Sophie Gee

I mean, yes, you're totally right.

And just to kind of kill that point by making it again, there'd obviously been polarization and violence in American society before 9-11, but almost all of it, a great deal of it, had been organized around the struggles of race and civil rights.

Obviously, there was nuclear crisis, there was

crisis and violence around women's rights, around gay rights.

So there were many flashpoints and moments of catastrophe.

So there'd been violence, there'd been polarisation before.

I'm thinking of the civil rights movement, I'm thinking about multi-generational violent struggles around race, I'm thinking of gay rights, I'm thinking of women's rights.

But actually this cosseted world and for all its criticism, utopian world of the East Coast Sporting School and actually the East Coast elite educational institution, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, being the logical extensions of Groton and Alt and all these sporting schools, they seemed curiously utopian still.

And what we've seen in the sort of intervening 20 years is the rise of big tech,

this massive division in haves and have-nots across America, and then the rise again of MAGA, as we said at the beginning of the episode, of the American right, the attacks on elite education, and a kind of questioning of the purpose of education.

So the terrain has just changed so much.

This is the perfect moment to shout out one of my favourite songs, Year 2000.

By your favourite band.

By my favourite band.

I've got three letters for you to bear your point out.

The thing we were most worried about in the 1990s was Y2K.

Total canard, yeah, yeah.

One of the 90s, actually, I mean, the fact that people are having sex is another pre-9-11 artefact.

The Korean roommate.

Well, I mean, this is where my comparison with The Great Gatsby completely falls apart because Lee does not have a voice that whispers listen.