Hello, and welcome to the meritocracy trap edition of Slate Money, your guide to the

business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I am joined by Emily Peck of Huff Post. Hello. I have been informed by Emily's boss that it is no longer the Huffington Post. It is now just Huff Post. Oh yeah, I've always meant to tell you that, but then I figure everyone knows it as Huffington Post, so I just go with it anyway.

It is Huff Post. And most excitingly, we have in the studio, Daniel Markovitz of Yale Law School.

Hi.

You came to fame. When was your commencement speech?

Four years ago, maybe?

2015. 15. There you go. This is honestly the only commencement speech that Four years ago, maybe? Four years ago. 2015. There you go.

This is honestly the only commencement speech that everyone should read and or listen to.

It's fantastic.

And you have basically turned it into a book, which is called The Meritocracy Trap.

And like all nonfiction books in America, it needs some long subtitle, which says everything that it's in the book, right?

Yes, it says everything that's in the book. I think that's exactly what it says.

So we're not going to say what the subtitle is, because that would mean that you wouldn't buy the book.

So, yeah, Daniel is here to talk about meritocracy and why it's not nearly as good of a thing as you might think.

We are also going to talk about the MIT Media Lab, Jeffrey Epstein, and the nexus of academia

and money, which I wrote about a lot this week.

And just for shits and giggles, we're going to talk about Volfefei. If you want to know

what Volfefe is, keep listening. All of that is coming up on Slate Money. So Daniel,

you have written a whole book about, I was thinking about this on my way over here. Basically,

it's a little bit a book about the nature nurture debate. You're saying that never mind nature, that is swamped by the amount of genuine

advantage that children can get if you throw a huge amount of money and privilege at them. And if you do that,

they will become what you call superordinate workers and they will wind up running the world

...