These jerks don't understand what DEI is

Plus, the NBA vs SNL; Orange juice is obsolete; How do we free ourselves from Kevin Hart?

My daughter is pondering a major in political science, bless her heart. It’s a volatile time to make that your primary field of study.

I get it, though. I was in business school 2000-2002, which was a hell of an era to be getting your MBA. If you were around then, you might remember that the dotcom bubble had popped early in 2000, and then the rest of the economy was already unraveling when 9/11 set everything on fire.

Warren Buffet famously said, “A rising tide lifts all boats, but only when the tide goes out do you discover who was swimming naked.” The post-dotcom fallout revealed that we were living in a skinny-dip-based economy. Super-massive economic titans like Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom collapsed as they could no longer hide that they were built on fraud.

But this early ‘00s period revealed something even more sinister about the economy, which is how much of it was dependent on pure good faith. Big corporations hired auditors like Arthur Andersen (which also collapsed, RIP) to vouch that they were telling the truth. But if the auditor didn’t want to play ball, they’d find another.

Just a few years later, Wall Street blew a housing bubble with mortgage securities that were approved by debt ratings agencies. But the ratings agencies were paid by the debt issuers that pooped out the mortgage securities. (Do you maybe see a conflict of interest here?) So when the underlying mortgages became irrational and fraudulent, the ratings agencies continued to ignore the facts and bestow“AAA” ratings, because that’s how they got paid.

This happens all the time in the economy. A couple years ago, I met a friend-of-a-friend who worked in a cannabis testing lab, which validated weed products’ content and potency. But the open secret, he told me, was that the weed producers will shop around for a lab that will deliver the results they want.

Like most people, I try not to think about how much of our economic system is based on good faith and trust, when the only real incentives in the economy are earning returns on capital and avoiding lawsuits and prison. It’s when the economy collapses — like in 2001 or 2008 — that we see who was swimming naked. That’s a fun time to be in business school, until you graduate and you need a job so you can start paying the required student loans.

Today, my daughter is learning about constitutional systems while ours is collapsing at an incredible speed. I texted her about it the other day, and she wrote back:

american government class is kinda chaotic rn because the professor has to keep explaining how certain things are changing or no longer true from a textbook that was published less than 10 years ago

She’s supposed to take a trip to Greece in May to learn about the foundations of democratic government. And then she can come home and watch it mutate into something else.

Trump exposed in 2017-2021 that, like our economy, much of our government isn’t based on enforceable laws, but merely good faith. After his first coup attempt failed, institutionalists like Joe Biden and Merrick Garland naively retained their faith in those institutions, even after Trump showed they were built from straw.

Now we have this (waves at everything). I’m not going to recount all the horrors occurring right in front of us. Project 2025 is happening just as they told us it would, and Trump is just assuming Congressional powers!

So here’s a question: Where is the opposition? Why is the public protest so sparse?

I have a hypothesis here, which is that Trump (with Elon’s support) is blowing up a system that most people don’t understand very well or just don’t believe capable of serving us effectively. (Where’s our damn background check for buying assault weapons?) This apathy is also evident in the lack of organized opposition. It doesn’t help that the official Democratic response seems to be issuing a finely tuned statement that always reads like AI slop. “This outrageous and unprecedented power grab harms hard-working Americans for the benefit of the billionaire donor class…”

Meanwhile, many of the horrors are actually quite easy to understand. Here’s one! Amazon is a monopoly that should be scrutinized by the feds to defend American consumers and workers. Well, Amazon just directly paid Melania Trump $40 million. It’s ostensibly for a documentary, but nobody else was bidding for this documentary, the price is inflated by at least 10x, and almost all the money goes directly to Melania, who is also selling “sponsorships” to anyone else who might have business with the government.

There’s a word for “people paying the President and his family in exchange for political favors,” but I cant remember what it is. It’s probably illegal.

Is there reason for optimism? Remember, Trump is redefining the presidency, but he’ll be gone someday. Perhaps a presidency that’s no longer accountable to Congress or the courts can be used for good. Imagine a future president declaring Roe v Wade the law of the land again. Sound impossible? TikTok is back on the app stores even though SCOTUS ruled that that’s illegal, because President Trump decided he doesn’t want to enforce that law.

That’s our new system. The rules were never real. The only thing that was holding up the system was belief, and then most people lost their belief. And then we twice elected a guy who never believed any of it.

Nobody who’s against DEI understands what it is

The breadth and virulence of the assault on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs has been shocking, even to me. Not only is the federal government in the process of sandblasting DEI from its own personnel, practices, and even websites, but it’s also putting tremendous pressure on school systems and the private sector to do the same. Not everyone is complying, and so Trump is already turning the screws.

One has to wonder: what do these guys believe DEI is?

So let’s review this, very briefly: DEI is about diversifying your workforce, assuring they all have equitable stakes in the success of your organization, and assuring that they’re included in the company’s decisions and operations. It’s predicated on a simple assumption that everyone suffers from biases they can barely perceive, and that these biases drive sub-optimal outcomes both within organizations and also in society at large.

This used to be non-controversial, and even the most conservative companies had DEI programs because they simply drive better company performance.

So what happened? 2020 did. After the police murder of George Floyd, America had a real racial reckoning — for a year or so. And then came the predictable backlash. Conservative leaders looking for an enemy found it in DEI consultants and programs, which they imagined as tools of a fantasy Marxist movement that had infiltrated every American institution. They fantasized about today’s anti-bias training paving the way for tomorrow’s socialist redistribution of wealth, in the name of racial reparations.

Stephen Miller, the great defender of guys like him

Now I’d like to start with my own experience with DEI. Just to set the stage: I’m a middle-aged, cis hetero white man. I’m also a native English speaker without a discernible regional accent or ethnicity. In other words, I’m playing the game on Easy mode.

For most of my career, I’ve also been a strong champion of DEI, which especially in Silicon Valley has not helped my career one bit. One executive accused me of “virtue signaling,” which I guess is partly true — I want people to understand that DEI is virtuous!

My motivation for supporting DEI is only partially about justice; it’s also about my desire for my company to be successful. My personal experience is that a workplace that’s committed to DEI hires better people and makes sounder decisions for its customers. This is how I’ve tried to sell DEI to skeptical founders and executives: “DEI is a Moneyball strategy to hire and empower the exceptional, undervalued talent being ignored by our competitors.”

This argument doesn’t always work. Many — not all — tech founders and executives are inherently hostile to workplace diversity. Early stage startups often tend to be staffed by people who look and act like the founders. Sometimes building a team of People Like Me is actually a core motivation for starting a company. For example, one of the founders of PayPal (not Elon) bragged he wouldn’t hire people who played basketball.

I’ve experienced my share of workplace monocultures, including a really uncanny experience at one startup where all seven interviewers weren’t blood relatives but maybe could have been. It reminded me of one of those Romney family photos.

When I interviewed at Google in the early 2010s, the recruiter made it clear that I only made through the screening because I had a graduate degree from the short list of schools the founders liked. Shortly after I started working there, Google dropped the alma mater requirement because they ran out of people to hire. But we still had to rate each applicant on “Googliness,” which was undefined but clearly meant to be understood as “Is this person enough like us?” (This even comes up in the cringey Google-approved movie The Internship.)

I’ve seen too much, and I’m more certain than ever that DEI is good for any organization. Yes, some anti-racism training curricula delved way too far into self-flagellation and academic leftism. Pete Buttigieg recently mocked these as “something out of Portlandia.” If the anti-DEI forces wanted to, they could just cut those from the federal government.

But Stephen Miller and team are disappearing every trace of DEI from the government, and now many private corporations are wiping it all out, too. People I know who work in the space — from basic anti-discrimination training to employment law — are despondent.

In its rare cogent moments, the anti-DEI culture uses the term as shorthand for a Jesse Helms-era definition of affirmative action, overtly claiming that critical jobs from airline pilots to judges are filled with underqualified people, only to keep woke pressure groups at bay. In its more common, less cogent moments, they use “DEI” as a slur, to target someone’s identity as evidence that the person is unqualified.

But DEI is actually a critical function in any organization. By addressing bias, it serves to elevate people based on merit, not discriminate against them.

It’s clear that the mischaracterization of DEI as a reverse-racial discrimination program is working. In a particularly infuriating WSJ piece titled “The Minority Voters Who Love Trump’s Dismantling of DEI,” one person after another misunderstand DEI as some kind of racial handout.

George Ortiz… tells his children they need to earn jobs based on merit, not because of diversity initiatives… Victoria Evans, 35, a home health aide who is Black, said she feels like DEI programs are racist because they single people out instead of letting the best people be hired.

(Most of the people in this article also say they voted for Trump because they’re expecting tariffs and deportations to bring consumer prices down, so DEI isn’t the only thing they’re tragically misinformed about.)

A key platform of Project 2025 is replacing tens of thousands of experienced federal employees with political appointees selected for their loyalty. Among the questions they asked of potential political appointees (again, this was widely reported for months before the election) was when they had their MAGA awakening.

In other words, they’re replacing merit and competence with a personal belief system that has nothing to do with the job itself. Pray tell, what does that remind you of?

Sunday Night Live

Last Sunday night provided a terrible live TV conflict: the NBA All-Star Game ran minute-for-minute against SNL 50, the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary show. (In our house, we did what we’ve been doing for the past 25 years or so, and just watched SNL off the DVR.)

NBA? SNL? Why not both?

Like a lot of people, I discovered SNL when I was about 12, and it quickly became an important part of my life. One of our local UHF stations also showed old reruns, so the whole 50 years are part of my consciousness.

People have compared SNL to a pro sports franchise, with an ever-evolving roster of franchise mainstays, superstars who leave for more money, valuable role players, and reserves who barely get off the bench, and a venerable team owner making the big decisions from the skybox.

But over the years I’ve started to think that SNL is more like a pro sports league. It has up eras and down eras, but it’s always present in the culture. Even if you stop paying attention for a while, you can’t escape its influence.

SNL is strong these days. Ratings are up 13% this season (thanks to the election and James Austin Johnson’s incredible Trump impression). SNL 50 was NBC’s highest rated non-sports program in years.

The NBA, however, is in a down cycle now. It got off to a promising start with a thrilling summer Olympics, where the most exciting US squad since the 1992 Dream Team faced off against a world that’s more than caught up. (The top four players in the NBA are French, Serbian, Slovenian, and Canadian.) The anguish of the French announcers as 35-year-old Steph Curry assassinated their gold medal hopes was the funniest thing I heard in 2024.

But NBA TV ratings are down 19% this year. Why? Oldheads say the game is boring, uncreative, predictable. (Here’s a great video that proves otherwise by comparing random first quarters from three different eras.) Others note that it’s just getting really hard to watch your local team without an $80 cable subscription, which fewer and fewer people want to pay for.

The All-Star Game is a tidy microcosm of the NBA’s self-inflicted problems. Last year’s game was unwatchable, more a laconic shootaround than a real basketball game. This year, they changed the format radically, and it mostly worked — the level of play was significantly more interesting.

But the TNT broadcast was a disaster. The three-hour broadcast featured less than 40 minutes of basketball. It included a 20-minute break in the middle of the final round for a moving tribute to… TNT’s All-Star Game coverage. It also assigned Kevin Hart to chirp for the entire three hours, mostly to complain about the state of basketball.

(Why must America suffer so much Kevin Hart? Can we have just one goddamned Kevin Hart-free year?)

Meanwhile, on NBC, Lorne Michaels was putting on a massively entertaining double-long episode of SNL stacked with A-listers joyfully jumping from the audience to the stage. (Did anyone else notice that they sat Al Sharpton next to Rob Schneider? I hope they talked about DEI.)

Much like the NBA All-Star Game, many people had low expectations for SNL 50 due to past performance. SNL 40, a decade ago, was a dull clip show with tuxedoes. And watching a couple hours of punchlines and catchphrases is deeply unfunny and unsatisfying.

One of the most poignant segments of SNL 50 came late in the show, when Tom Hanks introduced sketches that “aged horribly” — stereotypes, slurs, “ethnic wigs.” But Hanks pointed out, “You all laughed at them. So if anyone should be canceled, shouldn’t it be you?” You could call this a cop-out, but it’s actually an excellent point. It’s okay to admit that you enjoyed something during a less empathetic time of history. (And if you can’t admit that, there’s a shitty anti-woke comedy scene in Austin just for you.)

In spite of the ups and downs, both SNL and the NBA are both enduring institutions with high floors of popularity. They’ve evolved tremendously over the decades, even though not every change has served the audience perfectly. Sometimes they produce an unforgettable moment, and sometimes they drop a turd. And if you’re not happy with them, you can ignore them for a while — they’ll be different when you’re ready to come back, but you’ll be different, too.

Rangelife Shorts

Speaking of sketch comedy. Aside from SNL, sketch comedy shows have been relatively rare on TV. For my money, the best one since 2000 was That Mitchell and Webb Look. You may have never seen it before, but you’re probably seen at least one of their sketches in meme form, and it happens to be the first sketch they ever aired. The show also starred Olivia Colman (!) in the supporting cast.

In a time of lots of bad news, it was exciting to read that Mitchell and Webb are reuniting for a new sketch show. Let’s hope it’ll be as amazing as the Kids in the Hall revival in 2023.

In the meantime, if you’re into it, Amazon Prime has Mitchell & Webb’s wonderful three-episode miniseries Ambassadors (2013), which is about a troubled British diplomat in a fictional central Asian dictatorship. It’s quite funny, and it definitely deserved more than its micro-run. The fake dictatorship may remind you of a country a little closer to home.

The twin orange juice crises: Every now and then, two articles appear in the media that are like yin and yang. First yin: The Atlantic, The Last Days of American Orange Juice. A bacterial disease with no known cure is killing off orange trees. Climate disasters are claiming many of the survivors. Orange groves are selling out to housing developers. Florida production is down 92%(!) over the past 20 years, and “Florida” brands are likely to be mostly Mexican and Brazilian product. Prices are skyrocketing.

That’s the yin and here’s the yang: Nobody wants to buy OJ anyway. From Bloomberg: Orange Juice Makers are Desperate for a Comeback. Americans bought 56% less orange juice in 2024 compared with its peak in 1998. Tropicana’s debt is being downgraded, and OJ brands are racing to develop lower-sugar products.

OJ seems like it’s going to be one of those products whose era has passed. It was once considered a necessary health food, but younger people now view it like drinking Coca-Cola for breakfast.

Or maybe it’ll flip back. Cottage cheese is booming. Maybe in a few years, OJ will become part of a balanced breakfast again. If the trees survive.

Netflix tells its writers to dumb it down a little. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how HBO has transformed their post-credits segments to explain the episode you just watched, because you were probably fuckin around on your phone the whole time. Netflix, ever the innovator, is a full step ahead:

Executives are pushing writers to develop simpler, less complex scripts to keep distracted viewers engaged... Multiple screenwriters report that company executives are sending back scripts with requests to narrate the action, such as announcing when characters enter the room.

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