yeah. Is his race close? I haven't been following it. I think it's now at lean D when it was more toss up, but they're not fielding a great situation on the right against him. I mean, it's it's just incredible that we have Warnock and Ossoff, frankly. Yeah, especially in that state. In Georgia. Yeah. Fingers crossed, right? Okay. Yep. Let's take a quick break. Stay with us. Welcome back. Before we go, private school tuition in New York City has officially crossed jaw-dropping territory. Several elite schools are now charging more than $70,000 a year, more than many top colleges, as families flee a struggling public system and brace for major changes under the new mayor. For some parents, it's ticker shock. For others, it's the price of peace of mind. Jess, this is something we both deal with. This is a story of privilege. This is why I submitted it to David. I was like, Scott's going to want to talk about this. I got a lot to say about this or a lot of thoughts. You go first. I always go first. I want to hear you first. Well, I think, OK, so I'm going through this right now on both levels. My son just applied to college. They have this total racket called early decision where you say this is my top choice. and they say rather than a 9% admissions rate, we'll bump it up to 15% in exchange for the following. If we let you in, you withdraw all applications from every other college. They immediately get withdrawn. Now, what does that do? Okay, in exchange for us saying to you, greater chance of getting in, you lose all negotiating, all leverage for financial aid. So in a desperate move to please your parents, please yourself, go to a good school where they artificially sequester supply, not all schools, but most of the top schools, such that they can raise rates faster than inflation, we gonna enter into this corrupt cartel system of saying better chance of getting in but once you in no leverage Syracuse couldn fill their class And so they started offering scholarships And the people who got an early decision said, where are scholarships? And they said, sorry, you're fucked. You've committed to go here. So there is all sorts of grift going on here. Now, with respect to K through 12, the reason I left New York is because my son got shut out of seven schools because he was speech delayed. You know, the story ends well, just got into an elite school. But that was really upsetting that no one would let us in, our son in, our four-year-old into a school and let us pay them $58,000 to play with blocks and they artificially again sequester supply. And the math I did is that I think every private school should be required to say the following. All right. Say you're right and you decide to send your kid to the public school. By the way, there's a lot of research showing the best school for your kid is the closest, public or private, and reinvest that commute time back into study, sleep, play, time with parents. But let's say you send them to the local public school and you were wrong. They don't get as good an education. And to be clear, the average public school in America spends $15,000. The average private school is 75. So over the course of 12 years, $720,000 funneled through an education system is going to pay off for your kids, as evidenced by the SAT, where lower-income kids score 150 points less than middle-income kids and then hold your hats. Upper-income kids score 250 points higher than middle-class kids because for 12 years, they've had another $60,000 in education, tutoring, counseling, athletics invested in them. So you have this situation where there's a massive overinvestment, say you took that $50,000 or that, I'm sorry, now it's $70,000. If you took that $70,000 and you were disciplined and you sent it to Vanguard every year and sent them to the local public schools, say you fucked up. They don't get into an elite school. They don't get into an elite college. Okay. People will say elite college doesn't matter. Yeah, it does, folks. I hate to break it to you. It does. And any parent telling you college doesn't matter anymore just found out their little Susie got a 22 on the ACT and is trying to make himself feel better. But say, fine, okay, we put that $72,000 a year aside. The kid doesn't get into an elite school, doesn't get out of the gate strong, can't get a house. We fucked up sending them to public school. If you had taken that $72,000 and over 12 years were disciplined about putting it in an index fund and the market went up 9%, which it has since the beginning of the market, at 35, you can ease your guilt and your kid's pain by giving them $4.5 million. So it is very hard to argue that if you were to be disciplined and to take that money that you would spend on private school, especially in New York, and put it into index funds, you're going to be able to buy back a lot of potential mistakes and economic harm for that kid. Now, there are other reasons to send them to the best school. And also, just so I can get the progressives angry, there needs to be more accountability from public school officials because New York is not short on money spent per child. It's short on positive outcomes. We continue to have kids who are not doing well, even despite the fact we spend more than a lot of places do. So the sequestering of the 1% who have their own transportation, their own security, their own neighborhoods, their own education, their own health care creates a situation where the most powerful and some of the most talented among us are no longer invested in America. and the number one indicator of a strong school in terms of outcomes isn't money, isn't the kids, it's how engaged the parents are. And I saw this happen. I went to junior high in the 70s. In my seventh grade, me and all my friends were there. And then in the eighth grade, they started busing. And all of a sudden overnight, 40% of our class, a thousand kids, literally a thousand kids from Compton, black kids, were bused in an hour each way, You know, bad fucking mood when they got there. And I wish it had been a Hallmark commercial. We hated each other. It was violent. It was ugly. We used to have black against white softball games and the faculty allowed that. That's the bad news. The good news is by the time we got to high school, we were all getting along. So integration did pay off. And I actually think it's one of the reasons I have more empathy for people. My two closest friends was a Mormon kid who went to Stanford and a black kid who had to get a football scholarship to get to a school in Oregon. Immediately in the eighth grade, my two best friends, Adam and David, their parents pulled them out and sent them to Windward, this Tony school. And I had one of those talks with my mom. So I'm like, Mom, I need to go to Windward. All my friends are going there. And she's like, no, I had one of those we're different talks. But the school system is yet another means of enforcing the caste system. And the only solution I can come up with is to take that $70,000 price tag and make it $100,000 and redistribute that income back into public schools with distinctly harsher standards on teachers, administrators, and unions. That if you don't get your scores up, it's going to a charter school and we're firing all of you. But something needs to happen here. It's become the new enforcer of the caste system. Anyways, that's my TED Talk. Thoughts, Jess? I agree with everything that you said and most happy, I guess, to hear that the marker of the best school for your child is proximity because we're opting to send our oldest will go to public school next year. She'll start kindergarten. And it was a very hard decision for us to make because she's a December birthday. And inexplicably, the New York City public school system just puts all the kids who are born in the same year in the class. So she'll so she'll be one of the youngest. Yeah. But I mean, there'll be a few kids maybe that as bad for girls as it is for boys. There's there's research that shows the youngest boys in a class are more likely to be depressed because they're smaller and they get picked on. But the same data is not as evident with girls who are the youngest in their class. OK, well, that's good news. And she's very tall. She she has good tall genes. But so we're opting to do that. And as a New York City private school graduate, I had a lot of feelings about what kind of educational opportunities I was giving my child versus the ones that I was afforded. And this chart about the tuition costs really popped out at me because the school that I went to for high school was on a place called the Dalton School. It was $35,000 when I went. It's $70,000 now. And I look at the world, right? I'm out here functioning. I work with people who are paid tremendous amounts of money. My husband works in finance. He went to public school. A lot of his friends have huge jobs, right? Like leading big divisions at financial institutions who the people that I went to school with report to them, right? And these are your average good public school, but just, you know, normal thing that a parent moves to a certain place because they have a great school. Yeah, Indiana, Ohio State. Yeah. And they're not just fine. In most cases, I find that they're better human beings. A lot of them are more successful, but I've been much more focused on the quality of human than the level of academic achievement necessarily. because I just met so many and grew up with so many people who I don't want to be the folks surrounding my kids. And we'll see what happens. I hope that the school is fantastic for her. And at some point, we will end up in the private school system. But you look at that price tag and going back to what you were just saying about the Gini coefficient for the U.S., it's just wrong at a certain point. But especially at that age, they're playing with blocks. Well, for five. Yes, Yes, I get it. And most of these schools go through the really good ones in New York City, at least they go through fifth grade and the most kids filter into the private school system and they're set up for success with that. But the system needs to be smashed because you say, you know, take that 70K and invest it. For most people, they don't have the 70K, right? Or that they would be taking out loans to be able to do this and putting themselves into debt. But there has to be a real reckoning. And this goes back to the Epstein class, you know, formulation, right, where you just say it shouldn't be this way. And a majority of people who are doing this, and this is happening in cities all across the country, it's not just New York City. It's because their parents have generational wealth that they can help them. Can't even tell you how many people I know that are like, well, we're not paying for it, right? This is money that was set aside by grandparents. And it's creating this false sense of financial security and ego for these kids who are walking around like they're all, you know, like too big for their britches. We're saying, yeah, your granddad founded X, Y, or Z thing, right? Or your grandparents came from, or your great-grandparents, this incredible immigrant class, and was able to pass down this wealth so you could go to this school. But what are you going to make of it? Of course, people at the top, they're going to go to the Harvards and the Yales of the world. But there are plenty of kids that are going to go to just average schools, right? Colleges out of this. And then I'm thinking, you know, you spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for them to probably not have as good of a or as fun, certainly, or well-rounded experience while they were in school. And they ended up at exactly the same place with no guarantee that they're going to have a better job when they're coming out of it. So all for a meritocracy in this of smashing the system that allows schools to be $70,000 a year. And school just doesn't feel like it should be for profit. it. I just I hate that, especially going down to preschools. The dirty secret is the nonprofits or for profits wrapped in a sheep's clothing. Oh, we're 16. Now you've just ruined everything for me, Scott. There's 16 administrators for every one person that teaches at MIT. I can tell you my colleagues are obsessed with artificial scarcity and means of every every morning. Not everyone, but the majority of administrators, the majority of faculty members are capitalists like everywhere else. And they wake up in the morning and they say, how do I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? And they wrap themselves in nobility and raise tuition faster than inflation every year. I went to public school all the way through graduate school. And seven years of tuition of undergrad at UCLA and graduate school at Berkeley, the total tuition was $7,000. And the UC system is still doing God's work, still in exceptional value, probably one of the best actors in the space. and now the tuition for seven years would be $120,000. Now, seven to 120, even as old as I am, has vastly outpaced inflation, but there needs to be, I mean, it's a longer conversation, but a lot of it comes back to cheap credit, government-backed student loans, accreditation that won't let competition in, and also they, in my view, we need to revoke the tax-free status of any university, whether it's Dartmouth or Harvard, that has an endowment over a billion dollars It's not growing as freshman class faster than population growth because they've decided they're a hedge fund offering class who's no longer a public servant. But we fall under the illusion that me and my colleagues are like nice, noble, good people. No, we're capitalists like everyone else. And unless we're regulated, we're going to fuck the middle class. And that is exactly what we've been doing for the last 40 years. Thanks a lot, Scott. There you go. All right, Jess, that's the episode. Before we go, if you're watching us on YouTube, make sure you hit subscribe. That's all for this episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates. Have a good week, Jess. You too. See you later.
