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- [00:00]
A
A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is my friend and member of my writing group, which I have recently joined but far predated my my membership, Dylan Gottlieb, who is an assistant professor at Bentley University and a historian of American cities and capitalism. He's the host of the podcast who makes sense, as in, like the monetary spelling of sense. And he's got a brand new book out, which I apparently was the first person on earth to get a hardcover copy of Yuppies, the Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers and Grammons who Conquered New York. Welcome to the show.
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B
Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for holding up that book that I haven't seen in person yet.
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A
Oh, yeah. Nobody else can see this. They can just hear me doing this. But it's a beautiful. Oh, it's. It's blurry. Cameras are focusing on it.
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B
But we can get some book ASMR on Mike of leafing through the pages. I haven't seen that. I can't wait to hold soon.
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A
I mean, today you're going to have them, right?
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B
Today or tomorrow it'll be in my hands too.
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A
It's going to be wonderful. I'll tell you, it smells great. Looks good.
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B
We're wonderful. I asked them to make it. Sure. It smelled really good. I put in a special order.
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A
I was like, I need to ask you how many words this is because I think this is like the ideal book size and length. Like, I was like, this feels like a book with capital B.
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B
It's 120,000 words.
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A
Holy shit.
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B
Main text. I think that's the benchmark. I'm pretty sure there was some threshold I couldn't cross otherwise we had to pay more to print it.
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A
Okay.
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B
But about 350 pages, including all the notes, a very long index, all that stuff.
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A
Yeah. It's a serious book. Like I said, capital B. So we were recently talking in the writing group when we were supposed to be writing about jazz and I thought I like to always do a little bit of patter, friendly patter, to start off the show. And I was wondering if you have. This is putting you on the spot, but do you have any jazz hot takes that you'd be willing to share with the audience?
- [02:46]
B
Oh, this is really interesting. I do actually have a jazz hot take. I think that jazz in its current iteration has become chamber music. I think it's become largely ossified by a hyper educated, very credentialed audience. You might say yuppies. And it's. It's become a certain. There's like a certain repertory quality to it and there's a reverence and there's a, like, hush. We must listen to the improviser when so much of it was dance music. Like its origins are in libidinal dancing. Right. Not like quiet, studious absorption. And there's a certain reverence that can also. Yeah. Make it ossified, make it feel like a fossil of a different era, much like classical music has become for a certain type of audience. It's a high art that we're remembering a past era rather than forging new ground now. This is not to discount all the wonderful stuff that's coming out, like Sons of Kemet. Have you ever heard this group from England?
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A
I saw them at their last concert, their final concert in Scotland. Incredible. It was life changing, actually. The dancing at that concert was unbelievable, actually.
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B
There it is, right? It's like, let's get Dizzy Rascal on stage with a brass band or whatever, you know, so bringing in the vital energy that continue to be created. I mean, you see it in New Orleans where, like, brass bands meet bounce. Right. It still can happen in places, but there is this quality, particularly amongst white connoisseurs, of, like. It's a place to demonstrate expertise and show off your collection of downbeat and be a little snooty about it. You know, you've got the real authentic bootlegs from Charlie Parker at wherever. Yeah, that makes it. I think it turns off a lot of people because it seems cloistered and hard to break into and it shouldn't be. But that's my rant. Rant over. I wish it weren't only that way.
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A
I also don't love the idea of jazz solely as background music, which I think it now is where people are like, there's this beautiful Instagram reel I'm making and then there's like, jazz in the background and, like, I'm guilty of this too. Or like, I have a dinner party and I get this because this is a great album to put on in the background, algorithmically. Yeah. Instead of, like, this is a thing I really genuinely like and would listen to. Kind of regardless of the circumstances under which I'm listening to it.
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B
I'm gonna tell a strange anecdote.
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A
Please.
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B
I was in New Orleans with my wife. It was a first trip, post baby, years ago, and we were so excited to be out. And just so happens my grandmother, who was in her 80s at the time, was there for a bridge tournament in New Orleans as well, with her dear friend, her bridge partner. They kind of hated each other. They had a hater dynamic going on. Frenemies. Anyway, we met for a jazz brunch on Sunday. We were hungover. We had Bloody Marys, and her friend couldn't stop talking about, I thought there'd be more jazz at the jazz brunch. Can we move closer to the jazz? Like, it was a raw material. It was like a background thing, but it was an activity. She wasn't really listening. She just wanted to be near the jazz capital J. I don't know what that says about it, but it was very important to her that there was jazz at brunch. She might not have gone to brunch otherwise, but it sort of, like, legitimated it as a classy place. She's like, oh, well, it's a classy brunch. Now that there's jazz. I always quote that. I thought there'd be more jazz at the jazz brunch.
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A
I mean, I'm trying to make some sort of, like, draw some line to drag brunches. And I haven't gotten there yet in my head. But there's something where you're like, this fundamentally changes the dynamic of the experience I think I'm supposed to be having right now.
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B
I thought there'd be more drag at the drag brunch.
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A
Exactly. If you go to a drag brunch and there isn't drag, that's actually a problem for the event you thought you were attending.
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B
Somebody find a dress.
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A
Yeah, I do see your grandma's frenemy's point to some extent. If I'm going to the jazz brunch, I'm trying to hear jazz. To be fair, we're not actually here to talk about jazz. Although, to be fair, there's a segue that happens. Yeah. And brunches fits, too. Who are we talking about today on the show?
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B
We're not talking about one guy who sucked. We're talking about a whole demographic that kind of sucked. And it's not just men. It's also women who sucked. And importantly, it's also women. So my book is about yuppies, which is an 80s stereotype. I wonder how many people listening have heard the term. If you're old enough, you certainly have. But if you're younger. And when I speak to undergraduates, many of them haven't heard this term. So it's coined in the late 70s, but becomes really popular in the early 80s. And it stands for, as an acronym, Young Urban Professional. But it's one of these media stereotypes that caricatures a whole type of person who likes Camembert cheese and Perrier water. These cultural markers. Or they live in a city and they commute in sneakers and then put on their high heels when they get into the office. These upwardly mobile people who are the subject of no small amount of ridicule in the 1980s, and in 1984, Newsweek declares it the Year of the Yuppie. They really burst onto the scene as part of Gary Hart's primary campaign for the Democratic nomination. This demographic is seen as switching to a new sort of Democratic Party. We can talk about that later. So this is the media stereotype, right? And however, many years ago, when I started this book, over a decade, I thought, well, are there real people who live this life? Like, is this, in fact, a demographic that journalists had put their finger on but not really studied? And what I found was, in fact, they are a real demographic wave that crashes over America's cities beginning in the late 1970s for a host of reasons we can get into. But they do arrive in America's cities. And in my story, they arrive in New York. It's a New York book. And in the span of about 10 years, from the late 70s to the late 80s, about 120,000 new financiers arrive in the city. The number of corporate lawyers doubles in this period. In New York, some firms quadruple in size. So there really is a vortex pulling young people from highly elite colleges and universities and business schools and law schools to cities to do the work of a new sort of economy that's rolling out, especially as the 80s gets going. So it's not just a stereotype. It's a real group of people. Why do they suck? Well, we can get into that.
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A
This is a spoiler for everyone. We will be saying there's something wrong with at some point in the show. You know, I'm glad that you mentioned that for a lot of people who are listening, although we do have, like, our listenership really ranges in terms of age, which is pretty cool. But there will definitely be listeners who are not wildly familiar with the yuppie as a stereotype. That being said, I have a very clear image in my head of my first encounters with the concept of yuppies because, and this is unfortunate for many of the listeners who are older than me. I was born in 1994, and I mostly encountered the idea of the yuppie and in movies parodying them. I'm specifically thinking of two movies that I remember watching when I was pretty young that talked about yuppies that have kind of shaped my image of them, but which were set in the late 90s, early 2000s. So after the sort of yuppie wave that's parodying yuppies. So Megan Hamilton Swan in Best in show from 2000. Have you seen this?
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B
Oh, we can go deep on Best in Show.
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A
Like, their whole thing is that they, like, they have a Weimer on her and they have adult braces. And they met by one Starbucks looking
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B
at the other Starbucks.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They locked eyes from separate Starbucks. We met at Starbucks. Not at the same Starbucks, but we saw each other at different Starbucks across the street.
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B
Parker Posey just nails it, right?
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A
Yeah. Incredible. So that is one that I remember being like, oh, okay, so this is a yuppie. Like, this is what people are saying yuppies are. And then I also think of the 1999 film, which is one of my favorite films. 10 Things I Hate about yout. Because there's a group in 10 Things I Hate about yout of high schoolers who call themselves the future MBAs. They're like high schoolers who obsessed with, like, wine and cheese parties and Izod. And, like, they're all Ivy League accepted. And so, like, I had truly, when I was younger, had only ever encountered this idea as, like, this jokey stereotype of a person that you don't want to be. But also, there is some cultural cachet to it.
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B
These are your future MBAs. We're all Ivy League accepted. Yuppie greed is back, my friend. Hey, guys. It's both aspirational and also a subject of derision. And it's a way of working out really big things that are changing in American life through popular culture, through these stereotypes. So there are a million yuppie movies, particularly in the 80s. Working Girl, Wall Street. We could go on and on. American Psycho is a later iteration of that, and it's a satire, but it holds this sort of aspirational quality for many young people. Who want to move to a city, be upwardly mobile, successful, have the trappings of success. And it's also a way to work out our feelings about new things that are changing in American life. Like women. They're going to the professions, aren't they? They're putting on shoulder pads and play acting at things we thought men did.
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A
Women can ruin the economy, too.
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B
Like, importantly, it's Sigourney Weaver who's the big bad boss in Working Girl, right? It's not a glowering man. It's her who's made it to the top, her who gets injured on a ski vacation. And the class gulf between her and Melanie Griffith says everything about the transformation that's happening in the class structure in America. But it's also a way to talk about new modes of masculinity and how men are different in this era when women are working alongside of them. It's a new way to talk about inequality as cities become sites of really profound inequality. In the 80s, the unhoused alongside Wall street, bankers headed out to do cocaine at the nightclub. These things are existing together. And so popular culture is trying to make sense of all that through the yuppie. I will say my book is not a cultural history in that sense of, like, here are all the movies, right? Yeah, yeah, you should go watch all those movies, but then read my book to hear sort of the real story of the. On the ground, what this looked like, what this felt like in New York in a real place, to compliment the movies that tell it so well, in a sort of arch or satirical way.
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A
Yeah, it's a social history. Like, it's this. You're not explaining the idea of the yuppie and how it's been imagined. You're saying, like, well, what if we take seriously the proposition that these people existed in this certain way, and can we unpack that in all of these different spaces and times? Spaces as in, like, cultural spaces, not as in places, because you are really talking about one major place.
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B
I mean, here's one for the deep cut for the historian fan. Someone, a peer reviewer, told me it was like, E.P. thompson for the 1980s.
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A
Okay.
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B
The story of, like, the formation of a class of people recognizing, like, hey, we're kind of together in this thing, aren't we?
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A
Yeah.
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B
So mutual recognition of a new type of person who lives in the city. I was like, yeah, I guess that kind of is what I'm doing. Thanks.
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A
Can you tell me, slash, the listeners about, like, who is a yuppie? What are they doing? So We've established that they're being pulled into these cities. But, like, what is the evolution of a person into a yuppie? What is that? How does this happen?
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B
Well, I think there's a big historical demographic transition of who is an elite professional worker in this era. Because I'm primarily writing about professionals working in finance, working in law. Later it'll be consulting by the 90s. But these elite service professions that in the 1950s and 60s were almost all white men, guys who sucked in their own right. You know, bonesmen from Yale.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Went to Wall street to work at their dad's bank. They went to work at Cravath and other white shoe law firms. Great. That was the ruling class and the professional elite for so long in America. We're familiar with that stereotype. Right. But what's interesting about yuppies is as the professions open, however haltingly, to women. Well, first, really white ethnic men, Jewish men, Irish men, Italians a little bit, they start to break into the professions via the credential of an elite school. They go to Yale. Someone like Alan Dershowitz, who has a funny long tail in his life, but he went to Yale and was the first in his class, I think, at Yale Law School and said, okay, hire me at all the best firms. They say no, or he finds his way in the door. One of them eventually, but represents his first crack in the WASP elite and then into that crack flood. Next, white women entering the professions, particularly in the 70s as the percentage of women in professional schools surges, explodes really, in the 70s. And then on their tail are other minoritized Americans, Asian American men, black men and women, on and on. Right. They find their way into these jobs too. And how do they do it? Through the main feeder institution to these elite jobs, which is the Ivy League, mostly. Some other schools are in that mix as well. But through these credentialing institutions which help them gain access to a world they wouldn't have had access to before, you know, in the 50s or 60s. How did you get a job at a bank? Well, not many people did. First of all, only about 3% of the Ivy League goes to banking in the 60s. But you called someone who knew somebody and got you in. Right. By the 70s and 80s, the people who are arriving, their parents own restaurants or they're like lower middle class people. Their kids don't have those connections. So how do they get in? They go to Harvard, they go to the career services office, and there they're pulled into this vortex of on campus recruiting that brings them to these places and promises them the meritocratic advancement that they can harness to have this incredible life. So it is actually a diversification of our elite as new sorts of people enter that position to do these jobs. So the yuppie is both upwardly mobile, but also it's a different face of the American elite that really took shape especially in the 1980s.
- [16:20]
A
Foreign. Hi, it's Claire. I'm here to quickly say that this episode is free for everybody, but the next one won't be. That's because we switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you're a fan of public history made by actual experts, consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board because we're not trying to get rich. We're just trying to make good history that is engaging and accessible at the same time. For the price of a fancy muffin, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the bi weekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal. Just head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join the honorary Haters club. So I think a big thing that I wouldn't say that you emphasize in the book, but that you discuss in the book as sort of a marker of the yuppie, is the idea that it's this, like, diversified group of people who are aiming towards this elite lifestyle or succeeding at achieving or acquiring this sort of lifestyle. But it is interesting because, like, you look at photos of people who are, you know, Harvard MBAs or at law schools or whatever, and all of a sudden it's like, there's racial diversity and there's. There's. And whatever. And then they're all gonna go and like I said, destroy.
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B
This is the paradox, right? I love using in talks this picture of Barack Obama at the Harvard Law Review group shot. And he's in the middle, he's holding the scepter or whatever you hold. And he's one of two, maybe black faces out of however many dozen people are in Law Review. And you think, well, that's kind of wonderful, right? It's great that he could rise to the highest office in the land, on and on. But then you learn what these people are actually doing at their day jobs, you know, ripping apart America's industrial heartland or repackaging things for takeover artists or declaring bankruptcy to obviate union contracts. That's the actual work they're doing. And you think, hmm, how do I feel about the fact that women are also doing this crappy work and black men are also doing this crappy work? Should I be excited? Should I be dubious about it? And I'd go even further to say that the presence of those people, the diversification of the elite, helps us distract from the inequality they help to create. It helps us distract from just how shitty the work that they're doing is. It's a way of covering for mystifying the bigger class based inequality they help to create. So, you know, people cheer when we have a female head of the CIA or you know, like women dropping bombs on Iran.
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A
It's like, yeah, I was going to say women can order drone strikes too.
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B
Yeah, like, I guess I'm happy. Happy maybe. No, I don't know. There is a hope, right, that they would enter these institutions and bring different viewpoints and change them, but that's not really what I find in my research. So it's more of a diversification of the same type of forces that are actually getting further away from the rest of us in terms of wealth and income, not closer.
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A
Yeah, I mean it's not like they're going to these places and the like, diversification is somehow changing the MO of the institutions that they're entering necessarily. Like they're going and they're being like, well, I can, as you said, drone strike people or destroy mortgages forever. Like I can do all of these things, sell junk bonds, et cetera. Like the underlying issue is not in fact solved by changing the people who are engaging in the practices that we're saying are predatory or violent or whatever. And like in many cases we are literally talking about violence. We're not talking about this ontological thing that people are sort of like slow violence. There's. I'm doing like, no, we're talking about actual physical violence as a result of some of these things, of some of these decisions. So just an asterisk for listeners that I am sometimes, in many cases I'm talking about. And you talk about this in your book, like how things like evictions happen and all of this happens. And you talk about a fire that is really like, there's a lot, there's a lot of stuff that happens.
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B
Do you want me to get into that story of displacement? Yeah. So it's one thing to talk about this era Is like, oh, the abstraction of finance, right? Money's moving all around, big shots are wearing suspenders. It's very easy to talk about this in abstract terms of, like, corporate rate and takeovers. Great. You can see the numbers. And you're like, wow, there were a lot of mergers. That's not very visceral, and it doesn't feel really real. Yeah, there are job losses, and I document those, too. But what I was shocked to find is by zooming into a place like New York, looking on the ground at the places that yuppies move to, is a shocking story of eviction displacement through violence that occasions their arrival in these places. So this is actually the first story I found when I was researching my book. I didn't know where to look for yuppies. Right? They're this media stereotype. Where do you find them? And I got great advice from a senior scholar who said, dylan, you got to sit down with the census. Like, look at those charts.
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A
And this is what always happens to historians is someone says, unfortunately, it is census time.
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B
Unfortunately, it's boring. Lucky for me, I lived in the age of digital mapping tools that could plot that census data on space. So I look at the New York metro area and I think, well, where are yuppies moving? Like, where are finance workers moving? Where are people who earn X amount of money in Wall street? And, okay, the.in Greenwich is getting bigger and bigger. Fine, that's not my story. But a dot appeared in Hoboken, New Jersey, which, for people who don't know, is a brief subway ride across the Hudson river from Manhattan. You can be in Wall street in 10 minutes from there, but it's this working class community where famously, Marlon Brando shot on the waterfront there. It's like a longshoreman town. It's down on its lock. It's Italians and Puerto Ricans mostly. And I'm like, why are so many stockbrokers moving there? Like, why are lawyers moving to hoboken in the 80s? And so that's where I went to the archives. I went to Hoboken. I actually went to the public library first, as well as the historical museum. And they had all these folders that no one had ever looked at. And they're. You should look at these. They were manila folders labeled fires. Like, that's spicy. And it felt like it was in a movie.
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A
Slow Mo.
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B
It opens up, and inside are dozens of clippings of local newspapers about this wave of arson fires in Hoboken. Like, that's strange. And with further digging What I realized is the flood of yuppies that I saw in the census had triggered this explosion in landlords seeking to clear out their rent controlled tenants and replace them with my people to evade the law however they could in order to charge 5, 6, 7 times the rent or to sell to young urban professionals with a lot of money who were looking for a place maybe a little cheaper to live than Brooklyn Heights. And what's shocking is these fires. I have evidence of dozens of fires, killed 56 people in this one neighborhood. Thousands are displaced.
- [23:15]
A
Yeah. Do you not have like an Erin Brockovich moment where you're like, I need everyone to know about this thing that, like, I feel like people are not understanding that that is like this horrifying series of events.
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B
It lit a fire under me. And so I wrote an article for an academic journal and then also published in the Washington Post about it. But then, really importantly for me, I realized it wasn't fully my story. I am not a survivor of these fires. And so I worked with a photojournalist in Hoboken and local historical folks there. They renamed a park in memory of one of the tenants activists. The city council passed a resolution and the photojournalist did a wonderful display where he found survivors of these fires. It wasn't again, my story to tell, but that felt like a sense of, I don't know, it was like sort of truth and reconciliation. When I gave talks in and people hadn't talked about this because one of the effects of gentrification is silencing those who are no longer there. They can't contribute to the story. And so many didn't know the story. Those who did hadn't talked about it in decades. But what I found was it's not just Hoboken. It's also, as I write in my book, Park Slope in Brooklyn, it's the Upper west side, where single room occupancy housing, which is sort of, you know, we might call them a flop house, but it was the housing for the people at the bottom of the rental market that is right in the way of yuppie gentrification in the 80s. And so the owners of these buildings hire guys they call, what is it, relocation specialists. They're goons. And they show up at night and they start firing guns and kicking people out of their rooms and hammering the door behind them shut. And then they convert to condos. And you've probably stayed in one of these, like the Ace Hotel in New York, for example, like, was a former flop house. So hundreds of Thousands of people are put basically on the street as these buildings are emptied.
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A
And the idea of like a relocation specialist, like, even that has this professionalization thing happening to the title, which is like, you're right. There goes. This is a guy that you hire to like, bust up your. Your 10. I'm not laughing because it's funny.
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B
I'm like, no, but. Right. It's like, it's Tony. These guys, you know, they come.
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A
He has a name tag that says, I'm actually a relocation specialist. And he's like, and here's my gun that I'm brandishing to get you to leave.
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B
You know, it's almost unbelievable.
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A
Yeah. I mean, that's like a movie character kind of scenario.
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B
Yeah. I'm taking pitches. Anyone wants to write the screenplay, like, I'm here, please reach out.
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A
Yeah. Anytime. Contact me.
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B
Yeah. Cut clear in. It's just. It's not the way we tell the story of gentrification, where we talk about violence in quotes, sort of as metaphorical or structural violence. But this is quite literal.
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A
Yeah.
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B
For a time. And there's a lot of money to be made in neighborhoods that are upscaling as well as, you know, we typically picture fires burning in the Bronx. Right. Benj Ansfield has a wonderful new book, and their narrative is all about neighborhood on the decline. But neighborhoods across the country, from Boston to Chicago to Indianapolis to New York, I found, have violence on the upside, fires too. So I only tell a part of that story, but it's a phenomena. We're just beginning to grasp how violent the 80s were for those who were left out of this white collar boom.
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A
Can you. For listeners who probably will have heard the term thrown around a lot, but maybe need a little bit more of a historical understanding of it. Can you explain gentrification just in general,
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B
a highly contested social science term?
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A
Sure.
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B
Which basically means the increase in the class, identity, income, education level of residents in a neighborhood, and often with it, the rising prices of real estate in that neighborhood. There's some argument whether that leads directly to displacement of the people who already live there. There's a whole debate we don't need to get into. But I argue, at least in this case, it's incontrovertible. Like the landlord says, if you don't leave, I'm going to burn you out. The building burns the next day. In two weeks, there's a contract sign says the buildings have been delivered, parentheses, delivered vacant. Which was the term of the contract. Like, we've emptied it for you. And then they put condo Signs like for sale outside the buildings that are still smoldering, like within days. And that the chain of events is pretty clear, like we displace, we replace. So that's gentrification at its most extreme. But we might know it more in like SoHo in New York, where artist lofts became fancy shops. That's gentrification too.
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A
People will be like, oh, we've got a sweet green here. Unfortunately, the neighborhood is gentrified or whatever because, you know, a lot of understanding of it, and I don't think this is necessarily wrong, but a lot of the public understanding is this sort of corporate gentrification of an area which is real. And there's also, I guess, individual gentrification that happens at the same time. Like these are not actually that separable of issues.
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B
Right.
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A
But I think the yuppie thing and this period in the 80s is a moment where like it is very stark and very obvious that that's what's happening in spaces like New York, in specific spaces within New York. That's obvious that this is happening.
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B
Well, New York is just a place where it's most extreme. New York, New York. It's always nice to write a book about a place where it's the most extreme or illustrative. Example by the 2010s, like finance workers are say 5% of the city, but they take home over a third of all the wages in the city.
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A
Oh my God.
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B
Yeah, it's insane.
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A
Wild.
- [28:25]
B
So as the markets gyrate, like there are these reverberations all across the real estate market because they have to live there. So I tracked the first big boom in this era as the bull market produces all these knock on effects in the local community. You can see this in other places. It's just never as extreme, even if some ways they're also following New York's example in terms of gentrification. Right. So one of the parts of my story is this happens in New York in the 80s. It's also, it's the capital of capital, but it's also the capital of our media industries. It's no accident you saw all those movies about yuppies. Yeah, it's New York, New York. So other cities that look to attract these same people will follow New York's lead in terms of its municipal policies and tax preferences for certain types of housing and lifestyle campaigns and urban marathons. All the things that are dangled as bait to bring yuppies into their town too.
- [29:19]
A
This is a little bit of a digression, so indulge me For a second. One of my favorite parts of the book is you talking about running and running culture in this and like the marathon thing. Like, I thought this was just not a product of my imagination, but just this thing that I was associating with this group that I had felt like a level of not antipathy towards, but especially being from Portland. Like, the running thing is like, I just thought this is just what people do, like what annoying people do. And realizing that there was like a level of like demographic, like an expectation and like social cachet that comes out of being a runner. And like how this is actually not just like, what's the modern equivalent, like I guess running now again, but like CrossFit or something 10 years ago where like this is a specific thing that this social circle. Pilates. Now I don't know. I don't know. I'm feeling like. I don't know what it is.
- [30:15]
B
It was shocking, shocking to see, like, I interviewed all these runners who were in New York in this era and in the early 70s, if you were jogging down the sidewalk, people would come out of their house and be like, are you okay? Is someone hurt? Is there a fire? Why are you running?
- [30:26]
A
Right.
- [30:27]
B
It was totally bizarre to see urban runners. But by the end of the 70s, early 80s, you know, new York City Marathon is the most watched spectator event in the world at the time. You know, 50 million people are tuning in onto TV and running is this cultural phenomenon, but it's also a class linked phenomenon. Not everybody runs. So I think you put your finger on it with CrossFit today. There's a quality when you go to certain neighborhoods even now, right. You'll see people in stretchy pants running. It has a certain like, indicator for who lives there. Right.
- [30:56]
A
I live in a certain part of. And I'll tell you, I can't walk for 30 seconds without people running around here. It's so prevalent that we always joke about like, it's. I have never lived somewhere where more people run. And again, I lived in Portland and I went to the University of Oregon for my undergrad, which is like the epicenter of running in America. The whole time I lived next to Pre Rock, which is where he got killed. But it's like a big, like, runner thing. I have never seen more runners more constantly in my life than at. It is wild. And I think there's a linkage here.
- [31:32]
B
I think there's something about proving yourself in the meritocratic struggle of the professional world or academia. Relatedly, running used to be this countercultural practice for many people, I have all these books that are like, get loose with running. It's a Zen. You're not rushing anywhere.
- [31:48]
A
Yeah.
- [31:49]
B
But the professional world and the fitness world in the 1980s, these changes in character, it's no longer about loosening up and getting free and running barefoot. It's about tightening up and toughening up for the workplace where you're duking it out with all these people who are being recruited alongside of you out of these schools. And you need a more intense workout regime. You're lifting weights now. You are not jogging. 70s term. You're running and you're training for events which prove through these metrics that are numerical, how good you are and that you deserve to be atop this hierarchy, this new pile, whether it's through your smarts and also through your body and your performance. I interviewed all these runners who still remember their finishing times from the marathon in the early 80s. They still can rattle it off. Right. Just like they could rattle off their profit and losses from their investment banking
- [32:34]
A
job, their P and Ls. I know this from industry.
- [32:37]
B
There you go. There's something about the pursuit of the like, work hard, play hard, but also your play is work.
- [32:43]
A
Yeah.
- [32:44]
B
Leisure becomes work. Another way to prove yourself.
- [32:47]
A
Yeah.
- [32:47]
B
It's also a social activity. It becomes. It replaces sort of the country club for yuppies. You don't have a suburban country club to go play golf to build, you know, upper class sociability. You do it in a running club. And so I dug into all these running clubs where people, yes, they run together, they go to brunch together, they do deals together, jogging around the Central park reservoir. So it has this strongly class link quality that's also tied to their jobs. They can fuck off for an hour at lunch and go for a jog and go back. As long as they do their work. Yeah, it doesn't matter if they're sore.
- [33:18]
A
On Monday, before moving in to Connecticut for this job, I was living in the Bay Area, which obviously you know, but some of the audience will and will not know I was living in the Bay Area. And that to me is sort of like the Bay Area tech worker run club culture. Like that is happening there too, where they all are in run clubs together and then they go back to their job at Google or wherever else they're working. And I'm not like disparaging them, but this is like what they do and they work together and they go run. And I would say now, this digression is actually, I think, very useful for this I would say now the like equivalent it was CrossFit maybe like 10 years ago. Five, 10 years ago. And I think now it's ultra running are like the doctors, architects, lawyers, engineers that I know who are like psychotic are also doing ultramarathons because now running is not enough. Too many people are running. You have to be extra running. You have to be extremely running and doing this sort of like physical, like I like there, there's a physical insurance. You must go through PA pain as part of this to prove that you are not just tough mentally. It's wild and like these are all people. Not all of them, but many of them. I'm not someone who's like just go to therapy in general. But like some of them I'm like there is something that's happening here where
- [34:41]
B
you men will do an ironman instead of going to therapy.
- [34:44]
A
Well yeah, but I think I would also count women who are engineers will do. We'll do a hundred mile marathon over.
- [34:52]
B
It's a sickness, but it starts. I argue that it starts here. It starts with people moving to cities.
- [34:58]
A
I think you're right.
- [34:59]
B
Where they don't know anyone and they're looking for similar age people who are just as vigorous in their pursuit of the top. And one of my favorite sources in the whole project are the personal ads that I read in New York running News. Can I pause for a second and find one please? It's just like it's too perfect, right? They put in ads to find each other, right? The people who will just as assiduously like chase their goals and. And in every ad they cite their elite credentials, you know, jd, MBA in everyone or what they're looking for Julia, for my editor.
- [35:31]
A
Julia, can you put some like romantic sexy music over this
- [35:39]
B
one? 29 year old. This is all quote, quote ivy grad working for bulge bracket firm that's a large investment bank. Bank confessed he ran to keep himself out of the bulge bracket. His desired match, a slender JD or MBA, single female, 25 to 31. Someone fit, loyal, fun, very successful. This just goes on page after page. It's incredible.
- [36:03]
A
I can't imagine talking about your job and then using like you're working for bulge and you're not like I mean fair play to him for finding a way to work that into the. To the humble brass into your Tinder profile saying I. And that's also what I'm saying about my body and your body by the way, that's very. This is. Are there other good ads like that?
- [36:26]
B
I mean there's actually lucky enough there were wedding bells as a result from the New York running ads. At least one couple wrote in to say they found each other through the ads. And they spent weekends romantically jogging through Central park and puzzling over the New York Times crossword. And they got engaged and then announced it in the New York running news to say, look, we found love here. You can too.
- [36:45]
A
I'm telling you, I would hate that.
- [36:48]
B
They're insufferable. This is the problem with yuppies, right? They're both, like, aspirational and insufferable in every moment.
- [36:54]
A
Yeah, I mean, I get that. We're fully into the why they suck. Now. What are your sort of main arguments for them sucking? Or pick one and then we'll work through them.
- [37:04]
B
I think that we talked about the gentrification story, and that's the very on the ground sucking story. One of the biggest markers for yuppie dumb is elite taste. And if you talk about yuppies, every time they're holding a bottle of water, which was very fancy at the time, they're eating brie cheese. Again, very fancy at the time, they're drinking imported beer.
- [37:23]
A
Ooh, same sister, right? Fortunately.
- [37:25]
B
But all these things are novel and they take elite education to understand the refinement required in order to consume them. So one way they suck is that they want to broadcast these tastes all the time to make sure they're getting the most social capital and credit for having good taste. It's not just good enough for you to enjoy the flavor of sun dried tomatoes. You need to make sure everyone knows you like sun dried tomatoes. So one thing I document is the rise of sidewalk cafes in New York, which becomes almost a yuppie theater to see and be seen as you wear your Lacoste shirt streaming up and down Columbus Avenue on the Upper west side. It starts as this program for the city, which doesn't have much money to create a sort of European flair in, you know, let's have sidewalk tables. Great. Let's change the laws. Fine. But yuppie sees on this as a space, a kind of stage to perform their good taste and to spot each other and to flirt and all these things in the neighborhoods that are changing quite violently on the weekends. They're brunching out on the streets, something that New York didn't have. The sidewalks were a dirty place. It's where you, you know, put the garbage bags out.
- [38:28]
A
They're for walking, kind of. They're for walking famously.
- [38:31]
B
Famously. And the first reviewers who go to restaurants out of outdoor cafes are like, this is disgusting. There's exhaust in my face. There are fumes, there's specks of ash from someone's cigarette. But the yuppies seize on it as a way of seeing and being seen and displaying their great taste. Same thing with their consumer products. You go shop at Dean and Deluca and pay however much for a baguette for your brunch at home. Or you use the Silver palette cookbook to make sure you have the kind of obscure, popular recipe of the day to show off. You know what capers are, as unimaginable as that might be. You have to be on the vanguard of taste all the time. And it's exhausting and kind of gross. And people make fun of them for it. But look at us now. We're all eating sun dried tomatoes. We're all eating balsamic vinegar. It was a value add strategy that worked for the grocers, but it was also aspirational for us. Even if we made fun of them, we also aped their tastes.
- [39:21]
A
Yeah, I was gonna say I'm drinking the hell out of some San Pellegrino in the glass bottle.
- [39:27]
B
Hell, yeah.
- [39:27]
A
I'm sorry to say I have brie in my fridge as we speak. And I was gonna eat some for lunch. Oh, must be Nigel with the brie. And thinking about, like, some of the stuff that you're talking about now is how we talk about, like, dinks, which I am, right? Like a dual income, no kids. Like, some of these things. I look at them and I'm like, ooh, yikes. Because that's also me. And how I was just right now, before we started doing this. I mean, not right now. Like, you know, 40 minutes ago, I was looking at new stainless steel espresso cup sets because I got my partner an espresso machine for Christmas.
- [40:09]
B
There it is. I mean, the vanguard of taste changes right now. It's kombucha. It's not whatever, but this trend and the time you have to display these tastes and the education you have to understand there's a world out there to be discovered and that you can get credit from eating, you know, adventurous Mexican food and then posting about it like that has its origin in this era.
- [40:30]
A
Yeah.
- [40:30]
B
So there's this sort of foodie happens. Yeah, foodie happens. And it's. You know, I don't want to say it all sucks. Right. Because what was high? What was elite taste in the 60s? It was French dining and the food sucked. Like, the most expensive meals in New York were at French restaurants where the peas came in a can. But they were from France, so they were fancy peas.
- [40:49]
A
There's a hottest take on the pod thus far. You're probably beating out my bring skits back to hip hop records with French dining is bad.
- [41:00]
B
French dining in mid century sucked. It was all about status. The food did not taste good. Like there was two types of lettuce in the country. Yeah. But after the counterculture changes, what seems to be valuable, you could have like downmarket things were reimagined as fancy. So like Italian prosciutto, that was like an ethnic thing. You didn't eat that. But now it became part of the omnivorousness of this new elite culture that was willing to go everywhere. You know, people say, I like all music except country. That's actually sociologists say the highest form of taste is omnivorousness. Rather than in the 60s, if you were elite, you would say, well, I like classical music, I like opera. That's seen as snobby, not high, low, which is actually the gets you the most credit in taste circles since the 80s.
- [41:43]
A
That's so interesting. And I do think, I mean, you're right to point out that some of these things don't necessarily suck, but they represent like a reorientation of how we understand like value and culture. And what kind of culture gets to be high culture or good. Like, because it's not. For example, say you're someone who wants to eat Korean food and you're like, I love Korean food. And this shows that I'm interested in global cultures, et cetera, et cetera. I do also want to move into this neighborhood and displace everyone from K town so that they can't live here anymore, so that I can be a person of taste and culture. Like there is this opposite side dialectic thing happening where there's this, like, I don't know, I find it interesting.
- [42:31]
B
It takes a lot of money to do this, right. To make sure you've displayed the right taste at all times. It also takes a lot of expensive education.
- [42:37]
A
Yeah.
- [42:37]
B
At least initially. In order to understand which signifiers are cool, you probably need to have gone to certain schools and hung out in certain crowds. And as that becomes the marker of elite status more and more for all sorts of diverse people, it is a real democratization. Like you can be a black man and have elite taste and you'll be recognized for it. That's cool. But on the other hand, you need to have enough money A, to buy those things and B, you're probably into Yale no offense to Yale. Sorry.
- [43:04]
A
Look, man, it happens a lot of episodes on the show. We end up talking about Yale.
- [43:12]
B
I'm reading the Buckley biography, so I have like Yale on the brain.
- [43:15]
A
Yeah. So Yale is at the forefront of your imagination.
- [43:18]
B
Totally. But that's old Yale. That's like Bonesmen becoming CIA people. This is Janice from wherever going to Yale, meeting people she's never met before, and adopting the mores and also transforming of what it means to be an elite person in America. And that's cool in some respects, but it's also in the moment when inequality is spiking. So those people who do make the top are further and further away from the rest of us.
- [43:41]
A
I mean, yeah, there is also a J. Crew next to my office, like legitimately within a three minute walk of my office on campus. And a sweet green. Like. Yeah. I mean, this is a space of that kind of cultural reproduction. Like that is absolutely. And that remains that. And you can just.
- [43:59]
B
You gotta learn the codes. So in 1982, University of Chicago takes its MBA class to wine tasting class to make sure they know how to taste wine. Because when they're with clients, they need the right class in every sense of the word, to order a bottle, open a bottle, appreciate it. And if you're training these people who didn't come up through prep schools, they don't know this stuff necessarily. So they have to be taught. So it's quite literal sometimes teaching them the markers of class so that they can be upwardly mobile and pass in the investment banking world or wherever they're going.
- [44:30]
A
So part of the why this is bad and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, is that it's about taste as a class marker. It's about creating this aesthetic vision of oneself or this personal aesthetic that is actually telegraphing class in some way.
- [44:51]
B
Yes. And that class is actually changing itself. In this period in the mid century, we had one big middle class. You could drive a Cadillac, you could drive a gm, but it was basically your tastes were similar. It was just along a scale of income. By this era, we're seeing a real gulf as the middle class breaks apart economically. The downwardly mobile people who are being laid off as yuppies break up their firms and ship the jobs elsewhere. And then the yuppies who are doing better and better, they're the only ones who see a rise in disposable income in the 80s, you know, wages, the average American wage is flat from 1973 to 2000. Flat. Yuppies, not that story. So they are a new class class out of the middle class and they're leaving behind more and more people. And taste sort of signifies the fact that really materially they are leaving people behind and they need ways to express that.
- [45:43]
A
Just popping by with a quick shout out to tell you about other multitude shows I think you'll enjoy. If you like this one. Now if you're listening to this Guy sucked, that means you're a history person. Or possibly just someone who likes being mean. But for the purposes of this shout out, I'm gonna say you're a history person person. What if I said there was a podcast that would also convert you to being a science person? Well, great news, there is Dive into genes, microbes and other assorted tiny things that have a big impact on our world With Tiny Matters, join scientists Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti as they take apart complex and contentious topics and rebuild your understanding of the world around you. They've got episodes that cover things like evolution, ancient sewers, and the history of birth control and salmon Deboki Embrace the messiness of science and its place in the past, present, present and future. I personally really love the recent episode on the really Awful Legacy of Race Science and Modern Medicine, and I highly recommend giving that one a listen. Tiny Matters releases new episodes every Wednesday and it's brought to you by the American Chemical Society, a nonprofit that connects and advances chemistry and the broader scientific community. Subscribe to Tiny Matters today wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [46:53]
C
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- [48:00]
A
You brought up something just there that I was hoping we would get. So maybe this is a good space to move into that. What are they doing financially? Like these are all people who you've just said, like a huge proportion of them go into banking and into finance. And I think this is a space in which we can probably point towards or gesture towards them sucking in a pretty significant way. What is the economic or what are the economic repercussions of the decisions that they're making in the jobs they have all moved themselves into in their pursuit of upward mobility?
- [48:37]
B
Yeah, I don't want to get into the weeds too much to spare your listeners. They can read the book if they want all the details about what we call financialization. But very briefly, Wall street moves to the center of the economy. It becomes where more profits are generated than say, manufacturing in the 1980s. And that's a real transformation in where value is created. And they're going to be winners and they're going to be losers. I'm writing about the winners in that new economy. So what are they doing all day? Here's a stat. In the 80s, 1/3 of the Fortune 500 ceases to exist. It's either chopped up, merged, spun off, sold off, or goes out of business as a result of finance seeking to pick apart the value of America's corporations, which aren't growing as fast as they used to be. All that takes work. And that's what yuppies are doing all day. They're planning mergers. If they're in law firms, they're plotting those same transactions and making them happen. They're doing strategic bankruptcies which again help people avoid the contracts and liabilities to workers and the stable sort of employment that we're guaranteed. And just in general, the economy becomes about transactional work. Not for the long term benefit of many stakeholders like workers, local communities where these places are rooted, but rather for the short term gain of shareholders of those who can benefit from the financial machinations that help Wall street first and maybe the companies less so. So taking a company private for the benefit of its shareholders and firing most of the workers and then taking it back public as leverage. Buyout firms, and now we call them private equity, do doesn't really work for the worker on the line who's fired. You know, he doesn't see he is no equity. But for those who control the company or seek to benefit or from the investment bankers who make a lot of fees from every transaction, they don't really care. They've gone on to the and they've profited massively. But you're drawing wealth away from the rest of the country and indeed the world and concentrating it in the financial sector and the legal sector that advises them. So there's actually a new term created in the 80s, downsizing. It's literally added to the dictionary because this is what corporations have to do in order to keep up in this hyper competitive finance driven economy is downsize. That means fire tens of thousands of workers.
- [50:52]
A
Yeah. I mean, that is so bizarre. Very frequently on the show someone will say, oh, and then a term comes into being in this moment and it's a term that I am so completely used to that I have like not even thought about the fact that it didn't exist at one point and had to be created to describe a practice that emerges at this one moment. Downsizing is that I have never once in my life, life pause to be like, we didn't used to. I'm not saying we didn't used to fire people, but we didn't used to downsize. Which is this euphemism for what's actually happening. Like for a company to downsize or get smaller, like a very specific process needs to occur.
- [51:37]
B
Slimming down, just like the uppies on diet.
- [51:39]
A
Yeah.
- [51:40]
B
The way you made money traditionally in the, we'll call it the Fordist economy was fixed investments in place. Right? You have a big plant, you have a lot of people, they make stuff, you make money, right. You harvest value from their work. Fine. In this era, sort of after that begins to break down and yuppies help it break down, that's not how you make money. You're sort of liquid, right. You flow to where there's advantage, there's arbitrage. You can do global capital arbitrage between currencies. You seek out financial instruments that provide more gains than being stuck in one spot in an old plant that's going to depreciate. And so what you see with downsizing is it's. You're not just firing people in a downturn, in a depression, you're firing people when you have tons of assets and your sales are booming. Why? The shareholders demand it. They want more value. Or the CEO who's increasingly being paid in stock options demands it. This is the shareholder value revolution that changes the way people think about companies as more of a bundle of assets rather than, you know, a community of workers or a factory in a place.
- [52:40]
A
You know, I said this on Patrick Wyman's most recent episode of the show, I think, but like, one thing that I feel good about As a historian is I am really not generating shareholder value at any moment in time right now. Like that, that is not my job really to like bring value to anything. Like, like I'm the value. Right? Like that's the thought process.
- [53:06]
B
This is going to show that I'm a yuppie is I'm going to cite a New Yorker cartoon, but my favorite New Yorker cartoon is they're sitting around in a post apocalyptic landscape and a guy in a suit says, sure, we destroyed, but for one beautiful moment, we created a lot of value for shareholders.
- [53:18]
A
You know, I also have a New Yorker subscription that's again with my partner, with whom I have no children. We. He gets me the New Yorker, a New Yorker subscription for the holidays.
- [53:31]
B
This is how I'm really going to monetize this book is like, I need a game show called you think you're a yuppie. And we go through the signifiers and see if you are.
- [53:39]
A
Yeah, I mean, mostly what I, what's happening here is I'm having a real self conscious experience of realizing where I sit, which I think is, is a necessary part of understanding all of this. So part of this I think is they suck, but perhaps in a way that is, I don't know if understandable is the right word. But like, they're not like some of the people on the show that we've had where we're like, so then they did a genocide. Like, it's not that. And I think there is a level of understanding the social and cultural context around them that helps to create this. Is your feeling on. Not where they are on the spectrum of sucking? Because I don't think that's a necessary framing. But like, is there a level of sympathy that you feel for them or.
- [54:28]
B
Yeah, they're forced to suck by circumstance in a certain way. I mean, have you ever met a yuppie, a high powered attorney who's working 85 hours a week?
- [54:36]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [54:37]
B
Are they happy? Are they like content at the top of the pile? No, they're miserable. Right. They've taken this bargain maybe because they had a lot of debt from law school, maybe because they're the first in their family to go to college. Maybe this dream of upward mobility for compelling reasons was appealing. And then when they get to these places, like the law firms I write about, they call them sweatshops for a reason because they're worked so hard. Because, yes, the work they're doing is ruinous to the ordinary American and that sucks. But the people doing the work are also exploited if you're a law associate, you are earning tons of profits. Profit, you're throwing off tons of profit for the partners who sit above you. You're probably not going to make partner, especially if you're a woman who gets mommy tracked, as they call it. Especially if you're a person of color who doesn't quote, fit the firm culture. And so you're not going to see the deferred compensation. You're stuck at the bottom of the pyramid of the sort of MLM model that is the big law firm. And so yeah, you're doing work that sucks and you're making the country worse, arguably, but it also sucks for you. You're getting paid a good amount. You're getting double the median salary in the U.S. i'm not saying that you're actually in a sweatshirt chop, but your hourly wage is not that great. You have no time to enjoy the pleasures that you could afford with this money. And for many people, even some of my friends, they say, oh, I'll do it for a few years, I'll pay off my debts and then we'll see. But all the while, in those first few years, you're making tons of money for the people who own the law firm or profit from the law firm as equity partners or the investment bank, you're abused in a certain way with the promise that you someday might top. Just like any service industry, the value is created through your labor and through extracting it hour by hour. So yeah, the consequences suck for everyone, but it also sucks to be a yuppie often. And so some one of the ways that their cultural habits and their fitness habits are expressed is kind of a compensation for how awful work is, right? It's like, well, at least I can go out for a jog whenever I want. Or, you know, I get a dial a car to go home at midnight after I've worked for 12 hours. Like, cool, I'm happy for you. I think. So it's a trade off. As many people have told me, it was always a trade off. It's one maybe I wouldn't do again. But especially for those just breaking into these industries who don't have a better option. That's what it means to be a member of America's elite after the 80s, working really, really hard. They don't want to go back though, to the WASP mid century because they wouldn't even be there. They'd work less, but they wouldn't have even been in the room. So for them it's like, well, what choice did I. This is the circumstance created by an era of meritocratic competition. It's like, if you want to get to the top, you're going to have to work really hard. If you want to replicate your class position and pass it down to your kids, you got to get them to the elite preschool. You can't for a moment stop. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a wonderful book called Fear of Falling in the late 80s, which anatomizes exactly this. How it feels to be middle class, to know that every generation, you have to work so hard to keep your position or climb up higher on the ladder. And that's what yuppies epitomize, this terror of falling down the class ladder. And this explains why, say, college admission is so competitive or why kids are at Montessori Preschool and we're paying $40,000. Not we, but they are paying $40,000 a year to ensure their kids do
- [57:40]
A
it again, not us.
- [57:42]
B
And I feel bad for people who are caught in that trap even as the rest of us are suffering under their domination.
- [57:49]
A
Yeah. I mean, these things can certainly both be true. Like, you can both be, like, what they're doing is awful. And also, it is a real shame that we created it. And I don't mean a shame as in, like, when people. Oh, that's a shame. I mean, like, it is shameful that we are part of this culture where, like, that creates conditions under which that feels necessary for people or under which they feel validated for existing in that way while also being totally miserable. Like, sure, you have kids and you send them to Montessori Preschool and you're not raising them, because when would you have time to do that? Like, often you have a nanny or whatever. And again, I'm not, like, shaming people for doing that, but, like, it is sad that people, like, they don't. They have kids they can't raise, they are making all this money they can't spend, and they live their lives looking forward to retirement that they may or may not ever actually have because they have identified their whole lives with the job that they have.
- [58:45]
B
Absolutely. One more way that they do suck, though, at a bigger level, is that yuppies in the 80s take this money that they're earning and take their accrued power and do turn it into a politics that seeks to push the country more in their direction. So in that way, they do engineer a sort of takeover, no pun intended, of the Democratic Party in particular. I know we talked about Gary Hart always a while ago, but he is the avatar of this new face of the Democratic Party that is driven by yuppies and their visions of what politics should be. So in that sense, the dollars that the uppies earn and the fundraising networks they create are put to transforming America, transforming liberalism towards a new vision. It's not about the unionized work darker. It's not about the black working class. It's about young professionals, Bay Area professionals, East coast professionals, and an economy that works for them. That looks like the law firm that's meritocratic at its core. That sure is more diverse and cosmopolitan, but maybe papers over a lot of inequality. And this is how we get a Democratic Party. I show in one of the chapters of the book that looks the way we know it does now in the era of the Clintons and indeed Obama, who's the apotheosis of this, rising through the meritocratic ranks. Wonderful, great. But creating a party that we could fairly call neoliberal in its orientations and in terms of who those politicians listen to, who gives the most dollars to the Democrats? In Clinton's 96 campaign, the number one identity category for donors was Goldman Sachs, bankers and their wives. Obama makes more money or receives more donations from bankers on Wall street and lawyers than any candidate before, Republican or Democrats. Democrat. That's strange, right?
- [60:26]
A
Yeah. And you wrote a chapter for a book, Mastery and Drift, which you can't see because it's blurred out. It's on the bookshelf back there on journalism and the idea of the professional class liberal. But there's also a chapter by previous several time guest on the show Nikki Hemmer on the professional class liberal presidency of Obama. And it's fascinating the way that she connects politics and this idea of the ref. I just. That book is I found so instructive for me because this is so far outside of my field of research or of knowledge. And I was kind of like.
- [61:07]
B
But we live it.
- [61:08]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And I was alive for this.
- [61:11]
B
I think she. In that chapter, Nikki says that Obama used the word smart 900 times while in office, which just shows you. Yeah, right. The degree to which he thinks smart nudge, behavioral nudges or market mechanisms or technical fixes that appeal to the professional class are the way to do governance too. You don't need a broad democratic small d base of support or organizing as the basis like the union movement supporting a series of reforms. No, you need smart solutions that refrain from open conflict with your opposition or from conflict with Wall street or from conflict with Silicon Valley. Making sure you please Every constituency under this 10. Right. Sober technocratic governance that Matt Iglesias with love. So it's a new sort of Democratic Party. They joke that Obama's cabinet, they call it government sacks because there's so many people from Wall street on the cabinet. And so it's literally true too that yuppies find their way into power by the end of my story.
- [62:06]
A
Yeah, I mean, I get in trouble occasionally online for my views on the Democratic Party as it currently stands. And I think a lot of that is an outgrowth of what we're talking about here where like now political desires have shifted enormously and the Democratic Party is not keeping up with that because they're so entrenched in this previous idea of what success is supposed to look like and what is supposed to be desirable to the general public. And I will say it feels to me like most of the general public, not everybody, but quite a lot of people have started to realize that these things are simply not attainable anymore and that they're not all aspiring to be lawyers and bankers and whatever. Like, that's not a goal of most people now because people are realizing that's like, not possible.
- [63:00]
B
Not possible. Or that the AI job apocalypse is going to trim the entry level classes in these places.
- [63:06]
A
Sure.
- [63:06]
B
I talked to a bank recruiter recently and she's like, we're moving to more of a cylindrical shape rather than a pyramid, meaning the bottom, the legs will be cut off from the entry level hiring.
- [63:15]
A
They're not saying the top is going to widen.
- [63:17]
B
No, no. It's just fewer at the bottom. So the future of the yuppies very much in question in this precise moment as we wonder who will have the pathway into this world and what would happen if it's foreclosed? Who will that hurt most? And you can probably imagine who will be shut out as people seek those who fit the elite standards. I don't know, but we'll see.
- [63:39]
A
Yeah, I mean we're already seeing people being like, what if we un. Diversified. What if we solve the problem by not diversifying things anymore? Like, and it's, it's to me is like, well, like that's what was going to happen at some point out of this. As soon as you see someone saying like, let's chop off the legs of the. At the bottom of the pyramid. Right. Like those people. I don't know if this architecture makes sense, but in my head it's like, well, those were already the people who are on the outskirts of the bottom anyways. And those were the people who didn't feel like they fit to begin with or were somehow not the demographic that people imagined being there, most exploited, most
- [64:19]
B
immiserated, and now maybe not employed.
- [64:21]
A
Exactly. Well, exactly. And like, I think about, like, growing up on the west coast in the early 2000s, like everyone I know, including one of my own parents, went through like a tech layoff, for example. Like, be it working for a big tech company going through a layoff, which is just downsizing. Also, like, a layoff is just that. And there was a moment in time where people, people like, actually believe that a layoff was just a temporary suspension of your job when, like, it's a. You're fired. Like, you don't have a job anymore. That's what's actually happening. And like, it's just so wild to see people being like, well, why don't we just do that again? Why don't we just. I mean, it wasn't that bad the first. And it's like, it was horrible. It was. The west coast was awful.
- [65:06]
B
In that time, they've hitched themselves to these cruelly unstable industries that treat the rest of the world like widgets to be dispensed with. Right? The workers that they fire in a merger, they dispense with. Well, guess what? They're going to fire their bankers too, if there's a downturn. And they do. My story ends in the late 80s with a swoon on Wall street and the recession. Fine. There's a pause. But then by 93, 94, New York's in a phase that sociologists call super gentrification as the markets boom again. So yuppies are not immune from any of these changes. And it comes for them too. And I think it's unfortunate to think that if you hit yourself to. To the plutocrats in Capitol, you think you're going to be safe, but they don't really care about you and you're just their handmaiden to a new order. They're rolling out and they can replace you. Because there's always a new class coming out of Harvard indebted and looking to suck just as much as the last class.
- [65:56]
A
And as always, the show kind of ends on a note of us saying the real problem is capitalism.
- [66:02]
B
Sorry.
- [66:03]
A
As always, the real villain is capitalism and capital. Unfortunately.
- [66:09]
B
Unfortunately.
- [66:09]
A
Thank you so much for this. And the book is really, really great. And you know that I think this already. Cause we've talked about it before, but it's a really, really excellent book. And I hope people at home, if you're curious about this, will go and purchase it. I am very convinced that they suck. But I also think that there are some real arguments for the structural, the structures around them that make this possible and in fact likely so. Thank you so much for that.
- [66:36]
B
Thank you. I love being a hater. It was a pleasure.
- [66:39]
A
Well, great. Where can people find you? Slash contact you? I don't know. I don't know if you want people to contact you.
- [66:47]
B
Yeah, I have a website. Dylan Gottlieb.org I'm on Bluesky and kind of sort of on Twitter still. Not really. And they can come to an event in New York, in Princeton, in Philadelphia, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and hopefully in a city near you. But pick up a copy of the book and write me, especially if you are or were a yuppie. I'd love to hear from you you and hear your take. Did I get it right? What did I miss?
- [67:10]
A
Yeah, go to the book tour for sure. And as always, you can get yourself a copy of Yuppies. The Bankers, Lawyers, Yoggers.
- [67:20]
B
It's a mouthful.
- [67:21]
A
The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers and Gourmands who Conquered New York at the link in our episode description thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude Podcast Podcast collective. This episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Dylan Gottlieb, and edited by former Brie broker Julia Sheffini. All of our theme music was written and produced by jazz genius Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month, and access to our full archive of episodes, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or to our patreon@patreon.com this guy sucked. You can also support TGS by giving us a five star rating or a free review wherever you're listening to the show right now or just telling a friend or two to check the show out. That would be really, really great. See you next.