Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture | Lex Fridman Podcast #285
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Glenn Loury is a professor of economics and social sciences at Brown University, and a prominent podcaster and social critic who speaks and writes about race, inequality, and social policy. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:10 - Martin Luther King Jr.
9:58 - History of slavery
24:36 - Equality of outcome
40:59 - Math and economics
57:15 - Racial groups
1:10:31 - Black patriotism
1:20:24 - MLK and Malcolm X
1:34:04 - Joe Rogan controversy
1:53:21 - Accusation of racism
2:01:05 - Elon Musk and Twitter
2:06:39 - Universities
2:15:16 - Cognitive inequality
2:27:42 - Politics
2:47:08 - Ketanji Brown Jackson
2:53:11 - Thomas Sowell
2:58:26 - Barack Obama
3:17:03 - Mortality
3:29:17 - Meaning of life

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 I hate affirmative action. I don't just disagree with it. I don't just think it's against the 14th Amendment. I hate it. The hatred comes from an understanding that it is a band-aid, that it is a substitute for the actual development of the capacities of our people to compete. They wanna tell African-Americans to pat us on the head. We're gonna have a separate program for you. We're gonna give you a side door that you can come into. That doesn't make us any smarter. It doesn't make us any more creative, and it doesn't make us any more fit for the actual competition that's unfolding before us. The following is a conversation with Glenn Lowry, professor of economics and social sciences at Brown University. He is one of the great minds and communicators of our time, writing and speaking about race and inequality. I highly encourage you to listen to his show on YouTube and Substack, simply called The Glenn Show. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Glenn Lowry. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech, I think is the greatest speech in American history. If I may, I'd like to read a few words of it. Sure. And ask you a question about this dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. First of all, damn, I mentioned to you offline, I immigrated to America and this is why I love this country. This is one of the great speeches that represents what this country is about. So what is this ideal of equality that we should strive for as a nation, that all men are created equal? What does that mean to you, this equality? Well, if we put this in historical context, King is speaking in 1963 when he gives that speech. It's exactly 100 years after Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation declaring the enslaved people to be free. They're not yet citizens in 1863, but the end of slavery has become the position of the federal government when Lincoln issues that Emancipation Proclamation. So putting it in context, enslaved people, four million or so African-descended enslaved people, how do they become citizens? How do they become in this status of subjugation, and domination, and stigma, and exclusion? How do they become citizens? It seems to me that that's the heart of it. The equality that King is talking about is an equality of status as members of the nation as free and equal citizens within the Republic. Now, I think it's really important to understand that slavery was not merely a legal order, but it was also a social system that had the symbolism attached to it. They had a big journey to make from their subjugated status as serfs and the subjugated status as serfs, as landless people, as uneducated, unfit for citizenship really, in the minds of many. So I think that's what in 1963, 100 years later, that King is appealing to this idea that when Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence writes these words, all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. He didn't, Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, didn't have in mind when he wrote those words, the people who were slaves. But by the time you get to 1963, King is invoking this idea, all men, and of course he means all persons, he doesn't only mean men, he means men and women are created equal. He wants this idea to be embraced by the country in reference to the descendants of the African slaves. That's his dream, that's his idea. The legacy of slavery would be erased, that the position of African Americans would be equalized within the political community, which is the United States of America. That's my sense of it in any case. So on a very basic level, the worth of a human being is equal. It's just literally the worth of a human being. So I mentioned to you offline that I came from the Soviet Union, my grandfather fought in World War II, and for Hitler, the worth of a Slavic person as they were captured, there's different numbers, but it's in the hundreds to one German, in terms of the value of the person to the great Germany. So he wanted Germany to expand and conquer a large part of the world, and within that future world, that Third Reich, the worth of a Russian or Slavic person is 100th or 1,000th of a German person, of a pure German person. So that has to do with not some kind of public policy or politics or all that kind of stuff. It has to do with the basic worth of a human being, and that's what Dr. King is speaking to, that all people on some kind of deep level are worth the same. If you're somehow weighing the value of a person, we're equal in that's basic fundamental worth. Yeah, I think that's correct, I think that's very well said. I don't know that he had in mind the position of Slavic people in Central Europe in the middle of the 20th century, or the first part of the 20th century, King. I don't know that he had that in mind. He might well have done, but certainly that's the idea. So you don't think he was really thinking about this particular civil rights struggle and the particular struggle against the backdrop of the history of slavery in America and thinking about African Americans. He wasn't thinking about the basic, he wasn't speaking to the basic worth of all human beings. No, I don't mean to say that. The speech in Washington. The dream. In 1963, at that march, was within the context of the United States, and it was within the context of the civil rights movement. There was a movement that was going on. He was an actor in a political drama that was American, that had to do with the fight over equal rights for voting, for housing, for employment, for citizenship of blacks in America. But King was informed, I think, by a much broader Christian ethic of the equality of all persons. I mean, he gets killed in 1968. The five years after that speech in Washington, he spends developing his worldview and the things that he had to say, for example, about the war in Southeast Asia that was going on at that time, made appeals to universal principles of equality. He was a pacifist to some degree, he was against war. He was a socialist to some degree. He might not have worn that label publicly, but he believed in a decent society where the poor would not go untended, where healthcare would be available to people who needed it and this kind of thing. A humanitarian who saw that the value of a life was not dependent upon the color of the skin, upon the native mother tongue that might be spoken, upon whether male or female. All persons are created equal. This is very much the ethic of Martin Luther King on my understanding. Broadly speaking, what do you learn about human nature by looking at the history of slavery in America? Oh my. So what does that tell you about people? Well, I think of two things right off the top of my head. One is about the capacity of people for looking the other way in the face of unethical, and morally profoundly problematic practice. So, I mean, slavery was controversial. It was controversial going all the way back to the founding of the United States of America. The country was founded on a compromise where half of the country thought that slavery was abhorrent and would not have had it countenanced in the constitution. The other half of the country were steeped in the dependence on the labor of these African captives and their descendants. The economy depended upon it. They owned them as property. That was their wealth. Their wealth was invested to some degree in the value of these human beings. And in order for the United States to come together as a confederation of the several colonies, there had to be a compromise made. And it was made where slavery was allowed to persist. And the people who were against it or who thought it morally problematic were able to countenance the practice in the Southern States where slavery flourished. And that went on for 75 years after the founding of the country until the crisis of the late 1850s that led to the Civil War and ultimately to the Emancipation. So one thing I think about human nature from the fact of slavery is that the ability of people to live with terrible, morally questionable practices and have that as a part of their institutions. It took a massive movement of abolitionists struggling against slavery for the better part of a century before that practice could be eradicated. But the other thing about human nature that I see is the ability of people to sustain their humanity under the most awful oppressive conditions. The enslaved persons, the slaves and their children, I mean, they were chattel, they were bought and sold like horses or cattle. And yet their humanity was not destroyed by that. And they were able to sustain their dignity to some degree in such a manner that once Emancipation finally did arrive, the freedmen and women, the persons who had been enslaved and who were set free, were able to, over the following decades, build a foundation for the development of African-Americans within the context of American society that eventually culminated in the civil rights movement of the middle of the 20th century and has led us into the present day. So, you know, human nature can countenance awful evil, but human nature can also survive in the face of terrible evil. That's what I take from slavery. That survival, that flame can burn even when the world around it tries to put it out. There's still a little flame of human consciousness, of spirit, of culture, of whatever the hell that is that makes humans flourish and makes humans beautiful that lives on. That's very well said, yeah. I think you put it very well. There's gotta be some poetic way of expressing that. Leave it to the poets. What about the people that look the other way? How many people do you think, just regular people, knew that something is, this is wrong? Or do people, through generations, convince themselves, most people, most regular people, convince themselves that there's nothing wrong? All right, yeah. I ask this question because I wonder what we're looking the other way on today also. Because you have to ask yourself these difficult questions of assuming we're the same people we were back then, then we can be flawed in that same kind of way. We can look the other way just as others have in history. Yeah, you spoke of the European context and of the Nazis and certainly a lot of people had to be looking the other way when the massive crimes that were committed by that regime were being undertaken. I mean, railroad cars full of human beings being taken off to be slaughtered or to be worked to death in labor camps or to be gassed, et cetera. A lot of people had to know about what was going on and look the other way or enthusiastically supported the persecution of the Jews and the gypsies and so on. And I don't know, I wasn't around in 1840. My sense of the matter is that, like many practices that are unjust, most people thought that's just the way it is. I mean, that's the world that they inherited. They were not moralists, they were not revolutionaries. They just wanted to go along. Some people might've been troubled by it but thought there's nothing that can be done. Some people might've thought, well, they're these black Africans, they're not really like us and they are lucky to be here. If they were in Africa, they'd be worse off still. Some people might've thought that. Some people might've been disturbed but not been able to see what it is that they could do about it. They might've thought, oh, this is disgusting. This is not something I would wanna have anything to do with but not knowing whether there's any practical way of opposing it. That's why you need a movement. You need for the people who are troubled by the practice to know that there are others like themselves equally troubled and as they gather together, collectively they can exert their influence. I mean, debates about the wrongness of slavery, as I say, go all the way back to the founding of the country. There were abolitionists and there were people who opposed the compromise that led to the framing documents and institutions that created the United States of America, opposed the countenancing of slavery in that situation. But it took a while before that could come to a head and produce the crisis which ultimately led to the eradication of slavery. I would note that slavery is not unique to the United States. It's not unique to the Western hemisphere, that enslavement of people, the trafficking in human chattel is something that one sees on a global basis. One sees it going all the way back to antiquity. So we might ask, how is it that people finally came to turn their backs and eradicate the practice? That might be the thing worth really trying to understand because the practice itself is, there's a wonderful book by the sociologist Orlando Patterson called Slavery and Social Death that was published in 1982, which is a comprehensive history and social analysis of the institution of slavery over 2,500 years, going back to the classical Greek and Roman civilizations, finding slavery in Africa amongst Africans, finding slavery in the Middle East, finding slavery in the Far East, finding slavery in South Asia, the enslavement of people, the practice of taking someone as a captive in war and then instead of killing them, which you could do, making them into your property was very, very widespread in human culture. So I mean, I like to make this point sometimes when people are talking about how wrong slavery was, and I agree without any question, that the practice was profoundly morally problematic, but I like to make the point that given how wrong it was, think about how impressive was the accomplishment of the eradication of slavery. Now that was something, there were 600,000 dead in the war between the states 1861 to 1865 in a country of 30 million people. That's a lot of dead people who gave their lives not to eradicate slavery in every instance, probably most of them were just fighting for, they enlisted or were conscripted into the forces and they fought and they died, but the net effect of their having fought and died was to push along a process that led to the eradication of slavery. That's an amazing achievement. The slaves themselves were largely uneducated and backward in their, of course, what else could they have been? They were kept in captivity, they were prevented from developing their human potential. And yet, after the end of slavery, that population, that four million plus African descended people became the foundation for what a century later leads to Martin Luther King standing in the Washington Mall and giving that great speech. And now here we are 150 years down the road and Barack Obama is president of the United States. Now he did not descend from slaves, I think we must not lose track of that, but he identified as an African American and was a part of the population that consisted largely of people who descended from slaves. And we are, we African Americans are, for all practical purposes, fully equal citizens of this great republic. That has happened within a century and a half. And I don't know that you can find any parallel to that kind of transformation in the status of people from human chattel to full citizens of the republic. Anywhere in human history, it's certainly worth celebrating the achievement of the eradication of slavery, I would say. And it probably started with a few people that inside their mind dared to rebel. It's interesting to think about how it all started, how in the state of injustice, the revolution percolates, like where it starts. You said people that see something is wrong find each other. It's in the ideas of charismatic individuals that not only know that something is wrong, but are able to tell others about it and be convincing. And then together gather and rise up. It's interesting to make this kind of incredible progress from slavery to where we are today, to live out the ideal of this all men are created equal. The power of individual, because I don't know what you think about it, but I tend to think that a few small individuals probably originated this. It's the power of the individual. Because sometimes we think there's injustice in the world, what can I possibly do? I tend to think one person can be the seed of starting to fix the injustice. Sure. One person here, one person there. Yeah. One thinks of course of Frederick Douglass, those massively significant figure who was born in slavery, who stole his freedom, because he was property and he decided he was not gonna be property anymore. And he took it unto himself to emancipate himself personally, and who became an educated, powerfully articulate, massively influential person in the United States and in England going around presenting himself as an embodiment of human dignity and commitment to ideals of equality. And I mean, he's just one person, but there were others like him. Just one person. All it takes is just one person. So here we are on this topic of equality in the 21st century. So what does equality mean today? If you start to think about this idea of equality of outcome or the injustice of inequality, at which point does equality of outcome is just, at which point is it unjust? Sort of looking at our world today and looking at inequality, how do we know that some inequality is a sign of injustice and some is the way of life? So what does equality mean when we look at the world today, different from Dr. King's speech of the basic humanity? I don't think King's speech, I have a dream that one day my four little children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, requires equality of outcome. He says his children will be judged by the content of their character. That's a conditional statement. That is the judgment will depend upon the content of their character, not the color of their skin, but it doesn't follow from that, that the outcomes, whatever outcomes we consider, wealth and economic power, position within the society, representation in the various professions, the various measures of social achievement, doesn't follow from judging by the content of character and that color of skin, that when we look at the end of the day at the social outcomes, that they will be equal across the different groups. In fact, I think there's a contradiction in the idea that groups will be equal in all of the various social outcomes, that they will be equally successful in business, that they will be proportionately represented in the various professions, that they will have the same educational achievement, that the occupational profiles will look the same. If they are in fact distinct groups with their own cultural traditions and practices, with their own ideals and norms, various immigrant populations, people coming to the United States of America from all corners of the world, the descendants of the African slaves, the black Americans here today, who are ourselves various with different origins and so on, the different religious practices and commitments that Jewish or Mormon or Christian or whatever. However we parcel up the total population into the various groups, these groups are themselves different from one another. They have different norms within their own cultural practice. How would we expect if in fact we recognize that the groups are different from one another, that in a world that is fair, they would all come out equally represented in every undertaking, they're not equally represented. And that fact I'm arguing is in and of itself insufficient to justify the conclusion that they're not somehow being fairly treated. Fair treatment doesn't imply equal outcomes in a world in which the populations in question are themselves different with respect to their culture, their practices, their norms, their traditions, their beliefs, their ideals and so on. The fact of those different norms, traditions, beliefs, cultural orientations and ideals will have consequences in terms of their different social outcomes. So I just think it's a mistake that people are making when they think fairness of treatment implies equality of outcomes, it does not. Is the process by which we're speaking now in the midst of the National Basketball Association's playoffs, I confess to being a Boston Celtics fan. I mean, I'm just, it's a very good team and I'm excited about my Celtics. We defeated the Brooklyn Nets, I mean, we defeated Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and company, okay, in a playoff series. We whipped them and we're on our way to, you know, the Eastern Conference finals and we're on our way to the NBA finals and I'm, you know, if I were a betting man, I'd put down a few bucks that the Boston Celtics underrated as we are have a very good chance of winning the NBA finals. Okay, so that's the NBA, that's the National Basketball Association. I'm a sports fan, I like basketball. Slightly biased prediction, but yes. Yeah, it is somewhat biased. All I'm saying is, if you take a look at who the star players are in the National Basketball Association, you're gonna find that there's some Eastern Europeans. You know, there's some really good basketball players coming out of Eastern Europe, you know, and more power to them. And there are a lot of African-Americans. We're overrepresented. There are not that many Jews, as far as I know. No offense intended there, Lex, but I mean, the NBA is not equally representative of all of the different populations in the United States. Now, we could go into the reasons why, but I'm just saying the process by which you get to be playing in the NBA is fair. If you can play, you can get on the court. That all they're looking for is people who can play. I think something like that is true in many different venues. I expect if you're a really good technical engineer, companies are gonna employ you. And if you can make money, they're gonna advance you, and you will be able to rise to the top of that profession. I expect that the people who are engaged in financial transactions, who are actually making bets on the market, by and large, are the people who are good at that activity. And if you're good at that activity, in this world, in this modern world, you're gonna rise to the top. I'm not saying that there are no barriers of discrimination. Of course, there are of many different sorts. But I'm saying that to expect that there would be, okay, I mean, let's look at who's actually writing code. Let's look at who's actually trading bonds. Let's look at who's actually starting businesses, and so on, to say that in a fair world, I would expect that if blacks are 10% of the population, they'd be 10% of every one of those things, is to ignore the reality that the differences in the culture and practices and norms of the various population groups will lead to differences in their representation amongst people who are outstanding performers in one or another activity. How do you know if the difference in culture accounts for the difference in outcomes, or it's the existence of barriers, especially barriers early on in life, of discrimination that are racially based? So if you think about affirmative action, in which ways is affirmative action empowering, in which ways is it limiting for these early development of the different groups, but let's just speak to African Americans. We should say that you went to some no-name Northwestern University at first, but then you ended up with the great university of MIT. So that's your, not early, but middle development. So speaking of the development, the opportunities, the equality of opportunity, how do we know we got that equality right? Yeah, I'm glad you put it like that. We were talking about results, now we're talking about opportunity. I was taking the position that when King says, I have a dream and he envisions a world where his children will not be barred from the good things in life because of the color of their skin, we're talking about opportunity, not about results. But opportunity is not just something that depends upon what the law is and what public policies are. Opportunity also depends upon the social conditions in which people are raised, the social and economic conditions. So the child of a poor family that has no resources, it doesn't have the same opportunity as a child of a wealthy family to realize their full human potential. You asked me, how can we tell whether or not a difference in outcomes is a reflection of unequal opportunity, or it's a reflection of differences in culture and interest and practice? And I don't know that there's a single answer to that question, but I think one wants to look at the data. One wants to try to measure, as a social scientist, I would say what you wanna do is you wanna estimate the significance of various factors for determining the outcome. If the outcome is how much money does a person make when they work in the labor market, so you look at their wages and you think, well, that depends upon a number of things. It depends upon how educated they are, what kind of skills they have, what kind of work experience they have, and so on. And those things are all legitimate factors that might determine how much they end up making in the labor market. But you also wanna perhaps controlling for those things, see whether or not the fact that they are black or they are Latino or whatever, fact that they are male or that they are female, the fact that they do or do not speak English as their native language, this kind of thing, whether those factors also are implicated in determining how successful they are in the labor market. And if you find that after you have controlled for the things that are legitimately determining success and failure in the labor market, like skills and education and experience, having controlled for those things, the fact that a person is black or is a woman or is an immigrant or is of Latino background also affects their earnings, then you might conclude that to that extent, they're not getting equal opportunity in the labor market, that kind of idea. But I wanna focus a little bit more here on what we mean by opportunity, because it's not just whether employers treat the worker on a fair and even basis, irregardless of the worker's racial or ethnic background, that's one opportunity issue, but that's at the end of the development process, they are now presenting themselves to the market, trying to find work and being employed at this or that wage, that's the end of the line. What about the developmental opportunity, the opportunity to acquire skills in the first place, that goes all the way back, that goes all the way back to birth, it even goes back to before birth, the mother carrying the infant in the womb, she has certain nutritional practices as she might be smoking or drinking alcohol or something like that, I'm not saying she is, I'm not saying she isn't, I'm just saying whether she is so she isn't affect the development of the fetus, the newborn, now there's a question of environment, there's a question of the development of their neurological potential, do they learn how to read, are they stimulated verbally, how many words have they heard spoken, are they being nurtured in a home environment so as to maximize the possibility of them achieving their human potential, what about the peer group influences, what about the values and norms of the surrounding human communities in which they're embedded, do they encourage the young person to apply themselves in a systematic way to their studies and to their focus on their acquisition of language command and of their educational potential, so development is not only something that is controlled by the society's practices, it's also something that is influenced by the cultural background of the individual and those things are not equal, those things vary across groups in a very significant way and that too will be a factor of determining disparities of outcome, so when I see outcomes that are different, I see wealth holding that's different, I see educational achievement that's different, I see representation in the professional schools and law school and medical school that's different between groups, one question is are the institutions treating people fairly but another question is do the background in social and cultural influences equip people in the same way and we know that the answer to that, not in every instance do they equip people in the same way and so it makes the judgment, the moral judgment that we make when we see inequality of outcome complicated, inequality of outcome is a systemic factor to some degree but it is also a cultural factor to some degree, I wanna say and that's controversial I know, a lot of people they think of themselves as being progressive, they wanna point a finger at society whenever they see a disparity but I think that that's a mistake, I think it misunderstands the difficulty of the problem, you think that if you get the right law, if you have the right public policy, if the right politicians are elected to office, suddenly those disparities will go away and I'm here to tell you that that's a false hope and moreover it is probably the wrong goal but I mean we could go into that, you were talking about affirmative action which is something else altogether and you were talking about me and my education which is also something that's a little bit different and I'm happy to talk about those things, Northwestern University by the way was a great university. I'm just joking, it's one of the great universities of the world, yes. And I studied mathematics at Northwestern University which is how I ended up at MIT in the first place and I got a very good technical training in mathematics when I was at Northwestern so. You love both mathematics and human nature and so which is why you ended up going into economics at one of the great economics programs in the world at MIT and getting a PhD there. So one of the many hats you wear is that of an economist which allows you to think systematically and rigorously about the way the world and the way humans work at scale, trying to remove the full mushy mess of humans like a psychology perspective economics allows you to do. Well, economics is one of the social sciences, I think there's value in psychology and in sociology, there's a lot to know that doesn't come up within the study of economics. We study markets and the dynamics of economic development and trade and so on. But yeah, speaking personally as I was coming along, I was fascinated by mathematics, I was good at it and ended up at Northwestern and took a lot of courses there and functional analysis and logic and mathematics and dynamical systems and stuff that I ended up employing in my graduate studies and economics. But you're right, I was not satisfied simply to be proving theorems, I wanted to be addressing issues of social significance and economics I discovered to my delight was a field of study that allowed me both to develop rigorous analytical frameworks, modeling and precision of logical deduction and inference. On the one hand, satisfying my mathematical interest, but on the other hand could address questions of social significance like why does racial inequality persist, why are some countries prospering and growing and others less so, why do the prices of raw materials fluctuate in the way that they do over time and so on and so forth and I ended up falling in love with the application of mathematical analysis to the study of social issues. What to you is beautiful about mathematics, about mathematical puzzles, about logic, all those kinds of things, because it's still there, the love for math is still there for you, so is there something you could speak to, what is the kernel, the flame of that? And I think that's the key to the study is the kernel, the flame of that love. It's like magic. I mean, being able to prove something and I think of offhand, there's no largest prime number. Okay, so how would somebody know that? Okay, what's a prime number? So a prime number is a number that has, a whole number that has no divisor other than one. There are no divisors of the number that makes it a prime number, like 13 or 19 or 37, whatever, okay, so they're prime numbers. There's no largest prime number. There are infinite number of prime numbers. There's no largest prime number, okay. That's an idea, you can get your mind around it in an instant, it doesn't take a whole depth to see the question. There's no largest prime number. I wonder if prime numbers show up in economics. Oh, they don't show up in economics, except cryptography, I understand, that's important for code, you know, in coding stuff. And that shows up in economics. But in terms of models, probably not. So prime numbers are little, you know, in abstract algebra, it's like they show up in all these places that are just like beautiful mathematical puzzles that don't immediately have an application but somehow maybe challenge you and as a result push mathematics forward, like Fermat's last theorem. You know, as far as I know, no obvious real world application, but it has challenged mathematicians throughout the centuries. Indeed. And somehow indirectly progressed the field. But. That the rational numbers are countable. They can be put in one-to-one relationship with the integers, you know, but that the real numbers are not countable and there's a lot more real, quote unquote, more real numbers. These are orders of infinity. This is Cantor, Geyer-Cantor, and all that kind of stuff. Or Gertel's theorem. I studied this as an undergraduate, you know, the incompleteness theorem that there are propositions within any logical system that's rich enough to accommodate arithmetic. There are going to be propositions that you can formulate that are true but that you cannot prove to be true. So the idea that you could systematically develop a logical framework for mathematical inquiry that could demonstrate the truth or falsity of any proposition is not a feasible goal. This was Hilbert's project, as I understand it, and Gertel showed that there was no hope ever of being able to demonstrate the closure of logical systems that were rich enough to accommodate the real numbers. They gave an existential crisis to all mathematicians and scientists alike and humans because maybe you can't prove everything. I remember, you know, when I was a junior college, a community college student before I transferred to Northwestern, and I took a calculus course and it was a lot of fun. And it was differentiating algebraic expressions and integrating and using trigonometric substitutions. And it was a lot of simple problem solving. I get to Northwestern, I take a course in differential equations. And again, it was a lot of formulaic, you know, applying if you get a differential equation of this structure, like if it's linear, you've got exponentials, et cetera, you can solve it. And then I took a course that showed me, you know, where the question was not how to solve any particular functional expression, but it was proving the existence of a solution to a differential equation where it was like X dot equals F of X and T. And F is just some arbitrary function. What do I have to assume about the function F in order to know that there exists a solution to the differential equation, dx dt equals F of X and T. And it's basically, they called it a Lipschitz condition. It's a condition about the bounding of the slope of the function F as a function of X that it doesn't, that you can sort of uniformly bound the slope on that function. And then you can use a iterative process to show that the sequence of, you know, partial solutions to the thing converges to something that's a solution to the real thing. Anyway, again, I'm not gonna bore you or pretend that I'm a mathematician, I'm not. But what I'm saying is the difference between a specific algebraic formula that you can manipulate and solve on the one hand, and the abstract question of whether there exists a solution in the general case is like a huge, was like a huge step for me in my study of mathematics. And the techniques that you have to employ to address these larger questions and so on. So I, you know, when I was an undergraduate, I took the first year PhD sequence in math analysis at Northwestern from a brilliant mathematician named Avner Friedman and learned about measure theory. And, you know, learned about some early functional analysis ideas. And when I saw that those ideas were being applied by advanced study in economics, I was delighted. I found an intellectual home. So that one of the fascinating challenges in mathematics is to think, how can you, which echoes the challenge of economics, what are the properties of an equation that allow you to say something profound and say it simply? And so the question of economics is, how do you construct a model where you can generalize nicely and say something profound and say it simply? So one of the questions, one of the challenges of economics is macro versus micro economics is, you know, the world is made up of individuals. So there's a connection to this, our discussion of race and discrimination and outcomes and all those kinds of things. The world is made up of individuals, but in order to say something general, we have to construct groups. In order to analyze the data, we have to aggregate that data somehow. We have to make an average over some set of people. So what are the pros and cons of looking at things like equality of opportunity and equality of outcome based on groups versus based on individuals? And what are the groups, if there's any pros to looking at groups that we should be looking at? Okay, well, those are big questions. I mean, in economics, you're right. I mean, micro, you have an account of how individuals make decisions about spending their money on the consumption side and about how enterprises make decisions about what to produce, how much of it, what inputs to use, what techniques of production and so on, individual firms, individual consumers. And then you wanna aggregate. So there's a theory of so-called theory of general equilibrium where you think supply and demand in a bunch of markets, you think prices that move to equilibrate, but you recognize that the price in one market affects people's behavior in another, the markets are interacting with each other. You realize that the behavior of one individual affects the supplies and available resources and for other individuals, so they're knitted together in some kind of systematic way. And you wanna try to demonstrate the fact that notwithstanding all these interdependencies, there exists a solution to the system of equations that equates demand and supply across all the different markets. This is the existence of general equilibrium. Then you wanna try to say something about the properties of an equilibrium if it exists. Is it efficient? Well, what do you mean by efficiency? Well, the idea of so-called Pareto efficient outcomes. These are outcomes that cannot be uniformly improved upon. Everybody can't be made better off by an alternative outcome. You wanna demonstrate the efficiency of competitive equilibrium. What do you mean by competition? You mean that people take their actions to do the best for themselves that they can, profits of firms, wellbeing of consumers, they try to do the best for themselves that they can. But they do so in reference to a set of prices that they believe they cannot control. That's the criterion of competitive market circumstance. So does a competitive equilibrium exist? Do there exist a set of prices which if everybody recognizes them as given and responds to those prices on behalf of their own interest, the outcome will be supply equaling demand in all the markets where people are interacting with one another. And that requires the use of some concepts and topology, fixed point theorems and whatnot that are familiar to mathematics, not very deep mathematical results, but important to economics. That's all about general equilibrium and whatnot. But you ask about groups. By the way, amazing world win summary of all of economics, but yes, go ahead. That was great. Markets of competition, of operator efficiency, anyway, but yes, groups. And prices. And prices. And by the way, there are some very beautiful formalizations of everything that I'm saying here. You end up in vector spaces, you end up with sets of bundles of consumption and production, you end up with convexity, you end up with hyperplanes, which are in this finite dimensional vector space, which are all of the bundles that have the same value at a certain price, you end up with inner products. And it's very pretty. Yeah, but you almost forget that it's just a bunch of humans transacting with each other, that markets are made up of individuals. Markets are made up of individuals. And in order to carry out this formalization, you have to make assumptions about the individuals. And the end result is true in a formal sense, but may not be true as a representation of the reality, because it depends upon assumptions that themselves may not hold. But at least you know what it is that has to be true in order for your formal framework to be relevant, which is already a step in the right direction, I think. I mean, the formalization is better than the intuition, the armchair intuition where we sit back and we don't really know exactly what we're talking about because we haven't pinned it down in a precise way. I'm in favor of the formalization. People, they think what is mathematics and the social sciences? After all, we're dealing with people. People are not automata. I agree with that. But the analysis of the interaction of people, I think to be rigorous requires us to be specific about what we're talking about, about markets, about consumers, about firms, about profits, about technology, about preferences. And that's the language of economics. But people's behavior depends upon what they seek in life, it depends upon their goals and their objectives. Those things are at play. They can be pushed this way or that. So, I mean, you know, nationalism, fighting and dying for your country, religion, sacrificing on behalf of some abstract ideal of the good or of, you know, what is the human situation and what is the meaning of life. Economists have to assume that these things are some particular thing before they can turn the crank on their machine to analyze the outcomes of human interaction. And yet these things, belief in my identity, but the things that I'm willing to sacrifice and die for, purposes of life that I affirm and pass on to my children, are important preconditions for actually carrying out any economic analysis. And they are subject to manipulation and to change over time. And that's not something that economics has a whole lot to say about. Well, is there some general things that are really powerful in terms of, you said nation, religion, those are groups. Can you group people nicely in helping you understand human nature? So group them into nations based on their citizenry. That's geography, right? The geographic location of your birth or your long-term residence, or maybe religious belief, what religion you believe over time. Is there groups like that? And then race, is that useful? What are the pros and cons of that? What are the pros and cons of looking at outcomes based on these kinds of groups, race in particular? I think they're pros and I think they're cons. I mean, I am myself, Glenn Lowry, sits before you right now, a black American, an African American, I quote unquote, I identify as, you know, that's the way they talk about it nowadays. I identify as a black American. My skin is brown, my hair is coarse, my nose is broad relative to the way other people's noses look, my lips are thicker. That's a consequence of my ancestral descent from the human population resident in the African continent in millennia past, my race. Here in the United States, we have various quote unquote races defined crudely in the way that I just tried to define myself. You could say, and I think there is a very powerful argument that these are superficial differences. I mean, really, why should it matter that your eye color or your hair color or the shape of the bones in your face or the color, the tone of your skin, the amount of melanin and how it is that you react to ultraviolet radiation in terms of your skin? What is that to be the basis of anything? I mean, that's arbitrary, that's not meaningful. Could there really be meaning in these superficial differences among human beings? Isn't that a archaic or barbaric way of thinking about ourselves to look at each other's skin color or hair texture and then to decide, well, that's a black or that's a white or that's a Latin or that's an Asian or that's a whatever. That's something that we should outgrow, a person might say. That's a relic of a kind of tribal society, of a kind of pre-modern society where we built real structure on the basis of such superficial difference. A person could say that. On the other hand, I am a black American. I mean, that's part of my identity, that's part of my heritage, it's part of the stories that I tell myself about who my people are. Why do I need a people? Why do I need a narrative of dissent in which I affiliate with a racially defined people? Do I really need that? I mean, I think that's an important question. I, in fact, this is a confession, think of myself as black. I could think of myself as simply human. I could not identify specifically as black. I could say, my eyes are brown too, so what? I'm a brown eye? I mean, I'm gonna invent a group based on my eye color. I weigh 290 pounds. I'm gonna have a body size group, I'm a plus 200 and that's quote, who I am, close quote. I don't do that. I came from Chicago. Yes, I do have a certain sense of affinity with my hometown. I'm a Chicago born person, but frankly, I haven't lived in Chicago since 1979. That's a long time. I wear my Chicago origins very, very lightly. I would not go to war with someone from Cleveland or St. Louis and fight to the death with that St. Louis person or that Cleveland person based upon the fact that we come from different cities. And you have even abandoned in your heart the Chicago Bulls. There's some Chicago that's still in me, I suppose, but it's not very deep. It's not quote, who I am anymore. And I'm wondering, here I'm trying to pose a question, why is it that being a descendant of African slaves should be who I am? So there's some answers. One answer is people will look at me and deal with me differently based upon what they see. I don't have control over that. I'm going to be perceived as a member of a group, whether or not I elect to affiliate myself with that group or not. Therefore, I need to be mindful of the fact that regardless of what my internal orientation is, the world will perceive me in a particular way and will perceive me differently based upon the color of my skin. So a police officer who stops me at two o'clock in the morning because my tail light is out and ask me for my automobile registration and I reach quickly to the glove compartment to get my registration. And the police officer says, show me your hands. And I don't quite hear what he says or I ignore what he says as I'm getting my document out of my glove compartment. But the police officer thinks because I have not responded to his demand to show my hands that I might be reaching for a weapon. And the police officer sees that I'm black and fears that the likelihood that I might have a weapon is higher because in that town at that time, a lot of the people who get stopped with weapons in their car happen to be black and male and so on. And he pulls his weapon and he discharges it and I'm bleeding out there and I'm dead now. And all of that is a possibility that's very real and it's based upon the color of my skin. And therefore, when he stops me, I keep my hands on the steering wheel and I don't go to the glove compartment. And I'm fearful of the fact that he might mistake me for a criminal, et cetera. Or I walk into a high-end store, clothing store. I see you're nicely dressed there. Lex, I'm not, but that's okay. I do have some good clothes at home. I just didn't wear them here today. But you know what I mean. And the salesman in the clothing store either treats me like an old friend and is warm and welcoming and what can I do for you, sir? And let me show you this and that. And what are you looking for? Because he thinks I'm gonna spend $1,000 there that day and he's gonna get a 5% commission or whatever. And he either does that or he ignores me and looks at me with suspicion and thinks I might be trying to shoplift something or thinks I'm only gonna spend $50 and not $500 and therefore I'm not worth his time. And I'm aware of the fact that when I go into the clothing store, especially the high-end places where I can buy a good suit or buy some really good dress shirts or slacks that fit me well and so on, I'm not gonna be paying attention to that. He loves his clothes, he loves his clothes, he loves his dress shirts, he loves his clothes, he loves his clothes, he loves his clothes, and so on and so forth. So I'm aware of the fact that I may not be taken seriously by the salesman based upon the fact that he's looking at me and he sees a black person. And therefore I dress up before I go to go out to buy clothes, cuz I want to present myself as not someone who just walked in off the street. But as one of those black people such as it is, of knowing that I need to earn the being taken seriously by overcoming the suppositions that people may have about me based upon the color of my skin. Something like that. Or I ask myself what am I going to teach my children about who they are and where they come from? What stories am I going to tell them about their ancestors? Who are their ancestors? Every African American has European ancestors. Every black person in the United States of America, I think that I can say that almost without exception. We could go to 23andMe and look at the DNA. They have European ancestors. They're not purely African. That's a fact and that's a consequence of the experience of African descended people because it's a mixed population. My name is Lowry, spelled L-O-U-R-Y but pronounced as if it were L-O-W-E-R-Y. I gather if you trace the history of that name that it's Scottish. So somewhere back then... So you could identify as a Scott. Well, or I could claim some Scottish descent, but I don't. I don't know who those ancestors are and frankly, I don't know who my enslaved ancestors are. I can't trace my family history back very far into the 19th century. So what stories do I tell my children about who we are, about who their ancestors are? I mean, I want to tell my children some story and that story is going to be colored quote-unquote by my race. So even though it is superficial and in an ideal world you might think why would human beings... I mean, I read science fiction so there's this Chinese writer, Chik Sen Lu is his name. I might not pronounce it exactly right. C-I-X-I-N-L-I-U. Chik Sen Lu. He has a trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End. Those are the three books of Chik Sen Lu's trilogy about how Trisolaris, which is another star system within a few light years of the solar system, and Earth get into a conflict. And when the Trisolarans come down to dominate Earth, suddenly all of these differences between the Chinese and the North Americans and the Europeans and the Africans and the South Asians become kind of insignificant because after all the Trisolarans with their advanced civilization whose star system is dying have their eyes on the solar system which has a planet the third rock from the Sun that is pretty habitable and the difference between us become pretty insignificant. So we shouldn't need for an invasion by extraterrestrial beings to have to happen before we would recognize the common humanity that we all share that is profound and is deep. We all descend in effect from the same ancestral population of Homo sapiens who walked out of East Africa eons ago and have survived amongst all of the different possible variations of species and what not of humanoid population. The Homo sapiens have flourished, the others have died out, and here we are and we can just look at the genetic endowments that characterize our biological essence and we can see that we are all quote-unquote the same beneath the skin and yet we end up freighting so much weight onto these superficial differences. So I can see both sides of the issue is what I'm saying. I can see the argument race is an irrelevancy because at the end of the day deep down it is but I can also see the argument that I hold on to racial identity because a my racial presentation colors how other people deal with me but B because everybody needs a story. You know everybody needs an account. You tell me you're Jewish. I mean I don't know how deep that is. I don't know how genetically profound that is. I do know that it's a culturally profound identity for a lot of people based upon maybe some of the same kind of forces that I'm talking about. A they won't let you not be Jewish. You could say you're not Jewish but when Hitler is rounding people up what you say doesn't have a whole lot to do with what the Gestapo was about. And B you need to tell your children a story. Yeah. That's the fascinating thing about this tribalism that you spoke about that we formed tribes as humans throughout human history formed tribes and have directed hate toward other tribes and sometimes violence and destruction and yet tribalism allows you to tell a story to your children. It allows you to grow a culture. There's something about defining yourself within particular tribe that allows you to have a tradition. You have an article that you wrote called the case for black patriotism. Oh yeah. So I should also say it's so interesting because for me personally I feel, identify as, believe I am an American and yet within the American umbrella it feels that there's a longing for other tribes. You mentioned Jewish but what I honestly feel is I mean a lot of it is humor and culture and so on is Russian and Ukrainian because that's where I come from. That's where my family is from. You know there's like stereotypical things that are funny humorous type of thing about Russians showing no emotion, good at chess and math, into wrestling, drinking vodka. I mean there's literally every single stereotype I'm in the embodiment of that. So there's a, you celebrate that in certain kinds of ways. There's a tradition there and within the American umbrella and some of it is humor, some of it is little quirks of culture but now with the war in Russia and Ukraine interestingly enough even that little thing it becomes also source of negative tribalism. But anyway that context aside what is black patriotism and why do you feel? I mean I'm speaking in an article called the case for black patriotism in a particular context and what I'm saying basically is very simple. I'm saying we are African Americans and the emphasis should be on the American. I actually don't even much care for the framing African American but I'm not gonna fight with people about it. It's you know I don't think it's worth fighting about. That's not how I would just say we're Americans or if you want we're black Americans. We're certainly not African. That is the African American population is a population of people who come into existence here in North America through the cauldron of slavery. There are also immigrants. Immigrants from East Africa, immigrants from West Africa, immigrants from Southern Africa, immigrants from the Caribbean who descend from an ancestral population which is African. You know the history of the world since 1500 is a history in which people of African descent are scattered because of slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere and so here we are. But the institution of slavery ended in 1863 in the United States. The struggle that we started out talking about which gave rise to Martin Luther King giving that speech that you say is the greatest speech in American history and I'm not gonna argue with you about that. Happened right here in the United States. We are, what is the United States? The United States is a nation of immigrants. The population of the North American continent was sparsely populated by an indigenous population which was destroyed in conquest by a European population that settled here in North America and appropriated the land and have built a civilization here which has been people by a large influx of individuals from Europe, Irish and Italian and Greek and Slavic and Jewish, Russian Jews coming in large numbers and so on and wave after wave after wave of immigration. Asian, Latin American population of people have come to reside here in the United States and we black Americans who descend from slaves. We African Americans who descend from slaves. So here we are. This is a great nation. I mean this is a monumentally significant political force which is the United States of America founded in 1776, 1787 fought a war of independence from the British, established a republic which is a confederation of these independent colonies which has grown into now the 50 states of the United States of America, a continental nation. The richest and most powerful nation on the planet with massive influence throughout the world for good and for ill. That's who we are I want to say to black people. There is no other home for us. This fantasy of we being a people apart back in the day when I was coming along in the 1960s there was something called the Republic of New Africa movement and they wanted some states in the south given over to black people and we were going to have our own country. And that's a joke. It's a fantasy. It's a mythic, unbalanced, unrealistic, fanciful politics. It's not a serious politics. We're Americans. We're not going anywhere here. The idea that and I want to say this in a number of different registers. I want to say first of all we need to make peace with the fact that that's who we are and that's where we are. So nobody is coming. The world court is not going to litigate our disputes. The United Nations is not going to set up a desk for people of African descent who reside in North America. We have to work out whatever our concerns are with our fellow Americans right here within the context of American politics. That means compromise. That means looking for a framework for political expression which is broader than our racial identity, etc. So I want to say that. But I also want to say there's no reason to apologize for this. There's something positive to affirm. I take on this question about slavery in brief because in fact slavery was awful and it was wrong and it was on the backs of the enslaved Africans and it had consequences that endured, that have endured long after the termination of the thing. But I also want to say look at what has happened in the last 150 years for African Americans. And I want to say look at the vitality of the institutions here in the United States of America, of the Democratic Republic of the United States of America. Again, not perfect. Which are malleable enough, these institutions, to allow for the transformation of the status of African Americans such as has occurred since the end of slavery. And I want to say there's a lot to celebrate in that. So this is our country. We are full members of the polity. We have burdens and responsibilities as well as privileges that are associated with our membership in this republic. That does not mean that we should not fight for what we believe to be right, although we are not one voice here, we black Americans. It does not mean that we should not protest things that we think are deserving of protest. But I want to say it does mean that we should not reject the framework that we're operating in because we basically don't have any alternative and because when viewed in full context, a noble and profoundly significant achievement the United States of America and a beacon to the rest of the world. I don't want to you know go off in some starry-eyed kind of jingoistic celebration of America as the greatest civilization etc etc. But this great nation is our nation and I think we do best by beginning, we black Americans do best by beginning, this is my argument in the piece, by beginning from a framework which accepts that fact and then builds on it. So black patriotism is not exactly the same rhymes echoes American patriotism. So a black American is first and foremost an American. Yeah a black American is first and foremost an American and it's a good thing too. Let me return to the question of Dr. King and another powerful impact individual Malcolm X to ask you the question. Well first people often perhaps inaccurately portray them as representing two different ideals approaches to the fight for civil rights. So Martin Luther King for the nonviolent approach, the peacemaker and Malcolm X is the by any means necessary. What do you think about this distinction and broadly speaking in black patriotism in the future of black Americans in the 21st century, what is the role of anger? What is the role of protests? Even you know violence encompasses a lot of things but just aggression and you know fuck the man we're going to have to make change, force change. Okay I think you put your finger on something really important in the context of we were just discussing my black patriotism essay and it's not the only story. There is another story and Malcolm X is someone you identify and his memory lives on and is powerfully influential and I think you see it in Black Lives Matter and I think you see it in the protest and rioting and so forth that has broken out periodically going all the way back to the 1960s and before but especially since the 1960s. He saw it in Los Angeles in 1992 and the Rodney King civil disturbances that broke out there and the balled-up fist, the radical Afrocentric rejection of the American story that Martin Luther King he believed in. He believed in a magnificent promissory note and a lot of people are rolling their eyes you know and saying you know as you say fuck the man magnificent promissory note. I mean just get your knee off my neck. That's what you can do for me. Don't ask me to believe in your BS about it some magnificent promissory note, some founding fathers who were all slave owners anyway. I mean just get your knee off my neck. Now I can relate to that as I mentioned I grew up in Chicago in the 1950s and the 1960s. I remember Malcolm X I mean literally in real time. I remember when he was murdered in 1965 in the Audubon ballroom in Harlem in Manhattan in New York City. I remember my uncle I was raised in a house where my aunt and uncle were the master of the house and my mother and my sister and I lived in a small apartment upstairs in the back of this of this big house that my successful aunt and uncle owned. And my uncle was a small businessman, a barber and a tradesman. He was a hustler I mean legally. He did what he had to do to make money. He was a very enterprising, not especially well-educated but a very intelligent and disciplined and resourceful provider for his family which included myself, my sister and my mother in their household. And we called him Uncle Mooney because he had moon-shaped eyes that protruded and were round. Uncle Mooney James Ellis was his name. Uncle Mooney James Ellis Lee was my Uncle Mooney. But I'm saying all that to say this, he admired the nation of Islam. I mean King and Malcolm X, Martin King and Malcolm X differed along a number of different dimensions. Malcolm X was a Muslim and Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian minister. My Uncle Mooney didn't have any time for these Christian ministers. He thought that was the white man's religion. He you know and back in that day you go into a black church and you'd see a portrait of Jesus and he'd be a blonde haired, blue-eyed. He didn't even look like a Mediterranean. I mean he didn't look like somebody who came from Palestine. I mean he looked like somebody who came from Northern Europe or something like that. The picture of Jesus. And my Uncle Mooney rejected that whole thing. He would be damned if he was gonna bend his knee to some white Jesus. But he was not a Muslim either. But he respected the Muslims. He brought home their newspaper. It was called Muhammad Speaks. This is the nation of Islam which is the black Muslim movement founded in American cities in Detroit and in Chicago going back to the early middle 20th century and growing into a very significant movement that had a lot of influence. Louis Farrakhan, a controversial figure, descends from this movement. It has fractured now and has the major part of the legacy of the black Muslims. It has assimilated itself into Islam proper. Malcolm X made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and came back with a very different vision about what it meant to be a Muslim and understood himself to be a part of the large tradition and religious culture of Islam that has a global reach. And he had a different vision when he came back from that. Some people say that's why he was killed and so on. I don't know. I certainly find that to be plausible that he became the constitutive threat to the sect which was the black Muslims and had to be dealt with. I don't know if we'll ever know the full story on that. But anyway, what I'm trying to say is the black Muslims were there. Malcolm X was there and in my experience, they constituted a counterpoint to the position of king which depended on a kind of respect for the best of the tradition of American democracy, appealing to the better nature of our oppressors, live up to the full meaning of our creed. I mean, these are words that he would use. A magnificent promissory note is what he would think of as the Declaration of Independence and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, unfulfilled ideal. And the black Muslims were like, fuck that. We're gonna take care of our own. We're gonna build our own schools. We're gonna build our own businesses. We're not waiting for the white man to do anything. Get your knee off my neck and get out of my way and let me take care of my own. And my uncle respected that. He respected the straight back. The stand up straight with your shoulders back. That's a Jordan Peterson. But I mean, that was way before Jordan Peterson, but that was his philosophy. Stand up straight with your... Raise your children. Don't be depending upon welfare. You're taking welfare from the white man. You need to get busy. You need to educate yourself. You need to clean up your act. Put down the fried chicken because it's gonna kill you. My uncle Mooney loved this book that Elijah Muhammad, they called him the honorable Elijah Muhammad. He was the founder and the leader of the Nation of Islam. He had a book. And all the book said was be smart, eat green vegetables, don't eat fried food, don't eat pork. They're Muslims. Don't eat pork and take responsibility for your diet and be healthy. And don't be putting a whole lot of pills into your body. You don't need to do that if you just get control of your diet and you eat properly. My uncle loved this idea of responsibility for self and determination to build. He respected that in the Muslims even if he didn't buy the religious part of it. And so, and by the way, when my uncle died in 1983, he left me a bequest. It wasn't money unfortunately. It was his complete collection of the recorded speeches of Malcolm X. And I have these albums. These are 33 and a third LPs. There's six of them. And I have a complete collection as best as my uncle could assemble of the recorded speeches of Malcolm X. Now why did he do that? He did that because he did not want me to forget, don't be dependent upon the white man. Build your own. Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Proud black man. Take care of your business. Take care of your children. Pick up the trash in front of your house. Get busy. This was this philosophy. So violence now, that's another story. I mean Malcolm X would say, you know, we're gonna defend ourselves. You're gonna mess with us, you know, you racist Ku Klux Klan or whatever. We're gonna arm ourselves and we're gonna fight you back. You racist police who are oppressing and persecuting and abusing our people, well you better be ready because we're gonna fight you back. And that too was the spirit that my uncle, that was a kind of attitude, a kind of posture. My uncle was not a radical. He was a businessman but he respected this idea. You take your life in your own hands when you mess with us because we're prepared to defend ourselves. So that blood runs in you too. That threat is, when you write about black patriotism, that threat is there too. It's like you embody both the ideal that we're all American but also that there is this oppressive history. There is the powerful that are manipulating you, that are oppressing you, and you can't just wait around for things to fix themselves. You have to take action. You have to take things into your own hands and sometimes that means being angry, sometimes that means being violent. That's there too. Yeah it's there but here and the but is I don't, me today, Glenn Lowry in 2022, think that that is the answer. I don't think that violent rebellion gets us anywhere at the end of the day. I think we're past that. There aren't night rider Ku Klux Klan people breaking down your door and dragging you away. There are not nooses thrown over a tree limb where you hang somebody from the tree because they whistled at a white woman or they got too much property in your community and you became, they were uppity Negroes and whatnot like that. That is a thing of the past in America that the situation is no longer the one that requires that kind of violent reaction and that there is, if we look at the net effect of the so-called rebellions in the American cities, they're negative. The George Floyd protests which became violent and arsonist in the aftermath of civil disturbance and whatnot in the summer of 2020, I think set back the program for African-Americans. I don't think it advanced it. I think there are things to be concerned about. Schools that are not working, police that are not respecting citizens and so forth but I think that those are things that affect white Americans as well and that the way to ultimately correct those things is to make alliance and associate oneself with Americans who are concerned to change these things. I don't think it's properly framed as a racial problem and I certainly don't think that violent rebellion gets us anywhere. I get the historical salience of that posture and it made a lot of sense in the early and the mid 20th century. I don't think it makes very much sense at all in the early 21st century. Well thank you for allowing me for a brief moment to try to channel your Uncle Mooney and maybe Malcolm X in this conversation as we as we look forward to the 21st century. You mentioned that in part you're troubled by the term African-American so words are funny things until they're not. So let me ask you about what I think is one of the most powerful and controversial words in the English language, the N word. So this is a word that I can't say that only certain people have the right to say. I have a friend Joe Rogan who has, what would you say, there was mass pushback or highlighting of the fact that he didn't just say N word but the said the full word many times throughout his conversations when referring to in a meta way about the power of words especially when related to certain comedians using those words. Yeah. What do you think about this word? Is it empowering? Is it destructive? What is it? What does it mean for race in America? What does it mean that people like Joe Rogan were essentially there's an attack to cancel him for using the word? Just as a scholar of human nature. What do you think about this whole thing? This is a phenomenon that interests me. Okay. The N word, nigger. I can say it because I'm black but I mean I can also say it because I like hip-hop and when I listen to hip-hop I hear the word all the time. These niggas ain't did, you know, watch out for these etc. I heard the word constantly as I was growing up as a boy and a young man in Chicago. Niggas ain't shit. That was said. That could be a reflection of some kind of pathology within the African-American community of self-hatred and so forth. It could be or it could just be a colloquial linguistic way. I mean I assume other groups also have their various, I don't know how the Irish talk about their Irish brothers and you know whatever and I don't know how the Jews talk about the Jewish brothers and whatever. But black people when talking about other black people use the N word all the time. My nigga. N-I-G-G-A. My nigga. That is a term of endearment. My friend Randall Kennedy, the law professor at Harvard University has a book called Nigger and he uses the word in the title of the book. The history of a, strange history of a of a provocative word. It's something like there's a subtitle but the title of the book is N-I-G-G-E-R colon and then he has a subtitle. I think of course the use of the word as a slur and an insult which is a part of the history of black people in the United States. The use of the word by the southern racist segregationists. We don't want no niggas up in here. Y'all you know niggas have no place in my restaurant, in my store, etc. That's meant to be an insult. It's an insult to people it's a fighting word. It's a way that you say that to somebody. It's a invitation for conflict. That said, what is it that about this particular word and also the asymmetry of it that do you think it's empowering to the black community to own a word? My honest answer to you is I don't know. I don't fully understand it. It has become symbolic in a way and the policing of the use of the word, I can say it but white people can't say it. I can say it I'm not a racist. I'm not a self-hating black. Yeah I'm just speaking the language of colloquial English that has emerged amongst African-Americans in which that word plays a big role but the prohibition on its use by others and of course in the Joe Rogan case it wasn't as if he was calling anybody an n-word. He was simply pointing out that people had said stuff in which the n-word was a part of what they said. Now he did make the statement about how did he put it the planet of the apes that one of the offensive things that he said had a you know he walked into a room there's a bunch of black guys standing around he says like planet of the apes. He said it's like Africa planet of the apes. Yeah he should have and he should have been a little bit more careful. That was that was an insult. That was that was you know something that you know if you say that and people are offended they have a right to be offended and if you didn't mean to offend them you can apologize and he did apologize I accept his apology. Joe's okay with me as far as that goes. In fact McWhorter and I, John McWhorter and I at the podcast that I do the Glenn show I had a conversation part of which touched on the Joe Rogan phenomenon and we concluded he didn't really do anything wrong. I mean I mean you can like Ermel you can hate him or whatever but the idea that he's a racist it's kind of ridiculous so frankly I mean if that's your test of what constitutes a racist the utterance of the word then you know it's kind of a it's kind of silly as far as I'm concerned. What do you think about the rigorous testing of people to the degree they're racist or not? The accusation of racism being a way to attack, to bully, to divide. So what are the pros and cons of that once again? Because it does reveal the assholes and the racists but it can hurt people who are not. Well I think we have a history here in the United States of blatant racism that goes back a long way and that has present-day echoes. So there are racists I mean there are people who will look and see oh those are black people they're patronizing this business I don't want to patronize this business anymore who if their daughter or their son is dating somebody that is black they will say I really wish you wouldn't do that I mean why are you hanging out with those people don't you know who they are? There are people there are racists okay there are black racists that is black people who see somebody who's white and who then invoke a whole lot of stereotypes or whatever or have a you know visceral dislike based upon nothing other than the color of the person's skin such people exist racism is a real thing etc. On the other hand I think this throwing around you know the accusation of racism a college professor is teaching a course he says in the context of teaching the course that the under representation of blacks in physics program at this university is because they score lower on the test than other groups and they're not qualified. So say the professor gives a lecture and he says we don't have more blacks in the physics department at this university because there are not enough qualified blacks somebody in the classroom who hears that a black student objects he's a racist okay that's a power move it's a move to try to control the conversation it's not an argument it's an epithet you've said that a person who has a particular idea that you don't like maybe that idea is I'm against affirmative action I think it's unfair I was just with Dorian Abbott Dorian Abbott is a scientist at the University of Chicago who published a piece in Newsweek magazine in which he said that he thought affirmative action and racial balancing was unethical he was invited to give a lecture at MIT a very distinguished lecture in his field based on planetary science I don't know exactly what it is I'm not a scientist but in any case because he had said that he didn't like affirmative action and he thought affirmative action was racist that's basically what he said why are we looking at people based upon their race and decide we should just do it on the merit that was his position now people protesting at the university where he was invited MIT saying that he's a racist because he had that opinion he gets disinvited Charles Murray is a popular social science writer who is famous for his book about IQ the bell curve one chapter of which chronicles the racial differences between black and white in performance on mental ability tests and speculates about the extent to which such differences may be connected with the genetic inheritance of these racially distinct populations now he could be wrong about everything that he's saying the Southern Poverty Law Center calls him a white supremacist because he observes that there are racial differences in measured intellectual ability amongst Americans of different racial descent the I the you know he could be wrong let me stipulate that he is wrong I mean I don't want to argue about whether he's right or about whether he's wrong he's addressing himself to a factual issue and now the issue becomes instead of grappling with the factual questions at hand and demonstrating his rightness or wrongness about those questions the issue becomes his character he's a racist that's in my mind a lot like calling him a witch the use of that word now I think has parallels to accusing people of witchcraft because they have views about substantive questions that bear on racial inequality or racial difference that a person finds unacceptable or that a person disagrees with and you think you can shut somebody up crime in the cities of Chicago st. Louis Baltimore Philadelphia Washington DC is out of control some person might say murder rate is high who's committing those crimes they're mostly black young men who are doing the carjackings and who are doing the shootings they're killing each other they're making our city unlivable now that's a hypothetical statement that I offer it might be correct it might be incorrect it might be appropriate it might be inappropriate it may be true but something that we would be better off if people didn't focus on I don't know responding to someone making that statement have you seen what has happened to my city it used to be that you could go to North Michigan Avenue and you could find one after another after another high-end shop this is in Chicago my hometown and tourists would come and they go to the theater and there were restaurants and they go out they don't do it anymore you know what half of those stores are boarded up now you know why because when George Floyd was killed black people mobbed in this city and they burnt and they rioted and they looted and it hasn't been the same ever since and I'm moving to the suburbs I'll be damned if I'm gonna send my children to those schools a person could say that they might be right they might be wrong to say it calling them a racist is exactly not a rebuttal of what they said it's a move it's a move to try to take control of the conversation by accusing someone of having bad character because they said something that made you uncomfortable which you can't deal with so you think you can shut them up by calling them a racist you might as well be calling them a witch you might as well be calling for their head on a platter because they believe that Satan is Lord because that's the kind of quote argument close quote which is precisely not an argument that people who invoke that term are using and here's what I have to say about that it's a fool's errand to try to refute somebody by calling them a witch likewise it's a fool's errand to try to rebut the contrary forces in American politics that are a reaction often to real things that are going on on the ground in black communities in the cities across this country by calling people a racist you may shut them up but you won't change their minds and you know what at the end of the day they're gonna go to the ballot box and they're gonna vote they're gonna pick up their store and they're gonna move it to the other side of town or to another town all together they're gonna keep their children away from places where they think the influences are harmful to those children they may not even talk about it in public you can believe that in private that they're talking about it with each other you had better find a more effective way of dealing with the conflicts in this country that fall along racial fault lines then calling people witches which is what this you know anti-racist you're a racist because you think that the out-of-wed like birth rate amongst black Americans is seven babies out of ten are born to a woman without a husband their families are falling apart now no one says that in public because they'd be called a racist if they said it in public but as a matter of fact the families are falling apart you didn't change that in the least by telling people to shut up about it Daniel Patrick Moynihan is called a racist in the 1960s the late senator the night New York senator who was a federal employee and an intellectual writing reports and he writes a report about the Negro family he called it in those years if I use the word Negro now they're gonna call me a racist if I'm a white person I can't even use the word Negro which is a historically legitimate reference to the descendants of the slaves enslaved people which we were as black Americans proud to use until yesterday so all of this linguistic policing is a sign of weakness it's false black power people will seat you the ground okay you don't want me to use that word I won't use that word anymore okay you don't want me to talk about that in public all right I won't talk about it in public anymore I don't want to be called a racist okay so I won't express my opinion you haven't changed anybody's mind you know so and you've also mentioned that for that you haven't changed anybody's mind but also for things like in universities and institutions there's diversity inclusion and equity kind of meetings and education and so on and I believe I've read somewhere I've been like I mentioned to you offline big fan of your Glenn show people should listen to it it's amazing there's also just interviews of you that I've listened to I believe you mentioned somewhere that even those kinds of meetings people might sit through and nod along but that doesn't necessarily mean that's making progress that they may not they may actually be bottling up a frustration that's the fear is that that's going to result in a pendulum pendulum sort of push back towards this idea of forced appreciation like forced anti-racism kind of thing I talk about this often in my pockets that's the Glenn show you know you can you can find the Glenn show my youtube channel and also at sub stack yeah you have a great sub stack you and your friend do Q&A's and all that kind of stuff on Patreon yeah so yeah so people should definitely follow you it's brilliant conversation but yeah I mean one concern is that the policing of the superficial policing this is a part of political correctness you know the insistence that you only use certain words that you only talk in a certain way is a phony kind of power because it doesn't actually persuade people about the issues that are at hand instead it forces them underground in their talk about these issues and and that's that's problematic much better that we have overt and explicit and honest disagreement to the extent that there are disagreement about things that are going on then that we have a superficial kind of you know conversation that is perished of any real biting you know discomforting confrontation with with the realities of the situation at hand and for black Americans I think one big part of the reality of the situation at hand is violent crime violent crime you know a police officer is afraid when he stops the car because it's an 18 year old driver in the vehicle he's got dreadlocks he's a black person the car doesn't have the right license plate he's afraid to deal with that person and one of the reasons he's afraid to deal with them is because a few who look like him are behaving violently their violence is usually perpetrated against others who look like themselves but not always and that reality doesn't get changed by you know telling a newspaper writer who writes about it that they are a racist or enforcing within a newsroom you can't cover that story in that way because to do so would be racist that I think it's a monumental mistake to enforce a closure on public discussion based upon a calculation that if we allow people if Twitter allows this kind of post if the Washington Post runs this kind of story etc you end up with a superficial politeness but a subterranean seething resentment that only makes matters worse if I can get your comment maybe have ideas because it does seem that this kind of attack works of being called a racist being called maybe not sexist but somebody you know like they were going through a Johnny Depp trial now right it's a defamation trial and the reason it's a defamation trial is because all it took is a single accusation a Johnny Depp being somebody who sexually and physically abused ever heard and all it took is just a single article no proof was given except the accusation itself and the world believed it so it's effective so how do you fight back if it's so damn effective that you can just call anybody racist and it works it's hard to wash off it's it's a your you know you're not proven in the court of law or anything like that but we we get those articles get that label and then the world moves on and just assumes that person is racist so what how do you do you have any ideas how to fight back no I don't frankly just hi Roseanne Barr who made the statement about Valerie Jarrett she made some kind of ape like reference to the whatever and her show got cancelled and and she's a racist so first of all pointing it out I suppose is one of the most powerful things that this the the hypocrisy of it the you say it works I guess you're right it used to be the calling someone a communist yeah worked I mean going back to the late 40s early 50s red scare McCarthyism and whatnot and the person might have belonged to a club that was pro-soviet Union in the 1930s when they were in college they might have voted for the socialist candidate Henry Wallace in the presidential election of 1948 they might belong to the Communist Party they they might think Karl Marx was right about a whole lot of stuff about capitalism and whatnot and they got called a communist or a Marxist and it could have ruined their career could have ruined their lives you know and a lot of people shut up about it and it took and it went on for a long time and in a way in a way it kind of still is going on I mean you call somebody a Marxist if you can make that stick they certainly not gonna get elected president of the United States but I don't know about this I think you know I once read this book by a German political scientist called Elizabeth Neula Neumann that was a the writers name Elizabeth Neula Neumann the book was called the spiral of silence and the argument was there can be some views some issues in society that get defined in such a way that it's inappropriate to hold those views and as a result people who don't want to be shamed who don't want to be ostracized don't express those views and when they don't express them anybody holding the view because they don't hear it said by others think that they're the only one or one of the few who hold the view and so they don't want to be the only one out there saying something so they keep it to themselves so now this view this attitude in society could be held by a large number of people but because of the fear that if they were to express it they'd be ostracized no one says it and since no one is saying it the others who hold the view don't know that they're not alone that they are not the only ones who hold the view and hence they keep silent that could be an equilibrium it could be a relatively stable situation in which the Emperor has no clothes everybody can see that this dude is naked okay but everybody thinks that you know I don't want to be the only one to say it and so we all kind of collaborate in this charade of keeping the view to ourselves then along comes an event that somebody decides to defy the consensus and to speak out it could be a little kid who in the story about the Emperor has no clothes doesn't realize that he's not supposed to say that their Emperor is naked the thing about the kid in the story who says that the Emperor is naked it's not that he's saying it it's not even that other people hear him saying it it's that everybody knows that everybody else heard him say it okay the kid who speaks out and says the Emperor has no clothes creates a circumstance in which it's common knowledge that the Emperor has no clothes now common knowledge does not just mean knowledge it does not even mean widespread knowledge it means comprehensive knowledge of other persons knowledge of the thing okay so the spiral of silence is a equilibrium that is susceptible to being undermined by a process of a kind of cumulative process a snowballing process of revelation that you're not the only one who thinks this way okay it's fascinating to think that there's an ocean of common knowledge that we're waiting for the little kid to wake us up to different little parts of it that's correct and the little kid by the way could be somebody like Donald Trump only more effective than Donald Trump somebody who is smarter than Donald Trump somebody who is shrewder than Donald Trump somebody who figures out that when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee at a football game and says I'm not gonna stand for this President allegiance that a vast number of people are very unhappy about that somebody who understands that when a Black Lives Matter activist stands up with his bald fist and says burn this bitch down about a city in the United States of America that a lot of people are upset about that a lot of them a person a shrewd politician a shrewd manager of a public image could build on and create a circumstance in which more and more people will feel safe to express that view and the more who express it the safer those who have yet to express it but who hold it will feel in expressing it and to the extent that the view is very widespread but is kept under wraps an explosion could happen and you can look up tomorrow and have a very different country than you had today because the conspiracy of silence the spiral of silence ends up getting unraveled by somebody who steps out away from the consensus dares to take the slings and arrows of exposing themselves as a naysayer but taps into a sentiment that's that's very widespread and I fear that with respect to many racial issues this is the situation that we actually confront that it could unravel in a very ugly way but it could also unravel in a beautiful way so is the depending there is a spiral of silence you're saying and it could be because speaking of children charismatic children there's a guy named Elon Musk who might be a candidate for such an unraveling right you mentioned the person that speaks out could be a Donald Trump but in this current situation that we live in like as this week Elon has purchased Twitter that's what I hear and is pushing for in all kinds of ways the increase of free speech on Twitter and speaking about some of the issues that we've been speaking about here with you but maybe in broader strokes about just the fact that you have to it's okay to point out that the Emperor wears no clothes and to do so from all sides in a way that everybody's a little bit pissed off but not too much what do you think about this whole effort of free speech in these public platforms Elon in particular Twitter your avid Twitter user but just public platforms for discourse for us as a civilization to figure stuff out yeah well the people on the left are very upset about the possibility that Elon Musk and Twitter will be open to more open to provocative public speech that has heretofore been banned or suppressed and I think they might be right to be concerned that that could happen I don't know enough about the technology and about the market to really I mean I social media and whatnot it seems like it's a complicated system of interactions between people and who the users are and so forth and so on I do know that that New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop was real news and could have affected the outcome of the election and it was suppressed and that Twitter had a role in suppressing it I do know that the question of where the COVID-19 virus originated in the role that lab leak account could have played in the public processing of that event was real news and that it was suppressed by people who were trying to control misinformation disinformation Russian disinformation campaigns and whatnot so Twitter has users I'm one of them and it has a lot of users it's not as big as Facebook I gather it's not but it's important the ability to construct counter platforms where people moving around and whatnot it's a kind of network dynamic that maybe I should understand it better than I do being a social scientist but I don't think anyone understands it yeah even people include inside Twitter which is fascinating it's a monster because of just the bandwidth messaging and you don't know who is a bot and who is a human that's a fascinating dynamic and the whole and the viral nature of negativity yeah that all of those dynamics of course you are probably the right person to understand it from a social scientist perspective from an economics perspective but nobody really understands and it's fascinating within that domain how do you allow for free speech not allow for free speech encourage free speech defend free speech and at the same time manage millions of ongoing conversations from just becoming in insanely chaotic sort of from from Twitter perspective they want people to be happy to grow to actually have difficult critical conversations and they you know the problem with humans is they think they know what that is and they think they can label things as misinformation as as counterproductive for healthy conversations in quotes and the problem is as we are learning humans are not able to do that effectively first of all power corrupts there's something delicious about having the power to label something as misinformation you do that once for something that might be obviously misinformation and then you start getting greedy you start getting excited it feels good it feels good to label something as misinformation disinformation that you just don't like and over time especially if there's a culture inside of a company that leans a certain political direction or leans in all the groups that we talked about leans a certain way they'll start to labels misinformation things they just don't like and there's that power is delicious and it corrupts you have to construct mechanisms like the founding fathers did for somehow preventing you from allowing that power to get too delicious at least that's my perspective on what's going on I'll just tell you personally I'm excited about the prospect I'm glad to see Musk making the move that he's making and we'll see what happens at Twitter and so forth you look you're looking forward for the what did he say let's make Twitter more fun I'm looking forward to to the fun you've talked about you are at a prestigious University Brown University Brown University and you've mentioned that universities might be in trouble I think is with Jordan but everywhere else that barbarians are at the gate who are the barbarians at the gate of the university so first of all what is to you beautiful about the ideal of the university in America of academia and what is a threat well you know a university is dedicated to the pursuit of truth and to the education and nurturing of young people as they enter into the pursuit of truth to doing research into teaching in a environment of free inquiry and civil discourse so free inquiry means you go wherever the evidence and your imagination may lead you and civil discourse means that you exchange arguments with people when you don't agree with them on behalf of trying to get to the bottom of things I think the university is a magnificent institution it is a relatively modern institution I mean last 500 years or so I mean there are universities that are older than that but the great research universities of the world and not only here in the United States are places where human ingenuity is nurtured where new lot knowledge is created and where young people are equipped to answer questions that are open questions about our existence in the world that we live in you can trace to the university much if not most of the advances in technology and resourcefulness our understanding of the origins of the species of the nature of the universe cosmology set around science of the pursuit of humanistic understanding the nurturing of traditions of inquisitive also that's the university barbarians at the gates the people who are trying to shut down open inquiry at the university on behalf of their particular view about things are a threat to what the university stands for and they should be resisted so if I'm inquiring about the nature of human intelligence and I want to study differences between human populations and their acquisition of or their expression of cognitive ability that's fair game it's an open question if I want to know something about the nature of gender affiliation identity and gender dysphoria and whatnot that's fair game to study in a university you can't shut that down you shouldn't be able to by saying I have a particular position here I'm a member of a particular identity group suppose I want to study the history of colonialism and there's a narrative on the progressive side which is colonialism is about Europeans dominating and stealing or whatever whatever and I happen to think well there's another aspect to the story about colonialism too which is that it's a mechanism for the diffusion of the best in human civilization to populations that were significantly lagging behind with respect to that it brought literacy to the southern hemispheric populations that were dominated in the process of the colonizing thing it's complicated I'm not taking that position by the way I'm just saying somebody at a university should be able to take it up and pursue it and engage in argument with people about it I'm talking about race and ethnicity but this extends to a wide range of things suppose we're talking about climate and one person says the earth is endangered because carbon in global warming etc etc and another person says no wait no wait look at where we stand in the 21st century we're vastly richer than our ancestors just 250 years ago we have much more knowledge about that and so forth and so on 250 years from now human ingenuity will have devised in ways that we cannot even begin to anticipate all manner of technological means for managing the problem there's no reason that we should shut down industrial civilization today because we fear the consequences of it when in fact we are vastly richer than our ancestors and those who come up two centuries after us will be vastly more effective at dealing with problems than we are now let's it's you know so I'm not actually making that argument I'm just saying the tendency to try to say oh no that person is a climate denier they can't pursue that area of inquiry is against the spirit of the university I think the barbarians at the gates has to do with the people who think they know what the right side of history is and try to make the university stand on the right side of history my position is you don't know what the right side of history is and the purpose of a university is to equip you to be able to think about what is the right side of history what is the solution to the dilemmas that confront us as human beings living on this planet with the billions that we are in the condition that we are so the identitarians the ones who want to make the university kowtow to their particular understandings about their own identity we now have at the at Brown University and various other places we don't do Columbus Day anymore we do indigenous peoples day when that day comes up in October we don't talk about Columbus they're taking down statues of Columbus all across the country and so forth and so on I'm not arguing anything here other than that the latter-day position by pox black indigenous and other people of cover the latter-day position that the university has to reflect a particular sensibility about these identity questions I think it's a threat to the integrity of the enterprise I don't think you're overstating it I I tend to be just for my limited knowledge of MIT but perhaps it applies broadly I think the beauty of the university broadly speaking is the faculty and the students and the problem arises from the overreach of a overgrowing administration that gives again thinks that it knows enough to make rules and conclusions based on a set of beliefs and then based on that empowers a certain small selection of students to be the sort of voices of activism of a particular idea and not I think activism is beautiful but not just activism but anybody that disagrees is shut down and that that I think the the blame lies with the administration so I think the solution is in lessening just like the solution with too big of a government too big of a bureaucracy is there needs to be a redistribution of power to what makes universities beautiful which is the old students and the young students old students being professors so the scholars the curious minds the people there in this whole thing to explore the world to be curious about it on a salary that's probably way too low for the thing they're doing that's that's the that's the whole point and then the administration it just gets in the way and is the source of this kind of they I would say that in your beautiful phrasing I would say the administration is the barbarians at the gate so the solution is smaller bureaucracy smaller administrations I have to on this point you had this conversation you put on your self-stack with Jordan Jordan Peterson about cognitive inequality I think it's titled wrestling with cognitive inequality this particular topic of just IQ differences between groups why is this why is it so dangerous to talk about why this particular topic well it's like you're calling black people inferior it's like you're saying they're genetically inferior that's what people are saying it's like you're rationalizing the disparity of outcomes by reference to the intrinsic inferiority of black people if you if you say cognitive ability matters for social outcomes if you say cognitive ability exists people really are different in terms of their intellectual functioning and if you say cognitive ability differences are substantial between racially defined populations the sum of that there is cognitive ability it matters and a difference by race is the conclusion that outcome differences by race are in part due to natural differences between the populations people find that to be completely offensive and unacceptable so that's what I think is going on can you still man that case that we should be careful doing that kind of research so this has to do with research it's like the Nazis used Nietzsche in their propaganda right is you can use white supremacists could use conclusions cherry-pick conclusions of studies to to push their to push their agenda can you still man the case that we should be careful yeah I could do it at three levels one is what do we mean by cognitive ability so there's many different kinds of intelligence a person might say how good are IQ tests at measuring other kinds of human capacities that are pertinent to success in life like temperament like emotional intelligence and so on so intelligence is not a one-dimensional thing measured by G the cognitive psychologists talk about G the general intelligence factor which is a statistical construction it's a factor analytic resolution of the correlation across individuals in their performance on a battery a different kind of tests and they use that to define a general factor of intelligence and a person could say that is a very narrow view of what human mental capacities actually are and that it's much better to think about multi-dimensional measures of human mental functioning rather than a single cognitive ability measure a so-called IQ which is a narrow construction that doesn't capture all of the subtle nuance of human difference in functioning functioning is not just the ability to recite backwards a sequence of numbers I say eight seven nine five three two you say two three five seven eight nine it's not just that intelligence is a complex management of many different dimensions of human performance including things like being able to stick with a task and not give up things like being able to discipline and control your impulses so as to remain focused and so forth that could be one dimension I could start by questioning the very foundation of the argument for racial differences in cognitive ability by saying that your measure of cognitive ability is flawed I could go to a higher level I could say what we're really interested in is social outcomes and the question of what factors influence social outcomes extends well beyond mental ability to many other things so here's an example visual acuity how well do you see you're not wearing glasses I am visual acuity varies between human beings some people see better than other people do visual acuity can be measured I can put you at the chart and you can can you identify and read that bottom line in small print or not so we can measure visual acuity and it varies between human beings visual acuity is partly genetic I think that's undoubtedly true we inherit genes that influence whether or not we are nearsighted or farsighted or astigmatic or whatever so visual acuity difference between people and can be measured and is under genetic control on the other hand corrective lenses allow for us to level the playing field between people who are differently endowed in terms of visual acuity likewise social outcomes are what we're really interested in employment earnings whether or not they're law-abiding how do they conduct themselves in their families and so forth amongst individuals yes social outcomes are influenced by so-called cognitive ability but they're influenced by many other things as well if they can if there are interventions that can be undertaken in society that level the playing field between people who have different natural endowments of cognitive ability the fact that people or groups differ in cognitive ability becomes less significant just like it's less significant that people differ with respect to how well they see when corrective lenses allow for the leveling of that playing field there are in fact interventions educational interventions early childhood interventions that have been shown to level the playing field to create better life outcomes for people even if they happen to be endowed with low intelligence so a second level of arguing against this whole program of research on human differences and intelligence is to observe that yes human beings and perhaps racially defined groups may differ on the average in intellectual endowment but there well may be social interventions that level the playing field whether it's an education or in other kinds of programmatic interventions especially for the poor a final level of argument is the one that you alluded to which is that if you talk like this you're going to encourage a kind of politics which is very ugly and it's best to frame the discussion in ways that don't put emphasis on racially defined natural differences between populations that's an argument that I am myself personally conflicted about on the one hand I think you know those people are just stupid it is racist okay on the other hand I think the calculation we shouldn't do this kind of research suppose I'm at the National Science Foundation research team submits a proposal the proposal proposes to undertake a study the study would explore the extent to which people and racial groups differ with respect to their intellectual performance and how that's influenced by their genetic and environmental interaction and I decide not to fund the study based on a political calculation that the subject is too sensitive and if you explore that subject you might get the wrong answer and if you get the wrong answer the white supremacist will be encouraged well that is presuming before the research is done that I know the outcome of the research and that I can calculate what the political consequence of the research outcome is going to be that's that's assuming the thing before you even know what the thing actually is it's a kind of omniscience it presumes that you as the master of the universe can tell people what it is that people are being treated like children what it is that they're capable of knowing and what it is that they're not capable of knowing it would be like someone saying to Einstein I don't know about that special relativity theory you know it could well lead to the development of technologies that would allow nuclear weapons or someone saying that Oppenheimer who is a physicist overseeing the Manhattan Project where the US developed a nuclear weapons capacity don't carry out that project because the results of acquiring that knowledge may be more than we can deal with or someone saying to someone doing a biomedical research who's interested in exploring the nature of the human genome don't carry out that experiment that cloning undertaking whatever because the consequences could be deleterious well the consequences could be deleterious the consequences could also be the cure of cancer the consequences could also be being able to generate electric power without producing carbon effluent so who are you to tell me who you being the person in the political position to control the research what the consequence of doing the research is I think I don't want to cede that kind of power to politicians over the course of human inquiry so yes I would want there to be regulations governing the use of biologically sensitive and potentially dangerous pathogens in a lab in Wuhan or anyplace else I would I would not want to simply leave that to laissez faire on the other hand I think that the tendency to try to shut down inquiry on behalf of supposed adverse political consequences is the road to ignorance and impoverishment at the end of the day for humankind denying ourselves the potential benefits of that kind of inquiry I think we need to take our chances within query rather than to try to control it and I feel that way about the exploration of human intelligence as much as anything else so you've asked me to steel man the case against research on IQ of the sort that Charles Murray is famous for popularizing and I've said a your measure of intelligence is single-dimensional and it ought to be multi-dimensional I've said B the consequences of people's differing in intelligence depends not only on the natural endowments of the people but also on the environment and the potential for intervening in that environment environment through one or another kind of instrument as the metaphorical example of the use of corrective lenses to level the playing field between people with different visual acuity indicates but finally I've said yes research on racial differences and IQ can foster political beliefs that we would regard to be noxious on the other hand to presume that what we don't know yet and might find out from the research is going to be harmful is to assume a kind of presumption or of knowing what the outcome of unknown processes might be which we ought to be very slow to embrace because if we had done so in the past we wouldn't have nuclear power there's a lot of things that we would know I mean what were people saying about Darwin and exploration of the evolution and origin of the species they were afraid that it was going to in effect disprove the religious based accounts of you know what were they saying about Copernicus and etc etc so you know that was a masterful layering of quote wrestling with the cognitive inequality he dragged in nuclear research Copernicus Darwin biomedical research with genetics even COVID and the lab leak I mean this does that's it that was just fun to listen to okay okay let me ask you about your politics so you've recently said that you're a conservative leaning I mean maybe that's a day-to-day thing maybe you can push back but so you have somebody like your friend John McWhorter yeah who could say is on your left yeah to the left of you and then you have somebody like Thomas old who maybe is on to the right of you yeah probably and yet there's a lot of overlap between the three of you right so to what degree does politics affect your view on race in America and maybe to what degree does your view on race affect your politics okay and that for people who don't know has shifted over time you've been on quite a roller coaster as anybody who thinks about the world should be well let's begin with the fact that I was trained as an economist in a tradition of what many people would call neoliberalism I was trained at MIT which was not a right-wing place by any means but it was a place where you learned about markets and about the benefits of capitalism as a way of organizing society the virtues of free enterprise the fact that the pursuit of profit was not necessarily a bad thing but it well might be the road to prosperity and to economic growth the idea that private property and individuals seeking to acquire and succeeding in acquiring wealth did create inequality but it also created opportunity and it also expanded our knowledge and our control over the physical environment which we embedded in etc so we were not Marxists at MIT although we did read marks I mean those of us who were intellectually curious you read marks marks was an important figure in the history of the West and I think marks should be read in capital three volumes etc alienation of labor and whatnot the implications of modernization of the advent of industrial capitalism etc that that kind of dynamic deserves to be studied and to come at it in a critical way informed by the intellectual inheritance of marks and Marxism I think that's a part of a full education in social philosophy and economic analysis that open-minded person ought to acquaint themselves with but at the end of the day I think that the I think that the free marketeers have the better of it I think the story of the 20th century as far as economic development is concerned reflects that I think that the experiments where centralized control over economic decisions was the order of the day failed I think that the fact of the 21st century rise of China as a force has a lot to do with the spread of in effect capitalists oriented modes of in an economic exchange freeing up prices markets property and so forth although obviously it's a complicated political economic system I'm talking about China but I think that the story of the 20th century and the hope for the 21st century is that prosperity is enhanced through the free exchange of goods and the pursuit and acquisition of property by people in a more or less capitalist oriented system that that's you know that's the view that I hold I guess that makes me a conservative I don't know I want to say that's not to the exclusion of a social safety net I'm not saying that old people in an ideal social system would be left to their own devices regardless of whether or not they had saved for their retirement I'm not saying that the ideal of extending decent access to health care to all people regardless of whether or not they can afford it decent access to education to people regardless of whether or not they can afford it is standing in the way of prosperity I don't believe that I think the mixed economies that we see in northern Europe and in North America are a balancing of the virtues of free enterprise property and the pursuit of wealth on the one hand against the the needs to have a decent society in which people who fall between the cracks nevertheless are bolstered through a sense of social solidarity that is accommodated by our common membership within a single nation state which is why I think nationalism is important it's why I think borders are important because without a coherent polity who can see themselves as in a common situation and agree through their politics to support each other to some extent you can't sustain a safety net you cannot you cannot have a social safety net for a global population you can only have a social safety net for a bounded population who have a sense of common membership in an ongoing political enterprise which they pay their dues through their taxes in order to sustain it there's a balancing that has to go on so that's the first thing that I would say about my politics I'm a neoliberal economist I believe in markets I believe in prices I believe in profit corporations are not an incarnation of evil corporations are a legal nexus through which production gets organized in which you solicit the cooperation of workers of people who provide capital of people who provide raw materials and input of customers and so on and that functionality allows for the production of goods and their distribution and the earning of income and its distribution which at the end of the day is the foundation of our prosperity corporations are people to Mitt Romney got in trouble for saying that in 2012 but corporations are nothing but a legal fiction the corporation is not a person as such but the nexus of contracts and relationships amongst the stakeholders who intersect in the context of the corporation is the way in which we organize the massively complex set of activities that are necessary in order to produce economic benefits in order to feed people in order to have everybody with a cell phone in their pocket in order to be able to travel from one side of a continent to another on a device that is with almost absolute certainty going to safely take off and land and in order to be able to build cities and etc but to the markets the ideal of the market collide with the ideal of all men are created equal the identity the struggle that we've been talking about of of what it means to sort of empower humans that make up this great country do they collide and where do they collide well markets are going to produce inequality and all men being equal is a statement about the intrinsic worth of people not about the situation that will come about when people interact with each other through markets because people are actually different and because there are factors that are beyond anybody's control called luck and chance that you know I you and I both invest it looked our priori like your investment in my investment were equally likely to succeed but as a matter of fact ex post facto your investment succeeds my investment doesn't succeed I don't have wealth and you have wealth that is an inevitable consequence of a environment in which both of us are free to make our investment choices and where the consequences of investment dependent part upon random circumstances of which no one has control but you asked me about my politics and I was just trying to lay down a foundation by saying I begin as an economist in the tradition of liberalism Adam Smith and so forth John Maynard Keynes for that matter and so forth that Milton Friedman and so forth that Paul Samuelson Bob Solo James Tobin and so forth Thomas soul yes that appreciates property the virtues of free enterprise the set of institutions that allow for security of contract a rule of law things of this kind so that's one thing say about my politics another thing to say about my politics and you're right I've moved around is that you know I began South Side of Chicago black kid I was a liberal Democrat I encountered the economics curriculum at the MIT and I became trained in economics in the tradition that I've just described and I encountered also the Reagan Revolution this is the late 70s and early 80s these are big debates about economic policy and so on and I found a lot to admire in the supply side errors the people were saying you know let's get the government out of the way the people who worried about national debt which is a lot more now than it was then the people who worried that the welfare state could be too big that the incentives of transfer programs could be counterproductive that you had a war on poverty and we did have a war on poverty and poverty won and there's a lot of evidence that the war on poverty look was lost by the people who were trying to quote unquote eradicate poverty in our time that incentives really do matter and that the state which is driven by politics is often unresponsive to the dictates of incentives whereas markets eliminate people who are inefficient and who are not cognizant of the consequences of incentives because they can't cover their bottom line and they won't persist for very long if they can't cover their bottom line they're forced to respond to the realities of differences in costs and benefits and so forth in a way that governments can cover because they have their hand in our pocket they can cover their losses and they can make accounts balance notwithstanding their mistakes because they can take my property by fiat by the power of the state the tax collector comes if I don't pay he seizes my holdings and they can carry on in that way they need the corrective influence of markets in order to be responsive to the realities of life I mean I may not like it that prices are telling me that something that I want to do is infeasible I may not like it but what the prices are telling me is that the costs of doing it exceed the benefits to be derived from doing it and if I persist in doing it notwithstanding that I'm gonna run losses and those losses will accumulate and the net effect of that over an entire society is stagnation and ultimate attenuation of the economic benefits that might be available with people again I think if you look at the developing world in the post-colonial period the second half of the 20th century that's exactly what you see planning doesn't work centralized control over resource allocation doesn't work okay so I became more conservative in that respect but I also and this has to do with race lost faith in the posture that became what became of the civil rights movement I mean the civil rights movement you quote King 1963 the civil rights movement starts out as we want equal membership in the polity but it becomes a systematized a cover I'm going to argue for deficiencies that are discernible within black American society which only we could correct that's a very controversial statement I make it with trepidation I don't take any pleasure in saying it but here's what I'm talking about so I'm talking about the family so the family is a matter internal to the community about how men and women relate to each other and engage in social reproduction childbearing the standing up of households the context within which children are developed are maturing and so forth and so on so the African American family is in trouble I think I can demonstrate that by reference to high rates of marital dissolution by high rates of birth to out of wedlock and so forth you can't even say that the African American family is in trouble violence homicide is the order of magnitude more prevalent amongst African Americans that it is in the society as a whole this is behavior it's behavior of our people I speak of black people of course we're not the only people in society for whom violence is an issue it's an order of magnitude more prevalent in our communities I'm talking about schooling and school failure so we have affirmative action as a cover it's a band-aid on differences in the development of intellectual performance which is only partly a consequence of the natural intelligence of people and largely a consequence of how people spend their time what they value how they discipline themselves what they do with their opportunities how parents raise their children what peer groups value and things of this kind the Asian students who are scoring off the charts on these exams are doing it not because they are intrinsically more intelligent to other people but because they work harder because their parents are more insistent on focusing on their intellectual performance because they're disciplined because of the way that they devote their time and their resources to equipping their children to function in the 21st century this is what I believe I think it's demonstrably the case and it is a factor in racial disparity the way that the civil rights movement has evolved under the wing of the Democratic Party into an organized apologia of for the failures of African-Americans to seize the opportunities that exist for us now in the 21st century but did not exist in the first half of the 20th century the way in which the civil rights movement has become an avoidance mechanism for us not taking we African-Americans responsible this is Glenn Lowry not everybody's going to agree with it is part of what makes me a conservative I am tired of the belly-aching I'm tired of the excuse me white supremacy it is in my mind a joke I lament the fact that that kind of rhetoric is so seductively attractive to African-Americans and so widely adopted by others and as I am fond of saying at the end of the day nobody is coming to save us I mean higher education MIT Caltech Stanford the where the future is happening that is about mastery over the achievements of human civilization such as they manifest themselves in the 21st century there's no substitute for actually acquiring mastery over the material there's no substitute for that to be patronized to have the standards lowered they want to get rid of the test they want to tell African-Americans that pat us on the head we're gonna have a separate program for you we're gonna give you a side door that you can come into that doesn't make us any smarter it doesn't make us any more creative and it doesn't make us any more fit for the actual competition that's unfolding before us now you want to be 10% of the population that's carried along for the next hundred years you want to be a ward of the state in the late 21st century you go ahead because the Chinese are coming you're not gonna hold them back the world is being remade every decade by new ways of seeing and new ways of doing if you don't get on board with the dynamic advancement of the civilization in which we are embedded you're going to end up being dependent on other people to look kindly upon you in this story that you've got this bellyache this excuse my ancestors were slaves it's only gonna work for so long so that's that makes me I suppose a kind of conservative I hate affirmative action I don't just disagree with it I don't just think it's against the 14th Amendment I hate it the hatred comes from an understanding that it is a band-aid that it is a substitute for the actual development of the capacities of our people to compete I'd much rather be in the position of having them try to keep me out because I'm so damn good like they're doing with the Asians then having them have to beg the Supreme Court to allow for a special dispensation on my behalf because they need diversity and inclusion and belonging it's not just diversity it's not just diversity and inclusion is diversity and inclusion and belonging I'm whining because I feel like I don't belong that's a position of weakness it's pathetic and it's only political correctness that keeps people who can see this and believe me a lot of people can see it from saying so out loud so you want the black American community to represent strength correct and I want us to deal with what it is that we have to deal with in order to be able to project strength in an increasingly competitive world let me ask you I know you said you're angry or dislike affirmative action let me ask you about something that even to my ear cut wrong now I'm relatively apolitical so President Biden when he was running for president gave a campaign promise that he will nominate a black woman to the US Supreme Court saying quote the person I will nominate will be someone with extraordinary qualifications character experience and integrity first sentence second sentence and that person will be the first black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court do you wish he only said the first sentence and not the second yes I wish that he had only said the first sentence even if his intention was to do what he said he was gonna do in the second sentence in other words I wish that he had simply said if I have the opportunity to nominate someone to the Supreme Court it's gonna be a superbly qualified person to carry out that position and he might have kept to himself his intention to name an african-american woman to that position and then going ahead and named an african-american woman to that position and I'm sure that Katanji Brown Jackson I don't doubt that she's accepted qualified she has a distinguished career she served as a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals she's a graduate at Harvard Law School she has a background you do not have to be a world-class constitutional legal scholar to get onto the United States Supreme Court a lot of members of the United States Supreme Court have had different kinds of legal careers before they were elevated to that position Earl Warren of the famed Warren Court of the 1950s and 60s was a politician as well as a leading jurist and whatnot I mean many kind of people in the US Supreme Court I have no doubt that Judge Katanji Brown Jackson is a qualified member to be on the Supreme Court I wish that Biden had not done what he did he could have disappointed a black woman by saying that he was limiting his considerations to black women and what are black women as a percentage of all potential appointees to the Supreme Court 3% 4% I don't know we could look the number up the by saying that he puts an asterisk on the appointment but it's worse than that because she will live down the asterisk of a person is inclined to do that she will have the opportunity to show through her performance exactly what kind of jury she is just as Justice Clarence Thomas has shown through his performance that he was qualified and more than qualified to be on this United States Supreme Court what I dislike was the pandering he was seeking votes from black people by pandering to us and he's treating us like children why should I care what color the person is who's on the United States Supreme Court what I should care about is what kind of opinions they're gonna write when they on their unites do I suppose that being a black woman means that you're gonna write different kind of opinions and others well perhaps perhaps that kind of identity politics at the highest level of American legal establishment is something that rubs me very much the wrong way what I should care about is the nature and the future of the law I'm actually struck by this because the court is conservative it has six conservative members on it and it has three liberal members on it and if I were and I'm not a liberal Democrat the highest concern that I would have about an appointment to the Supreme Court is is this a person who is going to be effective in advocating my liberal views within the highest council of American law now the fact that that person is a woman or is a black person is way down the list of the things that I would think are important to the kinds of opinions that they're going to write so I mean I think Joe Biden this is just a piece of a larger political strategy to cobble together a coalition that will be successful at the polls in sustaining Democrats Jim Crow 2.0 this whole characterization of the conflict in the states about election security and voting rights is another part of that strategy he is pandering to black voters he is trying to frighten us thinking that if the Republicans win our rights will be taken away and I think it is a infantilization of African-American politics I think black people are not to be as concerned about the color of the skin of a person who is serving in government as they are about the content of their character and the focus of their of their political and ideological orientation which for me would be center or even center right but that's me and it should not have a significant impact nevertheless he said she can overcome the asterisks but to me it was deeply disrespectful that anyone would give an extra asterisk stuff to overcome he didn't have to say it all he had to do was do it if he wanted to put a black woman on the court that he could go ahead and done it the reason he said it is because he wanted black people to vote for him by saying it and I'm saying that treats us like we're children you know it's not a political statement I just thought as a leader that was not those that was kind of disgusting yeah let me ask you about Thomas all you mentioned him he's a colleague and somebody who was an influence what in the space of ideas so what broadly what impact has he had on your ideas and how do you think he shaped the landscape of ideas in our culture in general I think Thomas soul is in his 90s now he's been around for a long time he's still got it he's still going at it he's still going at it books continue to come out I think he's a great man I think Thomas soul regardless of his race he's black is one of the 100 most significant economists of the 20th century he has chosen as his subject a substantial part of his subject subject to investigate the deep causes and consequences of racial disparity of one kind or another he's written fundamental books about that many of them he's a social philosopher he is a economic historian he is a combatant in the conflict of ideas around how to think about society and this beyond racial differences although race has been a big part of what he's written about he's been critical of affirmative action and he didn't just stand back and wag his finger he got busy looking at the consequences of affirmative action in societies all around the world and he's written books about that he's been critical of the narrative about civil rights and racial inequality he believes in small government he doesn't think that efforts to redistribute income have proved to be the solution to the problem of racial disparity Tom has not been honored by the committee that hands out Nobel recognition in economic science and probably won't be because he's controversial and I reckon that that committee would be loath to encourage the blowback that they would be sure to receive if they were to take a controversial and politically focused and expressive black conservative in an honor in that way so I think another reason is that Tom as a methodology methodological matter is not especially quantitative he pays attention to data but he doesn't do statistical analysis and he doesn't do modeling so from a methodological point of view he's not a cutting-edge kind of mathematically sophisticated kind of quantitatively statistically oriented but he does descriptive stuff he writes in a style that is much more like a social historian than it is like a like a mathematically trained analytical economist on the other hand he is an economist in the Chicago School of Milton Friedman and George Stickler prominent amongst his teachers who takes price theory which is the analysis of the interplay of market forces mindful of incentives and so on to you know implement the basic insights from economic science you know there is no free lunch I mean there's always going to be a cost anything that you do and so on people respond to incentives demand curve slope downward you know competition tends to work best when people are free to enter and not and so on I mean that kind of thing but Tom is also a social historian and philosopher in the tradition of a Friedrich von Hayek one of Tom's books I've deeply admired knowledge and decisions is an extension of the Hayekian arguments about the limits of central planning and whatnot so I think Tom so Thomas soul African-American born as I understand it in Louisiana raised in New York City our graduate of Harvard College a military veteran a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago a black conservative social scientist of very high stature I think he's a great man and one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century and you're saying implicitly deserves a Nobel Prize yeah I do think so I mean I was awarded by the committee Gunnar Meridahl the Swedish economist wrote about economic development wrote a famous two-volume work an American dilemma about the status of blacks and I mean I think Tom could be you know put in that company very easily without any difficulty I agree Daniel Kahneman them so it doesn't have to be new psychology see nine economists yep Eleanor Ostrom the political scientist who was honored in a joint prize to give her and Oliver Williamson 15 years ago or so he could be put in that company really quite easily let me ask you you mentioned Obama in this in the very beginning that we were talking about how did it feel that seems like forever ago then 2008 Barack Obama became president now at that time perhaps you identify as conservative already but how did so politics aside just in general how did it feel that in 150 years where this country has come along well yeah I didn't identify in 2008 as a conservative to the same extent I do today I was I was kind of in transition yet again I was excited by the Obama candidacy at first I was skeptical because after all he's not black the man's father is a Kenyan and the man's mother is a white American and he identifies as black I find it interesting that the first black president of the United States and I could have put inverted commas around black and the first black vice president of the United States neither of them descend from American slaves Kamala Harris's father is of African ancestry in part he's a Jamaican immigrant and her mother is an Indian immigrant she was Kamala Harris raised up largely in Canada though born in the United States Barack Obama is as I've said of mixed ancestry and neither of his parents are the descendants of of American descendants of African slaves but blackness is flexible it's it's it's something that you can put on or you can take off to a certain degree for some people and so be it I was excited our time has come hope and change we are the ones we've been waiting for these are slogans from 2008 I can't believe I bought that crap oh interesting let me push back here you talked about it's I mean to me a Jew is a Jew skin color is skin color yeah I mean he Barack Obama is black okay when it matters when you're talking to a white supremacist yeah when you're talking to when you if you're a slave owner he's black just like you said when Hitler comes around a Jew is a Jew it doesn't matter how you identify doesn't matter what so in that sense don't you think that Barack Obama is black in the most powerful of ways which is designating how far the MLK the Dr. King vision oh sure and look I said it a little bit tongue-in-cheek yes yes of course but I think Obama has been very careful about manufacturing a kind of public persona that is intended to position him in the most effective way you mean like every politician yeah like every politician sure and that the racial identity piece is an aspect of that I mean anything I say here would only be speculation because I have no facts about the personal history of Barack Obama and I accept Barack Hussein Obama as Hillary Clinton what said I take him at his word about whatever she was talking about well was he a Christian I think is what the question was and you know there was some right-wing attack on Obama for you know having been raised and for some years in the Philippines and all of that or Indonesia I beg your pardon in Indonesia and his stepfather and all of that but she took him at his word and I take him at his word about his racial identity no but you were captivated by the power of his words and you regret to the degree you were captivated I mean I think in retrospect that whole campaign looks like a pie in the sky kind of fairy tale we are the ones we've been waiting for I can't quote exactly that speech that he gave in Grant Park in Chicago when he was announced as the winner of the election but today is the day that the rise of the ocean stop words to this effect I mean those who doubted that we could do it that tonight is your answer this was going to be a new day it was going to be a new regime well it wasn't a new day and it wasn't a new regime it was American politics more or less as usual Barack Obama turns out not to be the Messiah maybe there should be no surprise in that race relations got set back during Obama's tenure my beef with Obama is that you okay you're black you say you black you black you got elected now we have a black president a black president you can do stuff that nobody else could do you're a black president you could tell the people burning down the city to get their butts back in their houses and to stop it you know you could tell the race hustlers they all sharp into the world not only has our time come for those who supported my campaign your time is over for those who want to carry on a advocacy rooted in racial grievance the election of myself to this highest office proves that the institution of the state are legitimate and open to all comers I think Barack Obama when the shi t hit the fan if I had a son he looked like Trayvon I deeply regret that he said that he's president of the United States the color of his skin and the color of Trayvon skin the correlation between those two things if I had a son he looked like Trayvon now he says when he said it he only meant to sympathize with the parents but in fact when he said it from the highest office in the land and then sent his Attorney General Eric Holder out to enforce this narrative he doubled down on a racial narrative that I think is actually false I think the story that systemic racism in America as reflected in policing that terrorizes black people because of the color of their skin is demonstrably false I think that the central threat to black lives is violent crime perpetrated largely by black people against other black people I think there is such a thing as police brutality and I think there are reasons to have regulations of police but I think it is a second-order issue in terms of the quality of life of african-americans I think Obama could have told the people who after Freddie Gray died in police custody in a van in Baltimore and who undertook to burn that city down to get their asses off the street and go back to their apartments and stop it I think he could have said in the aftermath of Michael Brown being shot dead by Darren Wilson in Ferguson Missouri and there was a grand jury deliberation that elected not to indict officer Wilson and people took the streets in that city and stood on top of vehicles and so forth and so on he could have told them we don't mob around courthouses in this country we respect the rule of law get your butts off the streets and back into your apartments he didn't do that so to push back a little bit yeah good push back I think you're asking Barack Obama the first black president of the United States to do the thing that I think should be done by the second black president of the United States I think his very example given the color of his skin was the most powerful thing and actually doing some of these hard Thomas soul type of Glenn Larry type of strong words about race it may be too much to ask given the nature of modern-day politics he is a politician he is a politician he need to get elected he needed to get reelected yeah it was in his second term where most of what I'm talking about happened so he wasn't facing further election but Obama was what 46 or 47 when he was so inaugurated he served for eight years so he's in his mid 50s he's got another half century or 40 years of life God willing his post presidency I think was what was primarily on his mind not getting elected to anything but being enshrined in a certain way and the the persona that he is now embodying which depends upon a racial narrative that I and Thomas soul and others object to I think was very much in the forefront of his mind when he made decisions as the chief executive officer of the country that we've all now have to live with yeah but the fact is he opened the door in a way that hasn't been done in the history of this the United States that I don't see there being a even a significant discussion when an an african-american a black man or a black woman runs for president maybe a black man let's say because there still hasn't been a woman president I just see that that broke open the possibility of that that's not even a discussion and that that example by itself I mean to me the role of the president isn't just policy it's to inspire it's to do the yeah it's to do the dr. King thing which is I have a dream and Barack Obama is an example of somebody that could give one hell of a speech it got you to believe Obama is a smooth operator without any question he's a master of his craft he you know he did the impossible I mean he beat Hillary Clinton in that primary fight and he beat John McCain in that general election and hats off to him and moreover he remains a iconic figure in American culture I don't think there's any doubt about that let me just mention Clarence Thomas is also black Clarence Thomas has a story that is vivid and inspiring just like Obama's story he overcome obstacles just like Obama did I mean extreme poverty and so forth and so on Clarence Thomas has served longer than any other member of the United States Supreme Court he is one of nine justices and it's three equal branches of government so Clarence Thomas by my arithmetic personifies 127th of the American state he is an iconic figure his example should be an inspiration to Americans of all races but especially a black American youngsters he happens to be conservative he very conservative so fucking what he too deserves to be in that pantheon he is not by the custodians of American education Clarence Thomas name is not on that many schools Barack Obama's name will be on many of them I'm not equating them they're different people the offices are very different but the same logic that you just used to extol the significance of Barack Obama's ascendancy could and should be applied to Clarence Thomas in my opinion yes but you know it's the office but also there is a resume and there's accomplishments but then there is oratory and charisma and a number of Twitter followers so there's ability to captivate a large number of people and that's a skill that a skill that correlates but is not directly connected to with how impressive your resume is I agree and moreover the judicial function the judge doesn't go out and give speeches of that sort because it's exactly antithetical to what he's doing he's a custodian of the law and that's not a popular feature figure in American policy he doesn't stand for election and it's a good thing too so I take that point here I want to say something else though that's provocative the next black president you say first black president shouldn't have been the one to do that the second one should is more likely than not gonna be a Republican I'm not I don't have a particular person in mind I'm just saying I agree and that's why it's gonna be super fun let me ask you to put put on your wise sage hat and give advice to young people so if you're talking to somebody who's in high school in college what advice would you give them about their career about life in general how to live a life they can be proud of well I'd say the world is your oyster I mean first order business you're not a victim I don't care what color you are I don't care you male female you gay straight whatever the world is your oyster you are so privileged you sit here in the United States of America a free country a rich country everything is possible for you believe me you can do anything okay secondly I would say mastery over the medium in which we're embedded is the key to the future so get educated focus work hard you know invest in your future by acquiring the skills that you need to be able to navigate the 21st century I would say the Chinese are coming and I don't mean anything against China I just mean to say the world's a small place and it's getting smaller and you know you better get moving and you better get moving quickly I'd say your identity your coloration your your orientation your your category is not the most important thing about you that you know so the the temptation to limit yourself and I give this speech to my my kids I say I quote James Joyce he has a passage in portrait of an artist as a young man in which he says do you know what Ireland is Ireland is an old sow that eats her Pharaoh this is Joyce he says Stefan Daedalus is the character that he has in mine in this Chronicle he says your ethnic inheritance he's talking about Irish nationalism are like nets holding you back that your challenge is to learn how to turn those nets into wings and thereby to fly okay flying into the open skies of modern society don't be your grandfather don't be your father don't wear your things so heavily that it keeps you from being open to everything that's new in the world wear it lightly yes everybody comes from somewhere but it doesn't have to be where you end up so you're not your father you're not your grandfather you are this wonderfully blessed human being in the middle of going into the middle of the 21st century and don't miss it don't don't live blinkert Lee don't live small live big live big and where your history lightly yeah everybody's got a mother tongue everybody's got a story everybody has a people but the world is a small place I love that you're quoting an Irishman one of the greatest writers of the 20th century a profound one but an Irishman nevertheless the the the levels of humor within that is not lost on me let me just mention the great Ralph Ellison the African-American writer Invisible Man is his masterpiece embodied this spirit okay we black Americans we do come from somewhere that coming from somewhere is from slavery in America that's our ancestral heritage but that's not what we are skin and bone these are superficial things the spirit and if I were a more religious person I could give a whole disposition about that but it's the spirit it's that light that's inside that's that's who we are and our challenge is to live in the fullness of it as opposed to this blinker thing when we don't look left we don't look right we're just fitting within this template that we inherit that is a travesty really Glenn you've lived an incredible life a productive one but just representing some powerful ideas some powerful ideals but life comes to an end yeah do you think about your death are you afraid of it well it is a really interesting coincidence that you'd pose me that question because I'm coming from a funeral today is Sunday on the preceding Tuesday five days ago I was at the funeral of Eugene Wesley Smith who was my brother-in-law he was my sister's husband my sister Leonette passed away in August of 2021 her husband has died at the age of 68 in April of 2022 and I was at his funeral he died suddenly of a heart attack that came completely out of the blue he seemed to be in perfect health he was a magnificent human being I could go into the details but you know take my word for it he was a businessman a steel trader metals trader he would buy and sell he worked mostly from his home office he had clients counterparties people he did business with all over the world he had three sons one of whom is in his early 30s two of whom are in their late 30s these are my sister's children she's deceased now he's deceased the older two sons are severely developmentally disabled and although they're in their late 30s they're not independently viable they don't function effectively they have to be cared for that responsibility has now fallen to the family but mainly to the surviving son who lives and with his wife and his two young children and has assumed the responsibility they've cared at home my sister and her husband Wesley Eugene Wesley Smith cared for their disabled sons at home they didn't want to see them institutionalized they had some help from programs at the state and social worker and so on but they mainly took on the burden of caring for them at home anyway I go on at length here and you know I don't know how much of this you'll choose to make use of it doesn't matter really I'm just trying to respond to your question I was asked to offer some remarks at the funeral and I offered them and I you know I spoke well of this great man he was a great man he had a straight back he was a stand-up guy he could be counted on his word was his bond he had broad shoulders he carried a lot of people with him business associates family members and so forth and so on he had a huge heart he was a giving and kind person he had a great mind he was an intellectual even though as a businessman much of his day was taken up with the you know minutiae of contracts and you know the details of the order being delivered and not being delivered of the quality of the product of the financing and so forth and so on there was still a powerful mind there yeah he was a powerful mind and he studied he read books he was interested in music and art he was he's a spiritual seeker had been ordained as a child minister in his youth and while he remained a master of the Christian canon he also explored Eastern religion and other spiritual paths and kind of stood above any particular tradition as a man who believed in God but thought that God manifest himself in many ways to human beings and that there was much to learn from other religious traditions as well this is Wesley we called him Wesley by his middle name Eugene Wesley Smith may rest in peace 68 that's five years younger than I am right now he dropped dead without any warning I could too so how does that make you feel what were the thoughts in your mind leading up to it having to give that speech in the days that follow first of all I wonder what would I say what would I say and you know there was no way to prepare and I decided you know I rehearsed in my mind this you know he has straight back he had broad shoulders he had a big heart he had a great mind you know he had a capacious spirit and whatnot and I used that as a template for making my remarks but my main thought was my god life is precious and life is fleeting and death is a part of life my death is a part of my life and I thought you know well I want to take better care of myself than I do you know etc etc but I also thought a lot of this is not in my hands at all I thought one should have his affairs in order my brother did not have all of his affairs in order in the sense that there is a lot of you know things are going to probate there was no will there's you know this is kind of unsettled I don't want that to happen to my surviving family members I want to have my affairs such that should heaven forbid I fall over one day and don't get up again people don't have to scramble about how to how to take care of things from from that point forward but as a human are you afraid and you know I'm afraid now I read this wonderful book called the swerve it's it's about Lucretius it's about the nature of things which is this great classical work from the Roman period by this guy Lucretius and I'm trying to think of the name of the author but you could look it up the swerve is the book it won like a national book award or a Pulitzer Prize is and it's the history of the recovery of this book by one of these Italian Renaissance Italian people who would go into the monasteries in Central Europe and look through the scrolls and they discover these classical works from antiquity which had been lost through the Dark Ages and they re-publish and read these works and Lucretius's great work on the nature of things was one of these books Poggio Bacchalini I don't remember the Italian guy's name but this all could be looked up yeah Poggio Bacchalini yeah 15th century 15th century and the name of the author is Stephen Greenblatt yeah Stephen Greenblatt a magnificent book and a terrific story anyway one of Lucretius's points he was an atheist I mean he was a Roman I mean he was he didn't believe in mysticism and he argued it's irrational to be afraid of death why should I fear death death is coming to all of us the point of being afraid I mean I'm wasting my time fearing something that I have no ultimate control over it's irrational to be afraid of death yeah because it you can't predict when it happens you only know that it happens so why be afraid how's that and therefore live every day fully live every day purposefully you know and so on but these are all just words you know I I don't want to die I want to live forever I'm not gonna live forever I don't want to I don't want to suffer I see people suffering I saw my late wife Linda Datcher Lowry dr. Linda Datcher Lowry professor of economics at Tufts University whom I met in graduate school at MIT black woman from Baltimore we married we raised two sons together she died at the age of 59 from metastatic breast cancer and I watched her suffer and I watched her die and it took a while and we care for her at home right up until the very end she died in our bed with our sons on either side of her and the dog curled up by the by the door the porch door in the bedroom and she expired and I watched her suffer and I watched her die and I don't want to suffer who does I don't want to die I am likely to suffer before I die I am likely to see my death coming and to lament it there is a book by Richard John Newhouse the theologian called as I laid as I lay dying as I lay dying Richard John Newhouse he had stomach cancer and he thought he was dying and he wrote this book as he lay dying and then he recovered he had he went it went into remission and he had another couple of years he thought he was dying and he had another couple of years and I can remember meeting him at a bookstore in suburban Boston when he was on a tour he was a friend of mine a theologian and public intellectual he founded the Institute on religion and public life in New York City which still exists Richard John Newhouse and he's contemplating his own death from the point of view of a Christian minister he was a first Lutheran pastor and then he converted to Catholicism or as he would have put it I returned to the church because he you know thought the Renaissance was over I mean I'm sorry the Reformation Richard thought was over he says there's only one church you know etc get into theology stuff here but I'm saying all that to say I read that book aloud to my wife Linda as she lay dying in that bed I read that book and it was filled with hope I mean it first acknowledged the dread yes I lie dying I don't want to die I'm a Christian minister Christ was raised from the dead I'm supposed to believe in everlasting life but the fact of the matter is this is me and I'm lying here and I'm dying this is the end of me how are you gonna do anything other than dread the end of me so let's acknowledge that I don't want to die okay I'm just gonna tell you that up front but that is not the end of my death is not the end of life I have lived well and fully I will go and do my best right up until the end I will accept what is inevitable and I will hold out this belief and he's a Christian minister so he holds out this belief and he knows he knows that the belief is not rational it's not a reasoned deductive scientific conclusion it's spiritual in the most fundamental way it is something that people hold on to and they have hope and he had hope I don't know if I have that hope I used to be but I'm no longer a Christian and I'm no longer a theist really I I'm with Lucretius there I mean there's no nothing there's no magic that's going on here there's no you know unseen hand behind the scene that's arranging things what I believe is that when I look at the natural world I see I see the evolution of the species I see the organic development of the of the planets I mean the earth is going to not exist in a finite number of years I think with a very high probability the Sun is gonna die it's gonna you know implode it's gonna go supernova whatever is gonna happen and there's not gonna be any there there what's the meaning of life Glenn Larey what's the why or is that something economists and social scientists and mathematicians are not equipped to answer surely you know I think we live we try to live well and meaningfully within our time we bond we reproduce we try to pass on and we accept our limitations and our mortality we try to contribute and that's through our children and through our work and we're in this together we're not in this alone we are connected to other people I get a lot of gratitude out of teaching I'm a teacher my students are gonna outlive me they're gonna have students I'm a writer my writing is gonna outlive me I don't want to be you know self-important or pretentious here I doubt that I'm gonna be the James Joyce of the 21st century they may not be reading my stuff in a hundred years as people will certainly be reading Ulysses in a hundred years but I try to have a impact on my on on the world that I'm a part of and try to leave a legacy that's dignified you know I mean I could give some flowery words a truth-seeking and whatnot what about love love what what what what what role does love play in this in this life thing go around I mean love without love I mean what have we got I mean we don't have we don't have family and you know we certainly have missed out if love is not a central part of our of our existence but stop asking me questions like that Glenn thank you for doing everything you do for thinking the way you do for being fearless and bold and in the Glenn show and your writing and in your work and just being who you are thank you for being you and thank you for giving me the huge honor of spending your extremely valuable time with me today this was awesome it's been my pleasure Lex I mean really and it has been like four hours man I mean you wear me out for me I love it thanks for listening to this conversation with Glenn Lowry to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Dr. Martin Luther King jr. if you can't fly then run if you can't run then walk if you can't walk then crawl but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward thank you for listening and hope to see you next time
 I hate affirmative action.
 I don't just disagree with it.
 I don't just think it's against the 14th Amendment.
 I hate it.
 The hatred comes from an understanding
 that it is a band-aid, that it is a substitute
 for the actual development of the capacities
 of our people to compete.
 They wanna tell African-Americans to pat us on the head.
 We're gonna have a separate program for you.
 We're gonna give you a side door that you can come into.
 That doesn't make us any smarter.
 It doesn't make us any more creative,
 and it doesn't make us any more fit
 for the actual competition that's unfolding before us.
 The following is a conversation with Glenn Lowry,
 professor of economics and social sciences
 at Brown University.
 He is one of the great minds and communicators of our time,
 writing and speaking about race and inequality.
 I highly encourage you to listen to his show
 on YouTube and Substack, simply called The Glenn Show.
 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
 To support it, please check out our sponsors
 in the description.
 And now, dear friends, here's Glenn Lowry.
 Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech,
 I think is the greatest speech in American history.
 If I may, I'd like to read a few words of it.
 Sure.
 And ask you a question about this dream.
 I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up
 and live out the true meaning of its creed.
 We hold these truths to be self-evident,
 that all men are created equal.
 I have a dream that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia,
 the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave
 owners will be able to sit down together
 at the table of brotherhood.
 I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi,
 a state sweltering with the heat of injustice,
 sweltering with the heat of oppression,
 will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
 I have a dream that my four little children
 will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged
 by the color of their skin,
 but by the content of their character.
 I have a dream today.
 First of all, damn, I mentioned to you offline,
 I immigrated to America and this is why I love this country.
 This is one of the great speeches that represents
 what this country is about.
 So what is this ideal of equality
 that we should strive for as a nation,
 that all men are created equal?
 What does that mean to you, this equality?
 Well, if we put this in historical context,
 King is speaking in 1963 when he gives that speech.
 It's exactly 100 years after Abraham Lincoln signs
 the Emancipation Proclamation declaring
 the enslaved people to be free.
 They're not yet citizens in 1863,
 but the end of slavery has become the position
 of the federal government when Lincoln issues
 that Emancipation Proclamation.
 So putting it in context, enslaved people,
 four million or so African-descended enslaved people,
 how do they become citizens?
 How do they become in this status of subjugation,
 and domination, and stigma, and exclusion?
 How do they become citizens?
 It seems to me that that's the heart of it.
 The equality that King is talking about
 is an equality of status as members of the nation
 as free and equal citizens within the Republic.
 Now, I think it's really important to understand that slavery
 was not merely a legal order,
 but it was also a social system
 that had the symbolism attached to it.
 They had a big journey to make
 from their subjugated status as serfs
 and the
 subjugated status as serfs, as landless people,
 as uneducated, unfit for citizenship really,
 in the minds of many.
 So I think that's what in 1963, 100 years later,
 that King is appealing to this idea
 that when Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence
 writes these words, all men are created equal
 and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
 He didn't, Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner,
 didn't have in mind when he wrote those words,
 the people who were slaves.
 But by the time you get to 1963,
 King is invoking this idea, all men,
 and of course he means all persons,
 he doesn't only mean men,
 he means men and women are created equal.
 He wants this idea to be embraced by the country
 in reference to the descendants of the African slaves.
 That's his dream, that's his idea.
 The legacy of slavery would be erased,
 that the position of African Americans
 would be equalized within the political community,
 which is the United States of America.
 That's my sense of it in any case.
 So on a very basic level,
 the worth of a human being is equal.
 It's just literally the worth of a human being.
 So I mentioned to you offline
 that I came from the Soviet Union,
 my grandfather fought in World War II,
 and for Hitler, the worth of a Slavic person
 as they were captured, there's different numbers,
 but it's in the hundreds to one German,
 in terms of the value of the person to the great Germany.
 So he wanted Germany to expand
 and conquer a large part of the world,
 and within that future world, that Third Reich,
 the worth of a Russian or Slavic person
 is 100th or 1,000th of a German person,
 of a pure German person.
 So that has to do with not some kind of public policy
 or politics or all that kind of stuff.
 It has to do with the basic worth of a human being,
 and that's what Dr. King is speaking to,
 that all people on some kind of deep level
 are worth the same.
 If you're somehow weighing the value of a person,
 we're equal in that's basic fundamental worth.
 Yeah, I think that's correct, I think that's very well said.
 I don't know that he had in mind the position
 of Slavic people in Central Europe
 in the middle of the 20th century,
 or the first part of the 20th century, King.
 I don't know that he had that in mind.
 He might well have done, but certainly that's the idea.
 So you don't think he was really thinking about
 this particular civil rights struggle
 and the particular struggle against the backdrop
 of the history of slavery in America
 and thinking about African Americans.
 He wasn't thinking about the basic,
 he wasn't speaking to the basic worth of all human beings.
 No, I don't mean to say that.
 The speech in Washington.
 The dream.
 In 1963, at that march,
 was within the context of the United States,
 and it was within the context of the civil rights movement.
 There was a movement that was going on.
 He was an actor in a political drama that was American,
 that had to do with the fight over equal rights
 for voting, for housing, for employment,
 for citizenship of blacks in America.
 But King was informed, I think, by a much broader
 Christian ethic of the equality of all persons.
 I mean, he gets killed in 1968.
 The five years after that speech in Washington,
 he spends developing his worldview
 and the things that he had to say, for example,
 about the war in Southeast Asia
 that was going on at that time,
 made appeals to universal principles of equality.
 He was a pacifist to some degree, he was against war.
 He was a socialist to some degree.
 He might not have worn that label publicly,
 but he believed in a decent society
 where the poor would not go untended,
 where healthcare would be available to people who needed it
 and this kind of thing.
 A humanitarian who saw that the value of a life
 was not dependent upon the color of the skin,
 upon the native mother tongue that might be spoken,
 upon whether male or female.
 All persons are created equal.
 This is very much the ethic of Martin Luther King
 on my understanding.
 Broadly speaking, what do you learn about human nature
 by looking at the history of slavery in America?
 Oh my.
 So what does that tell you about people?
 Well, I think of two things right off the top of my head.
 One is about the capacity of people
 for looking the other way in the face of unethical,
 and morally profoundly problematic practice.
 So, I mean, slavery was controversial.
 It was controversial going all the way back
 to the founding of the United States of America.
 The country was founded on a compromise
 where half of the country thought that slavery was abhorrent
 and would not have had it countenanced in the constitution.
 The other half of the country were steeped
 in the dependence on the labor of these African captives
 and their descendants.
 The economy depended upon it.
 They owned them as property.
 That was their wealth.
 Their wealth was invested to some degree
 in the value of these human beings.
 And in order for the United States to come together
 as a confederation of the several colonies,
 there had to be a compromise made.
 And it was made where slavery was allowed to persist.
 And the people who were against it
 or who thought it morally problematic
 were able to countenance the practice
 in the Southern States where slavery flourished.
 And that went on for 75 years
 after the founding of the country
 until the crisis of the late 1850s
 that led to the Civil War
 and ultimately to the Emancipation.
 So one thing I think about human nature
 from the fact of slavery is that the ability of people
 to live with terrible, morally questionable practices
 and have that as a part of their institutions.
 It took a massive movement of abolitionists
 struggling against slavery for the better part of a century
 before that practice could be eradicated.
 But the other thing about human nature that I see
 is the ability of people to sustain their humanity
 under the most awful oppressive conditions.
 The enslaved persons, the slaves and their children,
 I mean, they were chattel,
 they were bought and sold like horses or cattle.
 And yet their humanity was not destroyed by that.
 And they were able to sustain their dignity to some degree
 in such a manner that once Emancipation finally did arrive,
 the freedmen and women,
 the persons who had been enslaved and who were set free,
 were able to, over the following decades,
 build a foundation for the development of African-Americans
 within the context of American society
 that eventually culminated in the civil rights movement
 of the middle of the 20th century
 and has led us into the present day.
 So, you know, human nature can countenance awful evil,
 but human nature can also survive
 in the face of terrible evil.
 That's what I take from slavery.
 That survival, that flame can burn
 even when the world around it tries to put it out.
 There's still a little flame of human consciousness,
 of spirit, of culture,
 of whatever the hell that is that makes humans flourish
 and makes humans beautiful that lives on.
 That's very well said, yeah.
 I think you put it very well.
 There's gotta be some poetic way of expressing that.
 Leave it to the poets.
 What about the people that look the other way?
 How many people do you think, just regular people,
 knew that something is, this is wrong?
 Or do people, through generations,
 convince themselves, most people, most regular people,
 convince themselves that there's nothing wrong?
 All right, yeah.
 I ask this question because I wonder
 what we're looking the other way on today also.
 Because you have to ask yourself these difficult questions
 of assuming we're the same people we were back then,
 then we can be flawed in that same kind of way.
 We can look the other way just as others have in history.
 Yeah, you spoke of the European context and of the Nazis
 and certainly a lot of people had to be looking the other way
 when the massive crimes that were committed by that regime
 were being undertaken.
 I mean, railroad cars full of human beings
 being taken off to be slaughtered
 or to be worked to death in labor camps
 or to be gassed, et cetera.
 A lot of people had to know about what was going on
 and look the other way or enthusiastically supported
 the persecution of the Jews and the gypsies and so on.
 And I don't know, I wasn't around in 1840.
 My sense of the matter is that,
 like many practices that are unjust,
 most people thought that's just the way it is.
 I mean, that's the world that they inherited.
 They were not moralists, they were not revolutionaries.
 They just wanted to go along.
 Some people might've been troubled by it
 but thought there's nothing that can be done.
 Some people might've thought,
 well, they're these black Africans,
 they're not really like us and they are lucky to be here.
 If they were in Africa, they'd be worse off still.
 Some people might've thought that.
 Some people might've been disturbed
 but not been able to see what it is
 that they could do about it.
 They might've thought, oh, this is disgusting.
 This is not something I would wanna have anything to do with
 but not knowing whether there's any practical way
 of opposing it.
 That's why you need a movement.
 You need for the people who are troubled by the practice
 to know that there are others
 like themselves equally troubled
 and as they gather together,
 collectively they can exert their influence.
 I mean, debates about the wrongness of slavery,
 as I say, go all the way back to the founding of the country.
 There were abolitionists and there were people
 who opposed the compromise that led to the framing documents
 and institutions that created the United States of America,
 opposed the countenancing of slavery in that situation.
 But it took a while before that could come to a head
 and produce the crisis which ultimately led
 to the eradication of slavery.
 I would note that slavery is not unique to the United States.
 It's not unique to the Western hemisphere,
 that enslavement of people, the trafficking in human chattel
 is something that one sees on a global basis.
 One sees it going all the way back to antiquity.
 So we might ask, how is it that people finally came
 to turn their backs and eradicate the practice?
 That might be the thing worth really trying to understand
 because the practice itself is,
 there's a wonderful book by the sociologist Orlando Patterson
 called Slavery and Social Death that was published in 1982,
 which is a comprehensive history and social analysis
 of the institution of slavery over 2,500 years,
 going back to the classical Greek and Roman civilizations,
 finding slavery in Africa amongst Africans,
 finding slavery in the Middle East,
 finding slavery in the Far East,
 finding slavery in South Asia, the enslavement of people,
 the practice of taking someone as a captive in war
 and then instead of killing them, which you could do,
 making them into your property
 was very, very widespread in human culture.
 So I mean, I like to make this point sometimes
 when people are talking about how wrong slavery was,
 and I agree without any question,
 that the practice was profoundly morally problematic,
 but I like to make the point that given how wrong it was,
 think about how impressive was the accomplishment
 of the eradication of slavery.
 Now that was something, there were 600,000 dead
 in the war between the states 1861 to 1865
 in a country of 30 million people.
 That's a lot of dead people who gave their lives
 not to eradicate slavery in every instance,
 probably most of them were just fighting for,
 they enlisted or were conscripted into the forces
 and they fought and they died,
 but the net effect of their having fought and died
 was to push along a process
 that led to the eradication of slavery.
 That's an amazing achievement.
 The slaves themselves were largely uneducated
 and backward in their,
 of course, what else could they have been?
 They were kept in captivity,
 they were prevented from developing their human potential.
 And yet, after the end of slavery,
 that population, that four million plus
 African descended people became the foundation
 for what a century later leads to Martin Luther King
 standing in the Washington Mall
 and giving that great speech.
 And now here we are 150 years down the road
 and Barack Obama is president of the United States.
 Now he did not descend from slaves,
 I think we must not lose track of that,
 but he identified as an African American
 and was a part of the population
 that consisted largely of people who descended from slaves.
 And we are, we African Americans are,
 for all practical purposes,
 fully equal citizens of this great republic.
 That has happened within a century and a half.
 And I don't know that you can find any parallel
 to that kind of transformation in the status of people
 from human chattel to full citizens of the republic.
 Anywhere in human history,
 it's certainly worth celebrating the achievement
 of the eradication of slavery, I would say.
 And it probably started with a few people
 that inside their mind dared to rebel.
 It's interesting to think about how it all started,
 how in the state of injustice,
 the revolution percolates, like where it starts.
 You said people that see something is wrong find each other.
 It's in the ideas of charismatic individuals
 that not only know that something is wrong,
 but are able to tell others about it and be convincing.
 And then together gather and rise up.
 It's interesting to make this kind of incredible progress
 from slavery to where we are today,
 to live out the ideal of this all men are created equal.
 The power of individual,
 because I don't know what you think about it,
 but I tend to think that a few small individuals
 probably originated this.
 It's the power of the individual.
 Because sometimes we think there's injustice in the world,
 what can I possibly do?
 I tend to think one person can be the seed
 of starting to fix the injustice.
 Sure.
 One person here, one person there.
 Yeah.
 One thinks of course of Frederick Douglass,
 those massively significant figure
 who was born in slavery,
 who stole his freedom,
 because he was property
 and he decided he was not gonna be property anymore.
 And he took it unto himself
 to emancipate himself personally,
 and who became an educated, powerfully articulate,
 massively influential person in the United States
 and in England going around presenting himself
 as an embodiment of human dignity
 and commitment to ideals of equality.
 And I mean, he's just one person,
 but there were others like him.
 Just one person.
 All it takes is just one person.
 So here we are on this topic of equality in the 21st century.
 So what does equality mean today?
 If you start to think about this idea of equality of outcome
 or the injustice of inequality,
 at which point does equality of outcome is just,
 at which point is it unjust?
 Sort of looking at our world today
 and looking at inequality,
 how do we know that some inequality is a sign of injustice
 and some is the way of life?
 So what does equality mean
 when we look at the world today,
 different from Dr. King's speech of the basic humanity?
 I don't think King's speech,
 I have a dream that one day my four little children
 will be judged not by the color of their skin,
 but by the content of their character,
 requires equality of outcome.
 He says his children will be judged
 by the content of their character.
 That's a conditional statement.
 That is the judgment will depend
 upon the content of their character,
 not the color of their skin,
 but it doesn't follow from that,
 that the outcomes, whatever outcomes we consider,
 wealth and economic power,
 position within the society,
 representation in the various professions,
 the various measures of social achievement,
 doesn't follow from judging by the content of character
 and that color of skin,
 that when we look at the end of the day
 at the social outcomes,
 that they will be equal across the different groups.
 In fact, I think there's a contradiction in the idea
 that groups will be equal in all of the various social
 outcomes, that they will be equally successful in business,
 that they will be proportionately represented
 in the various professions,
 that they will have the same educational achievement,
 that the occupational profiles will look the same.
 If they are in fact distinct groups
 with their own cultural traditions and practices,
 with their own ideals and norms,
 various immigrant populations,
 people coming to the United States of America
 from all corners of the world,
 the descendants of the African slaves,
 the black Americans here today,
 who are ourselves various with different origins and so on,
 the different religious practices and commitments
 that Jewish or Mormon or Christian or whatever.
 However we parcel up the total population
 into the various groups,
 these groups are themselves different from one another.
 They have different norms
 within their own cultural practice.
 How would we expect if in fact we recognize
 that the groups are different from one another,
 that in a world that is fair,
 they would all come out equally represented
 in every undertaking, they're not equally represented.
 And that fact I'm arguing is in and of itself insufficient
 to justify the conclusion
 that they're not somehow being fairly treated.
 Fair treatment doesn't imply equal outcomes
 in a world in which the populations in question
 are themselves different with respect to their culture,
 their practices, their norms, their traditions,
 their beliefs, their ideals and so on.
 The fact of those different norms, traditions, beliefs,
 cultural orientations and ideals will have consequences
 in terms of their different social outcomes.
 So I just think it's a mistake that people are making
 when they think fairness of treatment
 implies equality of outcomes, it does not.
 Is the process by which we're speaking now
 in the midst of the National Basketball Association's
 playoffs, I confess to being a Boston Celtics fan.
 I mean, I'm just, it's a very good team
 and I'm excited about my Celtics.
 We defeated the Brooklyn Nets,
 I mean, we defeated Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving
 and company, okay, in a playoff series.
 We whipped them and we're on our way to, you know,
 the Eastern Conference finals and we're on our way
 to the NBA finals and I'm, you know,
 if I were a betting man, I'd put down a few bucks
 that the Boston Celtics underrated as we are
 have a very good chance of winning the NBA finals.
 Okay, so that's the NBA,
 that's the National Basketball Association.
 I'm a sports fan, I like basketball.
 Slightly biased prediction, but yes.
 Yeah, it is somewhat biased.
 All I'm saying is, if you take a look at
 who the star players are in the
 National Basketball Association,
 you're gonna find that there's some Eastern Europeans.
 You know, there's some really good basketball players
 coming out of Eastern Europe, you know,
 and more power to them.
 And there are a lot of African-Americans.
 We're overrepresented.
 There are not that many Jews, as far as I know.
 No offense intended there, Lex,
 but I mean, the NBA is not equally representative
 of all of the different populations in the United States.
 Now, we could go into the reasons why,
 but I'm just saying the process
 by which you get to be playing in the NBA is fair.
 If you can play, you can get on the court.
 That all they're looking for is people who can play.
 I think something like that is true
 in many different venues.
 I expect if you're a really good technical engineer,
 companies are gonna employ you.
 And if you can make money, they're gonna advance you,
 and you will be able to rise to the top of that profession.
 I expect that the people who are engaged
 in financial transactions,
 who are actually making bets on the market,
 by and large, are the people who are good at that activity.
 And if you're good at that activity,
 in this world, in this modern world,
 you're gonna rise to the top.
 I'm not saying that there are no barriers of discrimination.
 Of course, there are of many different sorts.
 But I'm saying that to expect that there would be,
 okay, I mean, let's look at who's actually writing code.
 Let's look at who's actually trading bonds.
 Let's look at who's actually starting businesses,
 and so on, to say that in a fair world,
 I would expect that if blacks are 10% of the population,
 they'd be 10% of every one of those things,
 is to ignore the reality that the differences
 in the culture and practices and norms
 of the various population groups will lead to differences
 in their representation amongst people
 who are outstanding performers in one or another activity.
 How do you know if the difference in culture
 accounts for the difference in outcomes,
 or it's the existence of barriers,
 especially barriers early on in life,
 of discrimination that are racially based?
 So if you think about affirmative action,
 in which ways is affirmative action empowering,
 in which ways is it limiting for these early development
 of the different groups,
 but let's just speak to African Americans.
 We should say that you went to some no-name
 Northwestern University at first,
 but then you ended up with the great university of MIT.
 So that's your, not early, but middle development.
 So speaking of the development, the opportunities,
 the equality of opportunity,
 how do we know we got that equality right?
 Yeah, I'm glad you put it like that.
 We were talking about results,
 now we're talking about opportunity.
 I was taking the position that when King says,
 I have a dream and he envisions a world
 where his children will not be barred
 from the good things in life
 because of the color of their skin,
 we're talking about opportunity, not about results.
 But opportunity is not just something
 that depends upon what the law is
 and what public policies are.
 Opportunity also depends upon the social conditions
 in which people are raised,
 the social and economic conditions.
 So the child of a poor family that has no resources,
 it doesn't have the same opportunity
 as a child of a wealthy family
 to realize their full human potential.
 You asked me, how can we tell whether or not
 a difference in outcomes is a reflection
 of unequal opportunity,
 or it's a reflection of differences in culture
 and interest and practice?
 And I don't know that there's a single answer
 to that question, but I think one wants to look at the data.
 One wants to try to measure, as a social scientist,
 I would say what you wanna do is you wanna estimate
 the significance of various factors
 for determining the outcome.
 If the outcome is how much money does a person make
 when they work in the labor market,
 so you look at their wages and you think,
 well, that depends upon a number of things.
 It depends upon how educated they are,
 what kind of skills they have,
 what kind of work experience they have, and so on.
 And those things are all legitimate factors
 that might determine how much they end up making
 in the labor market.
 But you also wanna perhaps controlling for those things,
 see whether or not the fact that they are black
 or they are Latino or whatever,
 fact that they are male or that they are female,
 the fact that they do or do not speak English
 as their native language, this kind of thing,
 whether those factors also are implicated
 in determining how successful they are
 in the labor market.
 And if you find that after you have controlled
 for the things that are legitimately determining success
 and failure in the labor market,
 like skills and education and experience,
 having controlled for those things,
 the fact that a person is black or is a woman
 or is an immigrant or is of Latino background
 also affects their earnings,
 then you might conclude that to that extent,
 they're not getting equal opportunity in the labor market,
 that kind of idea.
 But I wanna focus a little bit more here
 on what we mean by opportunity,
 because it's not just whether employers treat the worker
 on a fair and even basis,
 irregardless of the worker's racial or ethnic background,
 that's one opportunity issue,
 but that's at the end of the development process,
 they are now presenting themselves to the market,
 trying to find work and being employed at this or that wage,
 that's the end of the line.
 What about the developmental opportunity,
 the opportunity to acquire skills in the first place,
 that goes all the way back,
 that goes all the way back to birth,
 it even goes back to before birth,
 the mother carrying the infant in the womb,
 she has certain nutritional practices
 as she might be smoking or drinking alcohol
 or something like that, I'm not saying she is,
 I'm not saying she isn't,
 I'm just saying whether she is
 so she isn't affect the development of the fetus,
 the newborn, now there's a question of environment,
 there's a question of the development
 of their neurological potential,
 do they learn how to read, are they stimulated verbally,
 how many words have they heard spoken,
 are they being nurtured in a home environment
 so as to maximize the possibility
 of them achieving their human potential,
 what about the peer group influences,
 what about the values and norms
 of the surrounding human communities
 in which they're embedded,
 do they encourage the young person to apply themselves
 in a systematic way to their studies
 and to their focus on their acquisition of language command
 and of their educational potential,
 so development is not only something
 that is controlled by the society's practices,
 it's also something that is influenced
 by the cultural background of the individual
 and those things are not equal,
 those things vary across groups in a very significant way
 and that too will be a factor
 of determining disparities of outcome,
 so when I see outcomes that are different,
 I see wealth holding that's different,
 I see educational achievement that's different,
 I see representation in the professional schools
 and law school and medical school
 that's different between groups,
 one question is are the institutions treating people fairly
 but another question is do the background
 in social and cultural influences
 equip people in the same way
 and we know that the answer to that,
 not in every instance do they equip people in the same way
 and so it makes the judgment,
 the moral judgment that we make
 when we see inequality of outcome complicated,
 inequality of outcome is a systemic factor to some degree
 but it is also a cultural factor to some degree,
 I wanna say and that's controversial I know,
 a lot of people they think of themselves
 as being progressive,
 they wanna point a finger at society
 whenever they see a disparity
 but I think that that's a mistake,
 I think it misunderstands the difficulty of the problem,
 you think that if you get the right law,
 if you have the right public policy,
 if the right politicians are elected to office,
 suddenly those disparities will go away
 and I'm here to tell you that that's a false hope
 and moreover it is probably the wrong goal
 but I mean we could go into that,
 you were talking about affirmative action
 which is something else altogether
 and you were talking about me and my education
 which is also something that's a little bit different
 and I'm happy to talk about those things,
 Northwestern University by the way was a great university.
 I'm just joking,
 it's one of the great universities of the world, yes.
 And I studied mathematics at Northwestern University
 which is how I ended up at MIT in the first place
 and I got a very good technical training in mathematics
 when I was at Northwestern so.
 You love both mathematics and human nature
 and so which is why you ended up going into economics
 at one of the great economics programs in the world at MIT
 and getting a PhD there.
 So one of the many hats you wear is that of an economist
 which allows you to think systematically and rigorously
 about the way the world and the way humans work at scale,
 trying to remove the full mushy mess of humans
 like a psychology perspective economics allows you to do.
 Well, economics is one of the social sciences,
 I think there's value in psychology and in sociology,
 there's a lot to know that doesn't come up
 within the study of economics.
 We study markets and the dynamics of economic development
 and trade and so on.
 But yeah, speaking personally as I was coming along,
 I was fascinated by mathematics, I was good at it
 and ended up at Northwestern and took a lot of courses there
 and functional analysis and logic and mathematics
 and dynamical systems and stuff that I ended up employing
 in my graduate studies and economics.
 But you're right, I was not satisfied simply
 to be proving theorems, I wanted to be addressing issues
 of social significance and economics I discovered
 to my delight was a field of study that allowed me both
 to develop rigorous analytical frameworks,
 modeling and precision of logical deduction and inference.
 On the one hand, satisfying my mathematical interest,
 but on the other hand could address questions
 of social significance like why does racial inequality
 persist, why are some countries prospering and growing
 and others less so, why do the prices of raw materials
 fluctuate in the way that they do over time
 and so on and so forth and I ended up
 falling in love with the application of mathematical analysis
 to the study of social issues.
 What to you is beautiful about mathematics,
 about mathematical puzzles, about logic,
 all those kinds of things, because it's still there,
 the love for math is still there for you,
 so is there something you could speak to,
 what is the kernel, the flame of that?
 And I think that's the key to the study
 is the kernel, the flame of that love.
 It's like magic.
 I mean, being able to prove something
 and I think of offhand, there's no largest prime number.
 Okay, so how would somebody know that?
 Okay, what's a prime number?
 So a prime number is a number that has,
 a whole number that has no divisor other than one.
 There are no divisors of the number
 that makes it a prime number, like 13 or 19 or 37,
 whatever, okay, so they're prime numbers.
 There's no largest prime number.
 There are infinite number of prime numbers.
 There's no largest prime number, okay.
 That's an idea, you can get your mind around it
 in an instant, it doesn't take a whole depth
 to see the question.
 There's no largest prime number.
 I wonder if prime numbers show up in economics.
 Oh, they don't show up in economics,
 except cryptography, I understand,
 that's important for code, you know, in coding stuff.
 And that shows up in economics.
 But in terms of models, probably not.
 So prime numbers are little,
 you know, in abstract algebra,
 it's like they show up in all these places
 that are just like beautiful mathematical puzzles
 that don't immediately have an application
 but somehow maybe challenge you
 and as a result push mathematics forward,
 like Fermat's last theorem.
 You know, as far as I know,
 no obvious real world application,
 but it has challenged mathematicians
 throughout the centuries.
 Indeed.
 And somehow indirectly progressed the field.
 But.
 That the rational numbers are countable.
 They can be put in one-to-one relationship
 with the integers, you know,
 but that the real numbers are not countable
 and there's a lot more real,
 quote unquote, more real numbers.
 These are orders of infinity.
 This is Cantor, Geyer-Cantor,
 and all that kind of stuff.
 Or Gertel's theorem.
 I studied this as an undergraduate,
 you know, the incompleteness theorem
 that there are propositions within any logical system
 that's rich enough to accommodate arithmetic.
 There are going to be propositions
 that you can formulate that are true
 but that you cannot prove to be true.
 So the idea that you could systematically
 develop a logical framework for mathematical inquiry
 that could demonstrate the truth or falsity
 of any proposition is not a feasible goal.
 This was Hilbert's project, as I understand it,
 and Gertel showed that there was no hope ever
 of being able to demonstrate the closure
 of logical systems that were rich enough
 to accommodate the real numbers.
 They gave an existential crisis to all mathematicians
 and scientists alike and humans
 because maybe you can't prove everything.
 I remember, you know, when I was a junior college,
 a community college student
 before I transferred to Northwestern,
 and I took a calculus course and it was a lot of fun.
 And it was differentiating algebraic expressions
 and integrating and using trigonometric substitutions.
 And it was a lot of simple problem solving.
 I get to Northwestern,
 I take a course in differential equations.
 And again, it was a lot of formulaic, you know,
 applying if you get a differential equation
 of this structure, like if it's linear,
 you've got exponentials, et cetera, you can solve it.
 And then I took a course that showed me, you know,
 where the question was not how to solve
 any particular functional expression,
 but it was proving the existence of a solution
 to a differential equation where it was like
 X dot equals F of X and T.
 And F is just some arbitrary function.
 What do I have to assume about the function F
 in order to know that there exists a solution
 to the differential equation,
 dx dt equals F of X and T.
 And it's basically, they called it a Lipschitz condition.
 It's a condition about the bounding of the slope
 of the function F as a function of X
 that it doesn't, that you can sort of uniformly bound
 the slope on that function.
 And then you can use a iterative process
 to show that the sequence of, you know,
 partial solutions to the thing converges to something
 that's a solution to the real thing.
 Anyway, again, I'm not gonna bore you
 or pretend that I'm a mathematician, I'm not.
 But what I'm saying is the difference between
 a specific algebraic formula that you can manipulate
 and solve on the one hand,
 and the abstract question of whether there exists
 a solution in the general case is like a huge,
 was like a huge step for me in my study of mathematics.
 And the techniques that you have to employ
 to address these larger questions and so on.
 So I, you know, when I was an undergraduate,
 I took the first year PhD sequence in math analysis
 at Northwestern from a brilliant mathematician
 named Avner Friedman and learned about measure theory.
 And, you know, learned about some early functional
 analysis ideas.
 And when I saw that those ideas were being applied
 by advanced study in economics, I was delighted.
 I found an intellectual home.
 So that one of the fascinating challenges in mathematics
 is to think, how can you, which echoes the challenge
 of economics, what are the properties of an equation
 that allow you to say something profound and say it simply?
 And so the question of economics is,
 how do you construct a model where you can generalize nicely
 and say something profound and say it simply?
 So one of the questions, one of the challenges of economics
 is macro versus micro economics is, you know,
 the world is made up of individuals.
 So there's a connection to this, our discussion of race
 and discrimination and outcomes
 and all those kinds of things.
 The world is made up of individuals,
 but in order to say something general,
 we have to construct groups.
 In order to analyze the data,
 we have to aggregate that data somehow.
 We have to make an average over some set of people.
 So what are the pros and cons of looking at things like
 equality of opportunity and equality of outcome
 based on groups versus based on individuals?
 And what are the groups, if there's any pros
 to looking at groups that we should be looking at?
 Okay, well, those are big questions.
 I mean, in economics, you're right.
 I mean, micro, you have an account of how individuals
 make decisions about spending their money
 on the consumption side and about how enterprises
 make decisions about what to produce,
 how much of it, what inputs to use,
 what techniques of production and so on,
 individual firms, individual consumers.
 And then you wanna aggregate.
 So there's a theory of so-called theory
 of general equilibrium where you think supply and demand
 in a bunch of markets, you think prices
 that move to equilibrate, but you recognize
 that the price in one market affects people's behavior
 in another, the markets are interacting with each other.
 You realize that the behavior of one individual
 affects the supplies and available resources
 and for other individuals, so they're knitted together
 in some kind of systematic way.
 And you wanna try to demonstrate the fact
 that notwithstanding all these interdependencies,
 there exists a solution to the system of equations
 that equates demand and supply
 across all the different markets.
 This is the existence of general equilibrium.
 Then you wanna try to say something about the properties
 of an equilibrium if it exists.
 Is it efficient?
 Well, what do you mean by efficiency?
 Well, the idea of so-called Pareto efficient outcomes.
 These are outcomes that cannot be uniformly improved upon.
 Everybody can't be made better off
 by an alternative outcome.
 You wanna demonstrate the efficiency
 of competitive equilibrium.
 What do you mean by competition?
 You mean that people take their actions
 to do the best for themselves that they can,
 profits of firms, wellbeing of consumers,
 they try to do the best for themselves that they can.
 But they do so in reference to a set of prices
 that they believe they cannot control.
 That's the criterion of competitive market circumstance.
 So does a competitive equilibrium exist?
 Do there exist a set of prices
 which if everybody recognizes them as given
 and responds to those prices on behalf of their own interest,
 the outcome will be supply equaling demand
 in all the markets where people are interacting
 with one another.
 And that requires the use of some concepts and topology,
 fixed point theorems and whatnot
 that are familiar to mathematics,
 not very deep mathematical results,
 but important to economics.
 That's all about general equilibrium and whatnot.
 But you ask about groups.
 By the way, amazing world win summary of all of economics,
 but yes, go ahead.
 That was great.
 Markets of competition, of operator efficiency, anyway,
 but yes, groups.
 And prices.
 And prices.
 And by the way, there are some very beautiful
 formalizations of everything that I'm saying here.
 You end up in vector spaces,
 you end up with sets of bundles of consumption
 and production, you end up with convexity,
 you end up with hyperplanes,
 which are in this finite dimensional vector space,
 which are all of the bundles that have the same value
 at a certain price, you end up with inner products.
 And it's very pretty.
 Yeah, but you almost forget that it's just a bunch
 of humans transacting with each other,
 that markets are made up of individuals.
 Markets are made up of individuals.
 And in order to carry out this formalization,
 you have to make assumptions about the individuals.
 And the end result is true in a formal sense,
 but may not be true as a representation of the reality,
 because it depends upon assumptions
 that themselves may not hold.
 But at least you know what it is that has to be true
 in order for your formal framework to be relevant,
 which is already a step in the right direction, I think.
 I mean, the formalization is better than the intuition,
 the armchair intuition where we sit back
 and we don't really know exactly what we're talking about
 because we haven't pinned it down in a precise way.
 I'm in favor of the formalization.
 People, they think what is mathematics
 and the social sciences?
 After all, we're dealing with people.
 People are not automata.
 I agree with that.
 But the analysis of the interaction of people,
 I think to be rigorous requires us to be specific
 about what we're talking about, about markets,
 about consumers, about firms, about profits,
 about technology, about preferences.
 And that's the language of economics.
 But people's behavior depends upon what they seek in life,
 it depends upon their goals and their objectives.
 Those things are at play.
 They can be pushed this way or that.
 So, I mean, you know, nationalism,
 fighting and dying for your country, religion,
 sacrificing on behalf of some abstract ideal of the good
 or of, you know, what is the human situation
 and what is the meaning of life.
 Economists have to assume that these things
 are some particular thing before they can turn the crank
 on their machine to analyze the outcomes
 of human interaction.
 And yet these things, belief in my identity,
 but the things that I'm willing to sacrifice and die for,
 purposes of life that I affirm and pass on to my children,
 are important preconditions for actually carrying out
 any economic analysis.
 And they are subject to manipulation
 and to change over time.
 And that's not something that economics
 has a whole lot to say about.
 Well, is there some general things
 that are really powerful in terms of,
 you said nation, religion, those are groups.
 Can you group people nicely
 in helping you understand human nature?
 So group them into nations based on their citizenry.
 That's geography, right?
 The geographic location of your birth
 or your long-term residence, or maybe religious belief,
 what religion you believe over time.
 Is there groups like that?
 And then race, is that useful?
 What are the pros and cons of that?
 What are the pros and cons of looking at outcomes
 based on these kinds of groups, race in particular?
 I think they're pros and I think they're cons.
 I mean, I am myself, Glenn Lowry,
 sits before you right now,
 a black American, an African American,
 I quote unquote, I identify as, you know,
 that's the way they talk about it nowadays.
 I identify as a black American.
 My skin is brown, my hair is coarse,
 my nose is broad relative to the way
 other people's noses look, my lips are thicker.
 That's a consequence of my ancestral descent
 from the human population resident
 in the African continent in millennia past, my race.
 Here in the United States,
 we have various quote unquote races defined crudely
 in the way that I just tried to define myself.
 You could say, and I think there is a very powerful argument
 that these are superficial differences.
 I mean, really, why should it matter that your eye color
 or your hair color or the shape of the bones in your face
 or the color, the tone of your skin,
 the amount of melanin and how it is that you react
 to ultraviolet radiation in terms of your skin?
 What is that to be the basis of anything?
 I mean, that's arbitrary, that's not meaningful.
 Could there really be meaning
 in these superficial differences among human beings?
 Isn't that a archaic or barbaric way
 of thinking about ourselves
 to look at each other's skin color or hair texture
 and then to decide, well, that's a black
 or that's a white or that's a Latin
 or that's an Asian or that's a whatever.
 That's something that we should outgrow,
 a person might say.
 That's a relic of a kind of tribal society,
 of a kind of pre-modern society
 where we built real structure
 on the basis of such superficial difference.
 A person could say that.
 On the other hand, I am a black American.
 I mean, that's part of my identity,
 that's part of my heritage,
 it's part of the stories that I tell myself
 about who my people are.
 Why do I need a people?
 Why do I need a narrative of dissent
 in which I affiliate with a racially defined people?
 Do I really need that?
 I mean, I think that's an important question.
 I, in fact, this is a confession,
 think of myself as black.
 I could think of myself as simply human.
 I could not identify specifically as black.
 I could say, my eyes are brown too, so what?
 I'm a brown eye?
 I mean, I'm gonna invent a group based on my eye color.
 I weigh 290 pounds.
 I'm gonna have a body size group, I'm a plus 200
 and that's quote, who I am, close quote.
 I don't do that.
 I came from Chicago.
 Yes, I do have a certain sense of affinity with my hometown.
 I'm a Chicago born person,
 but frankly, I haven't lived in Chicago since 1979.
 That's a long time.
 I wear my Chicago origins very, very lightly.
 I would not go to war with someone from Cleveland
 or St. Louis and fight to the death with that St. Louis person
 or that Cleveland person based upon the fact
 that we come from different cities.
 And you have even abandoned in your heart the Chicago Bulls.
 There's some Chicago that's still in me, I suppose,
 but it's not very deep.
 It's not quote, who I am anymore.
 And I'm wondering, here I'm trying to pose a question,
 why is it that being a descendant of African slaves
 should be who I am?
 So there's some answers.
 One answer is people will look at me
 and deal with me differently based upon what they see.
 I don't have control over that.
 I'm going to be perceived as a member of a group,
 whether or not I elect to affiliate myself
 with that group or not.
 Therefore, I need to be mindful of the fact
 that regardless of what my internal orientation is,
 the world will perceive me in a particular way
 and will perceive me differently
 based upon the color of my skin.
 So a police officer who stops me at two o'clock
 in the morning because my tail light is out
 and ask me for my automobile registration
 and I reach quickly to the glove compartment
 to get my registration.
 And the police officer says, show me your hands.
 And I don't quite hear what he says or I ignore what he says
 as I'm getting my document out of my glove compartment.
 But the police officer thinks because I have not responded
 to his demand to show my hands
 that I might be reaching for a weapon.
 And the police officer sees that I'm black
 and fears that the likelihood that I might have a weapon
 is higher because in that town at that time,
 a lot of the people who get stopped with weapons
 in their car happen to be black and male and so on.
 And he pulls his weapon and he discharges it
 and I'm bleeding out there and I'm dead now.
 And all of that is a possibility that's very real
 and it's based upon the color of my skin.
 And therefore, when he stops me,
 I keep my hands on the steering wheel
 and I don't go to the glove compartment.
 And I'm fearful of the fact that he might mistake me
 for a criminal, et cetera.
 Or I walk into a high-end store, clothing store.
 I see you're nicely dressed there.
 Lex, I'm not, but that's okay.
 I do have some good clothes at home.
 I just didn't wear them here today.
 But you know what I mean.
 And the salesman in the clothing store either treats me
 like an old friend and is warm and welcoming
 and what can I do for you, sir?
 And let me show you this and that.
 And what are you looking for?
 Because he thinks I'm gonna spend $1,000 there that day
 and he's gonna get a 5% commission or whatever.
 And he either does that or he ignores me
 and looks at me with suspicion
 and thinks I might be trying to shoplift something
 or thinks I'm only gonna spend $50 and not $500
 and therefore I'm not worth his time.
 And I'm aware of the fact that when I go
 into the clothing store, especially the high-end places
 where I can buy a good suit
 or buy some really good dress shirts
 or slacks that fit me well and so on,
 I'm not gonna be paying attention to that.
 He loves his clothes, he loves his clothes,
 he loves his dress shirts, he loves his clothes,
 he loves his clothes, he loves his clothes,
 and so on and so forth.
 So I'm aware of the fact that I may not be taken seriously
 by the salesman based upon the fact
 that he's looking at me and he sees a black person.
 And therefore I dress up before I go to go out
 to buy clothes, cuz I want to present myself
 as not someone who just walked in off the street.
 But as one of those black people
 such as it is, of knowing that I need to earn the being taken seriously by
 overcoming the suppositions that people may have about me based upon the color
 of my skin. Something like that. Or I ask myself what am I going to teach my
 children about who they are and where they come from? What stories am I going
 to tell them about their ancestors? Who are their ancestors? Every African
 American has European ancestors. Every black person in the United States of
 America, I think that I can say that almost without exception. We could go to
 23andMe and look at the DNA. They have European ancestors. They're not purely
 African. That's a fact and that's a consequence of the experience of African
 descended people because it's a mixed population. My name is Lowry, spelled L-O-U-R-Y
 but pronounced as if it were L-O-W-E-R-Y. I gather if you trace the history of
 that name that it's Scottish. So somewhere back then... So you could identify as a Scott.
 Well, or I could claim some Scottish descent, but I don't. I don't know who
 those ancestors are and frankly, I don't know who my enslaved ancestors are. I
 can't trace my family history back very far into the 19th century. So what
 stories do I tell my children about who we are, about who their ancestors are? I
 mean, I want to tell my children some story and that story is going to be
 colored quote-unquote by my race. So even though it is superficial and in an ideal
 world you might think why would human beings... I mean, I read science fiction so
 there's this Chinese writer, Chik Sen Lu is his name. I might not pronounce it
 exactly right. C-I-X-I-N-L-I-U. Chik Sen Lu. He has a trilogy, The Three-Body
 Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End. Those are the three books of Chik Sen Lu's
 trilogy about how Trisolaris, which is another star system within a few
 light years of the solar system, and Earth get into a conflict. And when the
 Trisolarans come down to dominate Earth, suddenly all of these differences
 between the Chinese and the North Americans and the Europeans and the
 Africans and the South Asians become kind of insignificant because after all
 the Trisolarans with their advanced civilization whose star system is dying
 have their eyes on the solar system which has a planet the third rock from
 the Sun that is pretty habitable and the difference between us become
 pretty insignificant. So we shouldn't need for an invasion by extraterrestrial beings
 to have to happen before we would recognize the common humanity that we
 all share that is profound and is deep. We all descend in effect from the same
 ancestral population of Homo sapiens who walked out of East Africa eons ago
 and have survived amongst all of the different possible variations of
 species and what not of humanoid population. The Homo sapiens have
 flourished, the others have died out, and here we are and we can just
 look at the genetic endowments that characterize our biological essence and
 we can see that we are all quote-unquote the same beneath the skin and yet we
 end up freighting so much weight onto these superficial differences. So I can
 see both sides of the issue is what I'm saying. I can see the argument
 race is an irrelevancy because at the end of the day deep down it is but I can
 also see the argument that I hold on to racial identity because a my racial
 presentation colors how other people deal with me but B because everybody
 needs a story. You know everybody needs an account. You tell me you're Jewish. I
 mean I don't know how deep that is. I don't know how genetically profound that
 is. I do know that it's a culturally profound identity for a lot of people
 based upon maybe some of the same kind of forces that I'm talking about. A they
 won't let you not be Jewish. You could say you're not Jewish but when Hitler is
 rounding people up what you say doesn't have a whole lot to do with what
 the Gestapo was about. And B you need to tell your children a story. Yeah.
 That's the fascinating thing about this tribalism that you spoke about that we
 formed tribes as humans throughout human history formed tribes and have directed
 hate toward other tribes and sometimes violence and destruction and yet
 tribalism allows you to tell a story to your children. It allows you to grow a
 culture. There's something about defining yourself within particular tribe that
 allows you to have a tradition. You have an article that you wrote called
 the case for black patriotism. Oh yeah. So I should also say it's so interesting
 because for me personally I feel, identify as, believe I am an American and
 yet within the American umbrella it feels that there's a longing for other
 tribes. You mentioned Jewish but what I honestly feel is I mean a lot of it is
 humor and culture and so on is Russian and Ukrainian because that's
 where I come from. That's where my family is from. You know there's like
 stereotypical things that are funny humorous type of thing about Russians
 showing no emotion, good at chess and math, into wrestling, drinking vodka. I mean
 there's literally every single stereotype I'm in the embodiment of that.
 So there's a, you celebrate that in certain kinds of ways. There's a
 tradition there and within the American umbrella and some of it is humor, some of
 it is little quirks of culture but now with the war in Russia and Ukraine
 interestingly enough even that little thing it becomes also source of
 negative tribalism. But anyway that context aside what is black patriotism
 and why do you feel? I mean I'm speaking in an article called the case for black
 patriotism in a particular context and what I'm saying basically is very simple.
 I'm saying we are African Americans and the emphasis should be on the American. I
 actually don't even much care for the framing African American but I'm not
 gonna fight with people about it. It's you know I don't think it's worth
 fighting about. That's not how I would just say we're Americans or if you want
 we're black Americans. We're certainly not African. That is the African American
 population is a population of people who come into existence here in North
 America through the cauldron of slavery. There are also immigrants. Immigrants
 from East Africa, immigrants from West Africa, immigrants from Southern Africa,
 immigrants from the Caribbean who descend from an ancestral population
 which is African. You know the history of the world since 1500 is a history
 in which people of African descent are scattered because of slavery throughout
 the Western Hemisphere and so here we are. But the institution of slavery ended
 in 1863 in the United States. The struggle that we started out talking
 about which gave rise to Martin Luther King giving that speech that you say is
 the greatest speech in American history and I'm not gonna argue with you about
 that. Happened right here in the United States. We are, what is the
 United States? The United States is a nation of immigrants. The population of
 the North American continent was sparsely populated by an indigenous
 population which was destroyed in conquest by a European population that
 settled here in North America and appropriated the land and have built a
 civilization here which has been people by a large influx of individuals from
 Europe, Irish and Italian and Greek and Slavic and Jewish, Russian Jews coming in
 large numbers and so on and wave after wave after wave of immigration. Asian,
 Latin American population of people have come to reside here in the United
 States and we black Americans who descend from slaves. We African Americans who
 descend from slaves. So here we are. This is a great nation. I mean this is a
 monumentally significant political force which is the United States of America
 founded in 1776, 1787 fought a war of independence from the British, established
 a republic which is a confederation of these independent colonies which has
 grown into now the 50 states of the United States of America, a continental
 nation. The richest and most powerful nation on the planet with massive
 influence throughout the world for good and for ill. That's who we are I want to
 say to black people. There is no other home for us. This fantasy of we being a
 people apart back in the day when I was coming along in the 1960s there was
 something called the Republic of New Africa movement and they wanted some
 states in the south given over to black people and we were going to have our own
 country. And that's a joke. It's a fantasy. It's a mythic, unbalanced,
 unrealistic, fanciful politics. It's not a serious politics. We're Americans. We're
 not going anywhere here. The idea that and I want to say this in a number of
 different registers. I want to say first of all we need to make peace with the
 fact that that's who we are and that's where we are. So nobody is coming. The
 world court is not going to litigate our disputes. The United Nations is not going
 to set up a desk for people of African descent who reside in North America. We
 have to work out whatever our concerns are with our fellow Americans right
 here within the context of American politics. That means compromise. That
 means looking for a framework for political expression which is broader
 than our racial identity, etc. So I want to say that. But I also want to say
 there's no reason to apologize for this. There's something positive to affirm. I
 take on this question about slavery in brief because in fact
 slavery was awful and it was wrong and it was on the backs of the enslaved
 Africans and it had consequences that endured, that have endured long after the
 termination of the thing. But I also want to say look at what has happened in the
 last 150 years for African Americans. And I want to say look at the vitality of
 the institutions here in the United States of America, of the Democratic
 Republic of the United States of America. Again, not perfect. Which are
 malleable enough, these institutions, to allow for the transformation of the
 status of African Americans such as has occurred since the end of slavery. And I
 want to say there's a lot to celebrate in that. So this is our country. We are full
 members of the polity. We have burdens and responsibilities as well as
 privileges that are associated with our membership in this republic. That does
 not mean that we should not fight for what we believe to be right, although we
 are not one voice here, we black Americans. It does not mean that we
 should not protest things that we think are deserving of protest. But I want to
 say it does mean that we should not reject the framework that we're
 operating in because we basically don't have any alternative and because when
 viewed in full context, a noble and profoundly significant achievement the
 United States of America and a beacon to the rest of the world. I don't want to
 you know go off in some starry-eyed kind of jingoistic celebration of America as
 the greatest civilization etc etc. But this great nation is our nation and I
 think we do best by beginning, we black Americans do best by beginning, this is
 my argument in the piece, by beginning from a framework which accepts that
 fact and then builds on it. So black patriotism is not exactly the same rhymes
 echoes American patriotism. So a black American is first and foremost an
 American. Yeah a black American is first and foremost an American and it's a good
 thing too. Let me return to the question of Dr. King and another powerful impact
 individual Malcolm X to ask you the question. Well first people often perhaps
 inaccurately portray them as representing two different ideals approaches to the
 fight for civil rights. So Martin Luther King for the nonviolent approach, the
 peacemaker and Malcolm X is the by any means necessary. What do you think about
 this distinction and broadly speaking in black patriotism in the future of black
 Americans in the 21st century, what is the role of anger? What is the role of
 protests? Even you know violence encompasses a lot of things but just
 aggression and you know fuck the man we're going to have to make change,
 force change. Okay I think you put your finger on something really important in
 the context of we were just discussing my black patriotism essay and it's not
 the only story. There is another story and Malcolm X is someone you
 identify and his memory lives on and is powerfully influential and I think you
 see it in Black Lives Matter and I think you see it in the protest and rioting and
 so forth that has broken out periodically going all the way back to the 1960s and
 before but especially since the 1960s. He saw it in Los Angeles in 1992 and the
 Rodney King civil disturbances that broke out there and the balled-up fist,
 the radical Afrocentric rejection of the American story that Martin Luther King
 he believed in. He believed in a magnificent promissory note and a lot of
 people are rolling their eyes you know and saying you know as you say fuck the
 man magnificent promissory note. I mean just get your knee off my neck.
 That's what you can do for me. Don't ask me to believe in your BS about it some
 magnificent promissory note, some founding fathers who were all slave
 owners anyway. I mean just get your knee off my neck. Now I can relate to that as
 I mentioned I grew up in Chicago in the 1950s and the 1960s. I remember Malcolm
 X I mean literally in real time. I remember when he was murdered in 1965 in
 the Audubon ballroom in Harlem in Manhattan in New York City. I remember my
 uncle I was raised in a house where my aunt and uncle were the master of the
 house and my mother and my sister and I lived in a small apartment upstairs in
 the back of this of this big house that my successful aunt and uncle owned. And
 my uncle was a small businessman, a barber and a tradesman. He was a
 hustler I mean legally. He did what he had to do to make money. He was a
 very enterprising, not especially well-educated but a very intelligent and
 disciplined and resourceful provider for his family which included myself, my
 sister and my mother in their household. And we called him Uncle Mooney because
 he had moon-shaped eyes that protruded and were round. Uncle Mooney James Ellis
 was his name. Uncle Mooney James Ellis Lee was my Uncle Mooney. But I'm saying all
 that to say this, he admired the nation of Islam. I mean King and Malcolm X,
 Martin King and Malcolm X differed along a number of different dimensions. Malcolm
 X was a Muslim and Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian minister. My Uncle
 Mooney didn't have any time for these Christian ministers. He thought that was
 the white man's religion. He you know and back in that day you go into a black
 church and you'd see a portrait of Jesus and he'd be a blonde haired, blue-eyed.
 He didn't even look like a Mediterranean. I mean he didn't look
 like somebody who came from Palestine. I mean he looked like somebody who came
 from Northern Europe or something like that. The picture of Jesus. And my Uncle
 Mooney rejected that whole thing. He would be damned if he was gonna bend his
 knee to some white Jesus. But he was not a Muslim either. But he respected the
 Muslims. He brought home their newspaper. It was called Muhammad Speaks. This is
 the nation of Islam which is the black Muslim movement founded in American
 cities in Detroit and in Chicago going back to the early middle 20th century
 and growing into a very significant movement that had a lot of influence.
 Louis Farrakhan, a controversial figure, descends from this movement. It has
 fractured now and has the major part of the legacy of the black Muslims. It has
 assimilated itself into Islam proper. Malcolm X made a famous pilgrimage to
 Mecca and Medina and came back with a very different vision about what it
 meant to be a Muslim and understood himself to be a part of the large
 tradition and religious culture of Islam that has a global reach. And he had a
 different vision when he came back from that. Some people say that's why he was
 killed and so on. I don't know. I certainly find that to be plausible that he became
 the constitutive threat to the sect which was the black Muslims and had to be
 dealt with. I don't know if we'll ever know the full story on that. But anyway,
 what I'm trying to say is the black Muslims were there. Malcolm X was there
 and in my experience, they constituted a counterpoint to the position of king
 which depended on a kind of respect for the best of the tradition of American
 democracy, appealing to the better nature of our oppressors, live up to the full
 meaning of our creed. I mean, these are words that he would use. A magnificent
 promissory note is what he would think of as the Declaration of Independence and
 the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, unfulfilled ideal. And the black Muslims
 were like, fuck that. We're gonna take care of our own. We're gonna build our
 own schools. We're gonna build our own businesses. We're not waiting for the
 white man to do anything. Get your knee off my neck and get out of my way and
 let me take care of my own. And my uncle respected that. He respected the straight
 back. The stand up straight with your shoulders back. That's a Jordan Peterson.
 But I mean, that was way before Jordan Peterson, but that was his philosophy.
 Stand up straight with your... Raise your children. Don't be depending upon welfare.
 You're taking welfare from the white man. You need to get busy. You need to educate
 yourself. You need to clean up your act. Put down the fried chicken because it's
 gonna kill you. My uncle Mooney loved this book that Elijah Muhammad, they
 called him the honorable Elijah Muhammad. He was the founder and the leader of the
 Nation of Islam. He had a book. And all the book said was be smart, eat green
 vegetables, don't eat fried food, don't eat pork. They're Muslims. Don't eat pork
 and take responsibility for your diet and be healthy. And don't be
 putting a whole lot of pills into your body. You don't need to do that if you
 just get control of your diet and you eat properly. My uncle loved
 this idea of responsibility for self and determination to build. He
 respected that in the Muslims even if he didn't buy the religious part of it.
 And so, and by the way, when my uncle died in 1983, he left me a bequest. It
 wasn't money unfortunately. It was his complete collection of the recorded
 speeches of Malcolm X. And I have these albums. These are 33 and a third
 LPs. There's six of them. And I have a complete collection as best as my uncle
 could assemble of the recorded speeches of Malcolm X. Now why did he do that? He
 did that because he did not want me to forget, don't be dependent upon the white
 man. Build your own. Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Proud black man.
 Take care of your business. Take care of your children. Pick up the trash in front
 of your house. Get busy. This was this philosophy. So violence now, that's
 another story. I mean Malcolm X would say, you know, we're gonna defend ourselves.
 You're gonna mess with us, you know, you racist Ku Klux Klan or whatever. We're
 gonna arm ourselves and we're gonna fight you back. You racist police who are
 oppressing and persecuting and abusing our people, well you better be ready
 because we're gonna fight you back. And that too was the spirit that my uncle,
 that was a kind of attitude, a kind of posture. My uncle was not a radical. He
 was a businessman but he respected this idea. You take your life in your
 own hands when you mess with us because we're prepared to defend ourselves.
 So that blood runs in you too. That threat is, when you write about black
 patriotism, that threat is there too. It's like you embody both the ideal that
 we're all American but also that there is this oppressive history. There is
 the powerful that are manipulating you, that are oppressing you, and you can't
 just wait around for things to fix themselves. You have to take action. You
 have to take things into your own hands and sometimes that means being angry,
 sometimes that means being violent. That's there too. Yeah it's there but
 here and the but is I don't, me today, Glenn Lowry in 2022, think that that is
 the answer. I don't think that violent rebellion gets us anywhere at the end of
 the day. I think we're past that. There aren't night rider Ku Klux Klan people
 breaking down your door and dragging you away. There are not nooses thrown
 over a tree limb where you hang somebody from the tree because they
 whistled at a white woman or they got too much property in your community and
 you became, they were uppity Negroes and whatnot like that. That is a thing of
 the past in America that the situation is no longer the one that requires that
 kind of violent reaction and that there is, if we look at the net effect of the
 so-called rebellions in the American cities, they're negative. The George
 Floyd protests which became violent and arsonist in the aftermath of civil
 disturbance and whatnot in the summer of 2020, I think set back the program for
 African-Americans. I don't think it advanced it. I think there are things to
 be concerned about. Schools that are not working, police that are not
 respecting citizens and so forth but I think that those are things that affect
 white Americans as well and that the way to ultimately correct those things is to
 make alliance and associate oneself with Americans who are concerned to change
 these things. I don't think it's properly framed as a racial problem and I
 certainly don't think that violent rebellion gets us anywhere.
 I get the historical salience of that posture and it made a lot of sense in
 the early and the mid 20th century. I don't think it makes very much sense at
 all in the early 21st century. Well thank you for allowing me for a brief moment
 to try to channel your Uncle Mooney and maybe Malcolm X in this conversation as
 we as we look forward to the 21st century. You mentioned that in part
 you're troubled by the term African-American so words are funny
 things until they're not. So let me ask you about what I think is one of the
 most powerful and controversial words in the English language, the N word.
 So this is a word that I can't say that only certain people have the right to
 say. I have a friend Joe Rogan who has, what would you say, there was mass
 pushback or highlighting of the fact that he didn't just say N word but the
 said the full word many times throughout his conversations when referring to
 in a meta way about the power of words especially when related to certain
 comedians using those words. Yeah. What do you think about this word? Is it
 empowering? Is it destructive? What is it? What does it mean for race in America?
 What does it mean that people like Joe Rogan were essentially there's an
 attack to cancel him for using the word? Just as a scholar of human nature. What
 do you think about this whole thing? This is a phenomenon that interests me.
 Okay. The N word, nigger. I can say it because I'm black but I mean I can also
 say it because I like hip-hop and when I listen to hip-hop I hear the word all
 the time. These niggas ain't did, you know, watch out for these etc. I heard
 the word constantly as I was growing up as a boy and a young man in Chicago.
 Niggas ain't shit. That was said. That could be a reflection of
 some kind of pathology within the African-American community of self-hatred
 and so forth. It could be or it could just be a colloquial linguistic way. I
 mean I assume other groups also have their various, I don't know how the Irish
 talk about their Irish brothers and you know whatever and I don't know how the
 Jews talk about the Jewish brothers and whatever. But black people when talking
 about other black people use the N word all the time. My nigga. N-I-G-G-A.
 My nigga. That is a term of endearment. My friend Randall Kennedy, the law
 professor at Harvard University has a book called Nigger and he uses the word
 in the title of the book. The history of a, strange history of a of a provocative
 word. It's something like there's a subtitle but the title of the book is
 N-I-G-G-E-R colon and then he has a subtitle. I think of course the use of the
 word as a slur and an insult which is a part of the history of black people in
 the United States. The use of the word by the southern racist segregationists. We
 don't want no niggas up in here. Y'all you know niggas have no place in my
 restaurant, in my store, etc. That's meant to be an insult. It's an insult to people
 it's a fighting word. It's a way that you say that to somebody. It's a
 invitation for conflict. That said, what is it that about this particular word
 and also the asymmetry of it that do you think it's empowering to the black
 community to own a word? My honest answer to you is I don't know. I don't fully
 understand it. It has become symbolic in a way and the policing of the use of the
 word, I can say it but white people can't say it. I can say it I'm not a racist. I'm
 not a self-hating black. Yeah I'm just speaking the language of
 colloquial English that has emerged amongst African-Americans in which that
 word plays a big role but the prohibition on its use by others and of
 course in the Joe Rogan case it wasn't as if he was calling anybody an n-word. He
 was simply pointing out that people had said stuff in which the n-word was a
 part of what they said. Now he did make the statement about how did he put it
 the planet of the apes that one of the offensive things that he said had a you
 know he walked into a room there's a bunch of black guys standing around he
 says like planet of the apes. He said it's like Africa planet of the apes. Yeah he
 should have and he should have been a little bit more careful. That was
 that was an insult. That was that was you know something that you know if you say
 that and people are offended they have a right to be offended and if you didn't
 mean to offend them you can apologize and he did apologize I accept his
 apology. Joe's okay with me as far as that goes. In fact McWhorter and I, John
 McWhorter and I at the podcast that I do the Glenn show I had a conversation part
 of which touched on the Joe Rogan phenomenon and we concluded he didn't
 really do anything wrong. I mean I mean you can like Ermel you can hate him or
 whatever but the idea that he's a racist it's kind of ridiculous so frankly I
 mean if that's your test of what constitutes a racist the utterance of
 the word then you know it's kind of a it's kind of silly as far as I'm concerned.
 What do you think about the rigorous testing of people to the degree they're
 racist or not? The accusation of racism being a way to attack, to bully, to divide.
 So what are the pros and cons of that once again? Because it does reveal the
 assholes and the racists but it can hurt people who are not. Well I think we have
 a history here in the United States of blatant racism that goes back a long way
 and that has present-day echoes. So there are racists I mean there are people who
 will look and see oh those are black people they're patronizing this business
 I don't want to patronize this business anymore who if their daughter or their
 son is dating somebody that is black they will say I really wish you wouldn't do
 that I mean why are you hanging out with those people don't you know who they are?
 There are people there are racists okay there are black racists that is black
 people who see somebody who's white and who then invoke a whole lot of
 stereotypes or whatever or have a you know visceral dislike based upon
 nothing other than the color of the person's skin such people exist racism
 is a real thing etc. On the other hand I think this throwing around you know the
 accusation of racism a college professor is teaching a course he says in the
 context of teaching the course that the under representation of blacks in physics
 program at this university is because they score lower on the test than other
 groups and they're not qualified. So say the professor gives a lecture and he
 says we don't have more blacks in the physics department at this university
 because there are not enough qualified blacks somebody in the classroom who
 hears that a black student objects he's a racist okay that's a power move it's a
 move to try to control the conversation it's not an argument it's an epithet
 you've said that a person who has a particular idea that you don't like
 maybe that idea is I'm against affirmative action I think it's unfair I
 was just with Dorian Abbott Dorian Abbott is a scientist at the University of
 Chicago who published a piece in Newsweek magazine in which he said that
 he thought affirmative action and racial balancing was unethical he was invited
 to give a lecture at MIT a very distinguished lecture in his field based
 on planetary science I don't know exactly what it is I'm not a scientist
 but in any case because he had said that he didn't like affirmative action and he
 thought affirmative action was racist that's basically what he said why are we
 looking at people based upon their race and decide we should just do it on the
 merit that was his position now people protesting at the university where he
 was invited MIT saying that he's a racist because he had that opinion he
 gets disinvited Charles Murray is a popular social science writer who is
 famous for his book about IQ the bell curve one chapter of which chronicles
 the racial differences between black and white in performance on mental ability
 tests and speculates about the extent to which such differences may be connected
 with the genetic inheritance of these racially distinct populations now he
 could be wrong about everything that he's saying the Southern Poverty Law
 Center calls him a white supremacist because he observes that there are
 racial differences in measured intellectual ability amongst Americans
 of different racial descent the I the you know he could be wrong let me
 stipulate that he is wrong I mean I don't want to argue about whether he's
 right or about whether he's wrong he's addressing himself to a factual issue
 and now the issue becomes instead of grappling with the factual questions at
 hand and demonstrating his rightness or wrongness about those questions the
 issue becomes his character he's a racist that's in my mind a lot like
 calling him a witch the use of that word now I think has parallels to accusing
 people of witchcraft because they have views about substantive questions that
 bear on racial inequality or racial difference that a person finds
 unacceptable or that a person disagrees with and you think you can shut somebody
 up crime in the cities of Chicago st. Louis Baltimore Philadelphia
 Washington DC is out of control some person might say murder rate is high
 who's committing those crimes they're mostly black young men who are doing the
 carjackings and who are doing the shootings they're killing each other
 they're making our city unlivable now that's a hypothetical statement that I
 offer it might be correct it might be incorrect it might be appropriate it
 might be inappropriate it may be true but something that we would be better
 off if people didn't focus on I don't know responding to someone making that
 statement have you seen what has happened to my city it used to be that
 you could go to North Michigan Avenue and you could find one after another
 after another high-end shop this is in Chicago my hometown and tourists would
 come and they go to the theater and there were restaurants and they go out
 they don't do it anymore you know what half of those stores are boarded up now
 you know why because when George Floyd was killed black people mobbed in this
 city and they burnt and they rioted and they looted and it hasn't been the same
 ever since and I'm moving to the suburbs I'll be damned if I'm gonna send my
 children to those schools a person could say that they might be right they might
 be wrong to say it calling them a racist is exactly not a rebuttal of what they
 said it's a move it's a move to try to take control of the conversation by
 accusing someone of having bad character because they said something that made
 you uncomfortable which you can't deal with so you think you can shut them up by
 calling them a racist you might as well be calling them a witch you might as
 well be calling for their head on a platter because they believe that Satan
 is Lord because that's the kind of quote argument close quote which is precisely
 not an argument that people who invoke that term are using and here's what I
 have to say about that it's a fool's errand to try to refute somebody by
 calling them a witch likewise it's a fool's errand to try to rebut the
 contrary forces in American politics that are a reaction often to real things
 that are going on on the ground in black communities in the cities across this
 country by calling people a racist you may shut them up but you won't change
 their minds and you know what at the end of the day they're gonna go to the
 ballot box and they're gonna vote they're gonna pick up their store and
 they're gonna move it to the other side of town or to another town all together
 they're gonna keep their children away from places where they think the
 influences are harmful to those children they may not even talk about it in
 public you can believe that in private that they're talking about it with each
 other you had better find a more effective way of dealing with the
 conflicts in this country that fall along racial fault lines then calling
 people witches which is what this you know anti-racist you're a racist because
 you think that the out-of-wed like birth rate amongst black Americans is seven
 babies out of ten are born to a woman without a husband their families are
 falling apart now no one says that in public because they'd be called a racist
 if they said it in public but as a matter of fact the families are falling
 apart you didn't change that in the least by telling people to shut up about
 it Daniel Patrick Moynihan is called a racist in the 1960s the late senator the
 night New York senator who was a federal employee and an intellectual writing
 reports and he writes a report about the Negro family he called it in those years
 if I use the word Negro now they're gonna call me a racist if I'm a white
 person I can't even use the word Negro which is a historically legitimate
 reference to the descendants of the slaves enslaved people which we were as
 black Americans proud to use until yesterday so all of this linguistic
 policing is a sign of weakness it's false black power people will seat you
 the ground okay you don't want me to use that word I won't use that word anymore
 okay you don't want me to talk about that in public all right I won't talk
 about it in public anymore I don't want to be called a racist okay so I won't
 express my opinion you haven't changed anybody's mind you know so and you've
 also mentioned that for that you haven't changed anybody's mind but also for
 things like in universities and institutions there's diversity inclusion
 and equity kind of meetings and education and so on and I believe I've
 read somewhere I've been like I mentioned to you offline big fan of your
 Glenn show people should listen to it it's amazing there's also just
 interviews of you that I've listened to I believe you mentioned somewhere that
 even those kinds of meetings people might sit through and nod along but that
 doesn't necessarily mean that's making progress that they may not they may
 actually be bottling up a frustration that's the fear is that that's going to
 result in a pendulum pendulum sort of push back towards this idea of forced
 appreciation like forced anti-racism kind of thing I talk about this often in
 my pockets that's the Glenn show you know you can you can find the Glenn show
 my youtube channel and also at sub stack yeah you have a great sub stack you and
 your friend do Q&A's and all that kind of stuff on Patreon yeah so yeah so
 people should definitely follow you it's brilliant conversation but yeah I mean
 one concern is that the policing of the superficial policing this is a part of
 political correctness you know the insistence that you only use certain
 words that you only talk in a certain way is a phony kind of power because it
 doesn't actually persuade people about the issues that are at hand instead it
 forces them underground in their talk about these issues and and that's that's
 problematic much better that we have overt and explicit and honest
 disagreement to the extent that there are disagreement about things that are
 going on then that we have a superficial kind of you know conversation that is
 perished of any real biting you know discomforting confrontation with with
 the realities of the situation at hand and for black Americans I think one big
 part of the reality of the situation at hand is violent crime violent crime you
 know a police officer is afraid when he stops the car because it's an 18 year
 old driver in the vehicle he's got dreadlocks he's a black person the car
 doesn't have the right license plate he's afraid to deal with that person and
 one of the reasons he's afraid to deal with them is because a few who look like
 him are behaving violently their violence is usually perpetrated against
 others who look like themselves but not always and that reality doesn't get
 changed by you know telling a newspaper writer who writes about it that they are
 a racist or enforcing within a newsroom you can't cover that story in that way
 because to do so would be racist that I think it's a monumental mistake to
 enforce a closure on public discussion based upon a calculation that if we
 allow people if Twitter allows this kind of post if the Washington Post runs this
 kind of story etc you end up with a superficial politeness but a
 subterranean seething resentment that only makes matters worse if I can get
 your comment maybe have ideas because it does seem that this kind of attack works
 of being called a racist being called maybe not sexist but somebody you know
 like they were going through a Johnny Depp trial now right it's a defamation
 trial and the reason it's a defamation trial is because all it took is a single
 accusation a Johnny Depp being somebody who sexually and physically abused ever
 heard and all it took is just a single article no proof was given except the
 accusation itself and the world believed it so it's effective so how do you fight
 back if it's so damn effective that you can just call anybody racist and it works
 it's hard to wash off it's it's a your you know you're not proven in the court
 of law or anything like that but we we get those articles get that label and
 then the world moves on and just assumes that person is racist so what how do you
 do you have any ideas how to fight back no I don't frankly just hi Roseanne
 Barr who made the statement about Valerie Jarrett she made some kind of
 ape like reference to the whatever and her show got cancelled and and she's a
 racist so first of all pointing it out I suppose is one of the most powerful
 things that this the the hypocrisy of it the you say it works I guess you're
 right it used to be the calling someone a communist yeah worked I mean going
 back to the late 40s early 50s red scare McCarthyism and whatnot and the person
 might have belonged to a club that was pro-soviet Union in the 1930s when they
 were in college they might have voted for the socialist candidate Henry Wallace
 in the presidential election of 1948 they might belong to the Communist Party they
 they might think Karl Marx was right about a whole lot of stuff about
 capitalism and whatnot and they got called a communist or a Marxist and it
 could have ruined their career could have ruined their lives you know and a
 lot of people shut up about it and it took and it went on for a long time and
 in a way in a way it kind of still is going on I mean you call somebody a
 Marxist if you can make that stick they certainly not gonna get elected
 president of the United States but I don't know about this I think you know I
 once read this book by a German political scientist called Elizabeth
 Neula Neumann that was a the writers name Elizabeth Neula Neumann the book
 was called the spiral of silence and the argument was there can be some views
 some issues in society that get defined in such a way that it's inappropriate
 to hold those views and as a result people who don't want to be shamed who
 don't want to be ostracized don't express those views and when they don't
 express them anybody holding the view because they don't hear it said by
 others think that they're the only one or one of the few who hold the view and so
 they don't want to be the only one out there saying something so they keep it
 to themselves so now this view this attitude in society could be held by a
 large number of people but because of the fear that if they were to express it
 they'd be ostracized no one says it and since no one is saying it the others who
 hold the view don't know that they're not alone that they are not the only
 ones who hold the view and hence they keep silent that could be an equilibrium
 it could be a relatively stable situation in which the Emperor has no
 clothes everybody can see that this dude is naked okay but everybody thinks that
 you know I don't want to be the only one to say it and so we all kind of
 collaborate in this charade of keeping the view to ourselves then along comes
 an event that somebody decides to defy the consensus and to speak out it could
 be a little kid who in the story about the Emperor has no clothes doesn't
 realize that he's not supposed to say that their Emperor is naked the thing
 about the kid in the story who says that the Emperor is naked it's not that he's
 saying it it's not even that other people hear him saying it it's that
 everybody knows that everybody else heard him say it okay the kid who speaks
 out and says the Emperor has no clothes creates a circumstance in which it's
 common knowledge that the Emperor has no clothes now common knowledge does not
 just mean knowledge it does not even mean widespread knowledge it means
 comprehensive knowledge of other persons knowledge of the thing okay so the
 spiral of silence is a equilibrium that is susceptible to being undermined by a
 process of a kind of cumulative process a snowballing process of revelation that
 you're not the only one who thinks this way okay it's fascinating to think that
 there's an ocean of common knowledge that we're waiting for the little kid to
 wake us up to different little parts of it that's correct and the little kid by
 the way could be somebody like Donald Trump only more effective than Donald
 Trump somebody who is smarter than Donald Trump somebody who is shrewder
 than Donald Trump somebody who figures out that when Colin Kaepernick takes a
 knee at a football game and says I'm not gonna stand for this President
 allegiance that a vast number of people are very unhappy about that somebody who
 understands that when a Black Lives Matter activist stands up with his
 bald fist and says burn this bitch down about a city in the United States of
 America that a lot of people are upset about that a lot of them a person a
 shrewd politician a shrewd manager of a public image could build on and create a
 circumstance in which more and more people will feel safe to express that
 view and the more who express it the safer those who have yet to express it
 but who hold it will feel in expressing it and to the extent that the view is
 very widespread but is kept under wraps an explosion could happen and you can
 look up tomorrow and have a very different country than you had today
 because the conspiracy of silence the spiral of silence ends up getting
 unraveled by somebody who steps out away from the consensus dares to take the
 slings and arrows of exposing themselves as a naysayer but taps into a sentiment
 that's that's very widespread and I fear that with respect to many racial issues
 this is the situation that we actually confront that it could unravel in a very
 ugly way but it could also unravel in a beautiful way so is the depending there
 is a spiral of silence you're saying and it could be because speaking of children
 charismatic children there's a guy named Elon Musk who might be a candidate for
 such an unraveling right you mentioned the person that speaks out could be a
 Donald Trump but in this current situation that we live in like as this
 week Elon has purchased Twitter that's what I hear and is pushing for in all
 kinds of ways the increase of free speech on Twitter and speaking about
 some of the issues that we've been speaking about here with you but maybe
 in broader strokes about just the fact that you have to it's okay to point out
 that the Emperor wears no clothes and to do so from all sides in a way that
 everybody's a little bit pissed off but not too much what do you think about
 this whole effort of free speech in these public platforms Elon in particular
 Twitter your avid Twitter user but just public platforms for discourse for us as
 a civilization to figure stuff out yeah well the people on the left are very
 upset about the possibility that Elon Musk and Twitter will be open to more
 open to provocative public speech that has heretofore been banned or suppressed
 and I think they might be right to be concerned that that could happen I don't
 know enough about the technology and about the market to really I mean I
 social media and whatnot it seems like it's a complicated system of
 interactions between people and who the users are and so forth and so on I do
 know that that New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop was real news and
 could have affected the outcome of the election and it was suppressed and that
 Twitter had a role in suppressing it I do know that the question of where the
 COVID-19 virus originated in the role that lab leak account could have played
 in the public processing of that event was real news and that it was suppressed
 by people who were trying to control misinformation disinformation Russian
 disinformation campaigns and whatnot so Twitter has users I'm one of them and it
 has a lot of users it's not as big as Facebook I gather it's not but it's
 important the ability to construct counter platforms where people moving
 around and whatnot it's a kind of network dynamic that maybe I should
 understand it better than I do being a social scientist but I don't think
 anyone understands it yeah even people include inside Twitter which is
 fascinating it's a monster because of just the bandwidth messaging and you
 don't know who is a bot and who is a human that's a fascinating dynamic and
 the whole and the viral nature of negativity yeah that all of those
 dynamics of course you are probably the right person to understand it from a
 social scientist perspective from an economics perspective but nobody really
 understands and it's fascinating within that domain how do you allow for free
 speech not allow for free speech encourage free speech defend free speech
 and at the same time manage millions of ongoing conversations from just
 becoming in insanely chaotic sort of from from Twitter perspective they want
 people to be happy to grow to actually have difficult critical conversations
 and they you know the problem with humans is they think they know what that
 is and they think they can label things as misinformation as as counterproductive
 for healthy conversations in quotes and the problem is as we are learning humans
 are not able to do that effectively first of all power corrupts there's
 something delicious about having the power to label something as
 misinformation you do that once for something that might be obviously
 misinformation and then you start getting greedy you start getting excited
 it feels good it feels good to label something as misinformation disinformation
 that you just don't like and over time especially if there's a culture inside
 of a company that leans a certain political direction or leans in all the
 groups that we talked about leans a certain way they'll start to labels
 misinformation things they just don't like and there's that power is delicious
 and it corrupts you have to construct mechanisms like the founding fathers did
 for somehow preventing you from allowing that power to get too delicious at least
 that's my perspective on what's going on I'll just tell you personally I'm
 excited about the prospect I'm glad to see Musk making the move that he's
 making and we'll see what happens at Twitter and so forth you look you're
 looking forward for the what did he say let's make Twitter more fun I'm looking
 forward to to the fun you've talked about you are at a prestigious University
 Brown University Brown University and you've mentioned that universities might
 be in trouble I think is with Jordan but everywhere else that barbarians are at
 the gate who are the barbarians at the gate of the university so first of all
 what is to you beautiful about the ideal of the university in America of academia
 and what is a threat well you know a university is dedicated to the pursuit
 of truth and to the education and nurturing of young people as they enter
 into the pursuit of truth to doing research into teaching in a environment
 of free inquiry and civil discourse so free inquiry means you go wherever the
 evidence and your imagination may lead you and civil discourse means that you
 exchange arguments with people when you don't agree with them on behalf of trying
 to get to the bottom of things I think the university is a magnificent
 institution it is a relatively modern institution I mean last 500 years or so
 I mean there are universities that are older than that but the great research
 universities of the world and not only here in the United States are places
 where human ingenuity is nurtured where new lot knowledge is created and where
 young people are equipped to answer questions that are open questions about
 our existence in the world that we live in you can trace to the university much
 if not most of the advances in technology and resourcefulness our
 understanding of the origins of the species of the nature of the universe
 cosmology set around science of the pursuit of humanistic understanding the
 nurturing of traditions of inquisitive also that's the university barbarians at
 the gates the people who are trying to shut down open inquiry at the university
 on behalf of their particular view about things are a threat to what the
 university stands for and they should be resisted so if I'm inquiring about the
 nature of human intelligence and I want to study differences between human
 populations and their acquisition of or their expression of cognitive ability
 that's fair game it's an open question if I want to know something about the
 nature of gender affiliation identity and gender dysphoria and whatnot that's
 fair game to study in a university you can't shut that down you shouldn't be
 able to by saying I have a particular position here I'm a member of a
 particular identity group suppose I want to study the history of colonialism and
 there's a narrative on the progressive side which is colonialism is about
 Europeans dominating and stealing or whatever whatever and I happen to think
 well there's another aspect to the story about colonialism too which is that it's
 a mechanism for the diffusion of the best in human civilization to populations
 that were significantly lagging behind with respect to that it brought
 literacy to the southern hemispheric populations that were dominated in the
 process of the colonizing thing it's complicated I'm not taking that
 position by the way I'm just saying somebody at a university should be able
 to take it up and pursue it and engage in argument with people about it I'm
 talking about race and ethnicity but this extends to a wide range of things
 suppose we're talking about climate and one person says the earth is endangered
 because carbon in global warming etc etc and another person says no wait no
 wait look at where we stand in the 21st century we're vastly richer than our
 ancestors just 250 years ago we have much more knowledge about that and so
 forth and so on 250 years from now human ingenuity will have devised in ways that
 we cannot even begin to anticipate all manner of technological means for
 managing the problem there's no reason that we should shut down industrial
 civilization today because we fear the consequences of it when in fact we are
 vastly richer than our ancestors and those who come up two centuries after us
 will be vastly more effective at dealing with problems than we are now let's it's
 you know so I'm not actually making that argument I'm just saying the tendency to
 try to say oh no that person is a climate denier they can't pursue that
 area of inquiry is against the spirit of the university I think the barbarians at
 the gates has to do with the people who think they know what the right side of
 history is and try to make the university stand on the right side of
 history my position is you don't know what the right side of history is and
 the purpose of a university is to equip you to be able to think about what is
 the right side of history what is the solution to the dilemmas that confront
 us as human beings living on this planet with the billions that we are in the
 condition that we are so the identitarians the ones who want to make
 the university kowtow to their particular understandings about their
 own identity we now have at the at Brown University and various other places we
 don't do Columbus Day anymore we do indigenous peoples day when that day
 comes up in October we don't talk about Columbus they're taking down statues of
 Columbus all across the country and so forth and so on I'm not arguing anything
 here other than that the latter-day position
 by pox black indigenous and other people of cover the latter-day position that
 the university has to reflect a particular sensibility about these
 identity questions I think it's a threat to the integrity of the enterprise I
 don't think you're overstating it I I tend to be just for my limited knowledge
 of MIT but perhaps it applies broadly I think the beauty of the university
 broadly speaking is the faculty and the students and the problem arises from the
 overreach of a overgrowing administration that gives again thinks
 that it knows enough to make rules and conclusions based on a set of beliefs
 and then based on that empowers a certain small selection of students to
 be the sort of voices of activism of a particular idea and not I think activism
 is beautiful but not just activism but anybody that disagrees is shut down and
 that that I think the the blame lies with the administration so I think the
 solution is in lessening just like the solution with too big of a government
 too big of a bureaucracy is there needs to be a redistribution of power to what
 makes universities beautiful which is the old students and the young students
 old students being professors so the scholars the curious minds the people
 there in this whole thing to explore the world to be curious about it on a salary
 that's probably way too low for the thing they're doing that's that's the
 that's the whole point and then the administration it just gets in the way
 and is the source of this kind of they I would say that in your beautiful
 phrasing I would say the administration is the barbarians at the gate so the
 solution is smaller bureaucracy smaller administrations I have to on this point
 you had this conversation you put on your self-stack with Jordan Jordan
 Peterson about cognitive inequality I think it's titled wrestling with cognitive
 inequality this particular topic of just IQ differences between groups why is
 this why is it so dangerous to talk about why this particular topic well
 it's like you're calling black people inferior it's like you're saying they're
 genetically inferior that's what people are saying it's like you're rationalizing
 the disparity of outcomes by reference to the intrinsic inferiority of black
 people if you if you say cognitive ability matters for social outcomes if
 you say cognitive ability exists people really are different in terms of their
 intellectual functioning and if you say cognitive ability differences are
 substantial between racially defined populations the sum of that there is
 cognitive ability it matters and a difference by race is the conclusion
 that outcome differences by race are in part due to natural differences between
 the populations people find that to be completely offensive and unacceptable so
 that's what I think is going on can you still man that case that we should be
 careful doing that kind of research so this has to do with research it's like
 the Nazis used Nietzsche in their propaganda right is you can use white
 supremacists could use conclusions cherry-pick conclusions of studies to
 to push their to push their agenda can you still man the case that we should be
 careful yeah I could do it at three levels one is what do we mean by
 cognitive ability so there's many different kinds of intelligence a person
 might say how good are IQ tests at measuring other kinds of human
 capacities that are pertinent to success in life like temperament like emotional
 intelligence and so on so intelligence is not a one-dimensional thing measured
 by G the cognitive psychologists talk about G the general intelligence factor
 which is a statistical construction it's a factor analytic resolution of the
 correlation across individuals in their performance on a battery a different kind
 of tests and they use that to define a general factor of intelligence and a
 person could say that is a very narrow view of what human mental capacities
 actually are and that it's much better to think about multi-dimensional measures
 of human mental functioning rather than a single cognitive ability measure a
 so-called IQ which is a narrow construction that doesn't capture all of
 the subtle nuance of human difference in functioning functioning is not just the
 ability to recite backwards a sequence of numbers I say eight seven nine five
 three two you say two three five seven eight nine it's not just that
 intelligence is a complex management of many different dimensions of human
 performance including things like being able to stick with a task and not give
 up things like being able to discipline and control your impulses so as to
 remain focused and so forth that could be one dimension I could start by
 questioning the very foundation of the argument for racial differences in
 cognitive ability by saying that your measure of cognitive ability is flawed
 I could go to a higher level I could say what we're really interested in is
 social outcomes and the question of what factors influence social outcomes
 extends well beyond mental ability to many other things so here's an example
 visual acuity how well do you see you're not wearing glasses I am visual
 acuity varies between human beings some people see better than other people do
 visual acuity can be measured I can put you at the chart and you can can you
 identify and read that bottom line in small print or not so we can measure
 visual acuity and it varies between human beings visual acuity is partly
 genetic I think that's undoubtedly true we inherit genes that influence whether
 or not we are nearsighted or farsighted or astigmatic or whatever so visual
 acuity difference between people and can be measured and is under genetic control
 on the other hand corrective lenses allow for us to level the playing field
 between people who are differently endowed in terms of visual acuity
 likewise social outcomes are what we're really interested in employment earnings
 whether or not they're law-abiding how do they conduct themselves in their
 families and so forth amongst individuals yes social outcomes are
 influenced by so-called cognitive ability but they're influenced by many
 other things as well if they can if there are interventions that can be
 undertaken in society that level the playing field between people who have
 different natural endowments of cognitive ability the fact that people
 or groups differ in cognitive ability becomes less significant just like it's
 less significant that people differ with respect to how well they see when
 corrective lenses allow for the leveling of that playing field there are in fact
 interventions educational interventions early childhood interventions that have
 been shown to level the playing field to create better life outcomes for people
 even if they happen to be endowed with low intelligence so a second level of
 arguing against this whole program of research on human differences and
 intelligence is to observe that yes human beings and perhaps racially defined
 groups may differ on the average in intellectual endowment but there well
 may be social interventions that level the playing field whether it's an
 education or in other kinds of programmatic interventions especially
 for the poor a final level of argument is the one that you alluded to which is
 that if you talk like this you're going to encourage a kind of politics which is
 very ugly and it's best to frame the discussion in ways that don't put
 emphasis on racially defined natural differences between populations that's
 an argument that I am myself personally conflicted about on the one hand I think
 you know those people are just stupid it is racist okay on the other hand I think
 the calculation we shouldn't do this kind of research suppose I'm at the
 National Science Foundation research team submits a proposal the proposal
 proposes to undertake a study the study would explore the extent to which people
 and racial groups differ with respect to their intellectual performance and how
 that's influenced by their genetic and environmental interaction and I decide
 not to fund the study based on a political calculation that the subject
 is too sensitive and if you explore that subject you might get the wrong answer
 and if you get the wrong answer the white supremacist will be encouraged
 well that is presuming before the research is done that I know the outcome
 of the research and that I can calculate what the political consequence of the
 research outcome is going to be that's that's assuming the thing before you
 even know what the thing actually is it's a kind of omniscience it presumes
 that you as the master of the universe can tell people what it is that people
 are being treated like children what it is that they're capable of knowing and
 what it is that they're not capable of knowing it would be like someone saying
 to Einstein I don't know about that special relativity theory you know it
 could well lead to the development of technologies that would allow nuclear
 weapons or someone saying that Oppenheimer who is a physicist overseeing
 the Manhattan Project where the US developed a nuclear weapons capacity
 don't carry out that project because the results of acquiring that knowledge may
 be more than we can deal with or someone saying to someone doing a biomedical
 research who's interested in exploring the nature of the human genome don't
 carry out that experiment that cloning undertaking whatever because the
 consequences could be deleterious well the consequences could be deleterious
 the consequences could also be the cure of cancer the consequences could also be
 being able to generate electric power without producing carbon effluent so who
 are you to tell me who you being the person in the political position to
 control the research what the consequence of doing the research is I
 think I don't want to cede that kind of power to politicians over the course of
 human inquiry so yes I would want there to be regulations governing the use of
 biologically sensitive and potentially dangerous pathogens in a lab in Wuhan or
 anyplace else I would I would not want to simply leave that to laissez faire on
 the other hand I think that the tendency to try to shut down inquiry on behalf of
 supposed adverse political consequences is the road to ignorance and
 impoverishment at the end of the day for humankind denying ourselves the
 potential benefits of that kind of inquiry I think we need to take our
 chances within query rather than to try to control it and I feel that way about
 the exploration of human intelligence as much as anything else so you've asked me
 to steel man the case against research on IQ of the sort that Charles Murray is
 famous for popularizing and I've said a your measure of intelligence is
 single-dimensional and it ought to be multi-dimensional I've said B the
 consequences of people's differing in intelligence depends not only on the
 natural endowments of the people but also on the environment and the
 potential for intervening in that environment environment through one or
 another kind of instrument as the metaphorical example of the use of
 corrective lenses to level the playing field between people with different
 visual acuity indicates but finally I've said yes research on racial
 differences and IQ can foster political beliefs that we would regard to be
 noxious on the other hand to presume that what we don't know yet and might
 find out from the research is going to be harmful is to assume a kind of
 presumption or of knowing what the outcome of unknown processes might be
 which we ought to be very slow to embrace because if we had done so in the
 past we wouldn't have nuclear power there's a lot of things that we would
 know I mean what were people saying about Darwin and exploration of the
 evolution and origin of the species they were afraid that it was going to in
 effect disprove the religious based accounts of you know what were they
 saying about Copernicus and etc etc so you know that was a masterful layering
 of quote wrestling with the cognitive inequality he dragged in nuclear
 research Copernicus Darwin biomedical research with genetics even COVID and
 the lab leak I mean this does that's it that was just fun to listen to okay okay
 let me ask you about your politics so you've recently said that you're a
 conservative leaning I mean maybe that's a day-to-day thing maybe you can push
 back but so you have somebody like your friend John McWhorter yeah who could say
 is on your left yeah to the left of you and then you have somebody like Thomas
 old who maybe is on to the right of you yeah probably and yet there's a lot of
 overlap between the three of you right so to what degree does politics affect
 your view on race in America and maybe to what degree does your view on race
 affect your politics okay and that for people who don't know has shifted over
 time you've been on quite a roller coaster as anybody who thinks about the
 world should be well let's begin with the fact that I was trained as an
 economist in a tradition of what many people would call neoliberalism I was
 trained at MIT which was not a right-wing place by any means but it was
 a place where you learned about markets and about the benefits of capitalism as
 a way of organizing society the virtues of free enterprise the fact that the
 pursuit of profit was not necessarily a bad thing but it well might be the road
 to prosperity and to economic growth the idea that private property and
 individuals seeking to acquire and succeeding in acquiring wealth did
 create inequality but it also created opportunity and it also expanded our
 knowledge and our control over the physical environment which we embedded
 in etc so we were not Marxists at MIT although we did read marks I mean those
 of us who were intellectually curious you read marks marks was an important
 figure in the history of the West and I think marks should be read in capital
 three volumes etc alienation of labor and whatnot the implications of
 modernization of the advent of industrial capitalism etc that that kind
 of dynamic deserves to be studied and to come at it in a critical way informed by
 the intellectual inheritance of marks and Marxism I think that's a part of a
 full education in social philosophy and economic analysis that open-minded
 person ought to acquaint themselves with but at the end of the day I think that
 the I think that the free marketeers have the better of it I think the story
 of the 20th century as far as economic development is concerned reflects that I
 think that the experiments where centralized control over economic
 decisions was the order of the day failed I think that the fact of the 21st
 century rise of China as a force has a lot to do with the spread of in effect
 capitalists oriented modes of in an economic exchange freeing up prices
 markets property and so forth although obviously it's a complicated political
 economic system I'm talking about China but I think that the story of the 20th
 century and the hope for the 21st century is that prosperity is enhanced
 through the free exchange of goods and the pursuit and acquisition of property
 by people in a more or less capitalist oriented system that that's you know
 that's the view that I hold I guess that makes me a conservative I don't know I
 want to say that's not to the exclusion of a social safety net I'm not saying
 that old people in an ideal social system would be left to their own devices
 regardless of whether or not they had saved for their retirement I'm not
 saying that the ideal of extending decent access to health care to all
 people regardless of whether or not they can afford it decent access to education
 to people regardless of whether or not they can afford it is standing in the way
 of prosperity I don't believe that I think the mixed economies that we see in
 northern Europe and in North America are a balancing of the virtues of free
 enterprise property and the pursuit of wealth on the one hand against the the
 needs to have a decent society in which people who fall between the cracks
 nevertheless are bolstered through a sense of social solidarity that is
 accommodated by our common membership within a single nation state which is
 why I think nationalism is important it's why I think borders are important
 because without a coherent polity who can see themselves as in a common
 situation and agree through their politics to support each other to some
 extent you can't sustain a safety net you cannot you cannot have a social
 safety net for a global population you can only have a social safety net for a
 bounded population who have a sense of common membership in an ongoing
 political enterprise which they pay their dues through their taxes in order
 to sustain it there's a balancing that has to go on so that's the first thing
 that I would say about my politics I'm a neoliberal economist I believe in
 markets I believe in prices I believe in profit corporations are not an
 incarnation of evil corporations are a legal nexus through which production
 gets organized in which you solicit the cooperation of workers of people who
 provide capital of people who provide raw materials and input of customers and
 so on and that functionality allows for the production of goods and their
 distribution and the earning of income and its distribution which at the end of
 the day is the foundation of our prosperity corporations are people to
 Mitt Romney got in trouble for saying that in 2012 but corporations are
 nothing but a legal fiction the corporation is not a person as such but
 the nexus of contracts and relationships amongst the stakeholders who intersect
 in the context of the corporation is the way in which we organize the massively
 complex set of activities that are necessary in order to produce economic
 benefits in order to feed people in order to have everybody with a cell phone
 in their pocket in order to be able to travel from one side of a continent to
 another on a device that is with almost absolute certainty going to safely take
 off and land and in order to be able to build cities and etc but to the markets
 the ideal of the market collide with the ideal of all men are created equal the
 identity the struggle that we've been talking about of of what it means to
 sort of empower humans that make up this great country do they collide and where
 do they collide well markets are going to produce inequality and all men being
 equal is a statement about the intrinsic worth of people not about the situation
 that will come about when people interact with each other through markets
 because people are actually different and because there are factors that are
 beyond anybody's control called luck and chance that you know I you and I both
 invest it looked our priori like your investment in my investment were equally
 likely to succeed but as a matter of fact ex post facto your investment
 succeeds my investment doesn't succeed I don't have wealth and you have wealth
 that is an inevitable consequence of a environment in which both of us are free
 to make our investment choices and where the consequences of investment
 dependent part upon random circumstances of which no one has control but you asked
 me about my politics and I was just trying to lay down a foundation by
 saying I begin as an economist in the tradition of liberalism Adam Smith and
 so forth John Maynard Keynes for that matter and so forth that Milton Friedman
 and so forth that Paul Samuelson Bob Solo James Tobin and so forth
 Thomas soul yes that appreciates property the virtues of free enterprise
 the set of institutions that allow for security of contract a rule of law
 things of this kind so that's one thing say about my politics another thing to
 say about my politics and you're right I've moved around is that you know I
 began South Side of Chicago black kid I was a liberal Democrat I encountered the
 economics curriculum at the MIT and I became trained in economics in the
 tradition that I've just described and I encountered also the Reagan Revolution
 this is the late 70s and early 80s these are big debates about economic policy
 and so on and I found a lot to admire in the supply side errors the people were
 saying you know let's get the government out of the way the people who worried
 about national debt which is a lot more now than it was then the people who
 worried that the welfare state could be too big that the incentives of transfer
 programs could be counterproductive that you had a war on poverty and we did have
 a war on poverty and poverty won and there's a lot of evidence that the war
 on poverty look was lost by the people who were trying to quote unquote
 eradicate poverty in our time that incentives really do matter and that the
 state which is driven by politics is often unresponsive to the dictates of
 incentives whereas markets eliminate people who are inefficient and who are
 not cognizant of the consequences of incentives because they can't cover
 their bottom line and they won't persist for very long if they can't cover their
 bottom line they're forced to respond to the realities of differences in costs
 and benefits and so forth in a way that governments can cover because they have
 their hand in our pocket they can cover their losses and they can make accounts
 balance notwithstanding their mistakes because they can take my property by
 fiat by the power of the state the tax collector comes if I don't pay he
 seizes my holdings and they can carry on in that way they need the corrective
 influence of markets in order to be responsive to the realities of life I
 mean I may not like it that prices are telling me that something that I want to
 do is infeasible I may not like it but what the prices are telling me is that
 the costs of doing it exceed the benefits to be derived from doing it and
 if I persist in doing it notwithstanding that I'm gonna run losses and those
 losses will accumulate and the net effect of that over an entire society is
 stagnation and ultimate attenuation of the economic benefits that might be
 available with people again I think if you look at the developing world in the
 post-colonial period the second half of the 20th century that's exactly what you
 see planning doesn't work centralized control over resource allocation doesn't
 work okay so I became more conservative in that respect but I also and this has
 to do with race lost faith in the posture that became what became of the
 civil rights movement I mean the civil rights movement you quote King 1963 the
 civil rights movement starts out as we want equal membership in the polity but
 it becomes a systematized a cover I'm going to argue for deficiencies that are
 discernible within black American society which only we could correct
 that's a very controversial statement I make it with trepidation I don't take
 any pleasure in saying it but here's what I'm talking about so I'm talking
 about the family so the family is a matter internal to the community about
 how men and women relate to each other and engage in social reproduction
 childbearing the standing up of households the context within which
 children are developed are maturing and so forth and so on so the African
 American family is in trouble I think I can demonstrate that by reference to
 high rates of marital dissolution by high rates of birth to out of wedlock
 and so forth you can't even say that the African
 American family is in trouble violence homicide is the order of magnitude more
 prevalent amongst African Americans that it is in the society as a whole this is
 behavior it's behavior of our people I speak of black people of course we're
 not the only people in society for whom violence is an issue it's an order of
 magnitude more prevalent in our communities I'm talking about schooling
 and school failure so we have affirmative action as a cover it's a
 band-aid on differences in the development of intellectual performance
 which is only partly a consequence of the natural intelligence of people and
 largely a consequence of how people spend their time what they value how they
 discipline themselves what they do with their opportunities how parents raise
 their children what peer groups value and things of this kind the Asian
 students who are scoring off the charts on these exams are doing it not because
 they are intrinsically more intelligent to other people but because they work
 harder because their parents are more insistent on focusing on their
 intellectual performance because they're disciplined because of the way that they
 devote their time and their resources to equipping their children to function in
 the 21st century this is what I believe I think it's demonstrably the case and it
 is a factor in racial disparity the way that the civil rights movement has
 evolved under the wing of the Democratic Party into an organized apologia of for
 the failures of African-Americans to seize the opportunities that exist for
 us now in the 21st century but did not exist in the first half of the 20th
 century the way in which the civil rights movement has become an avoidance
 mechanism for us not taking we African-Americans responsible this is Glenn
 Lowry not everybody's going to agree with it is part of what makes me a
 conservative I am tired of the belly-aching I'm tired of the excuse
 me white supremacy it is in my mind a joke I lament the fact that that kind of
 rhetoric is so seductively attractive to African-Americans and so widely adopted
 by others and as I am fond of saying at the end of the day nobody is coming to
 save us I mean higher education MIT Caltech Stanford the where the future is
 happening that is about mastery over the achievements of human civilization such
 as they manifest themselves in the 21st century there's no substitute for
 actually acquiring mastery over the material there's no substitute for that
 to be patronized to have the standards lowered they want to get rid of the test
 they want to tell African-Americans that pat us on the head we're gonna have a
 separate program for you we're gonna give you a side door that you can come
 into that doesn't make us any smarter it doesn't make us any more creative and it
 doesn't make us any more fit for the actual competition that's unfolding
 before us now you want to be 10% of the population that's carried along for the
 next hundred years you want to be a ward of the state in the late 21st century
 you go ahead because the Chinese are coming you're not gonna hold them back
 the world is being remade every decade by new ways of seeing and new ways of
 doing if you don't get on board with the dynamic advancement of the civilization
 in which we are embedded you're going to end up being dependent on other people
 to look kindly upon you in this story that you've got this bellyache this
 excuse my ancestors were slaves it's only gonna work for so long so that's
 that makes me I suppose a kind of conservative I hate affirmative action I
 don't just disagree with it I don't just think it's against the 14th Amendment I
 hate it the hatred comes from an understanding that it is a band-aid that
 it is a substitute for the actual development of the capacities of our
 people to compete I'd much rather be in the position of having them try to keep
 me out because I'm so damn good like they're doing with the Asians then having
 them have to beg the Supreme Court to allow for a special dispensation on my
 behalf because they need diversity and inclusion and belonging it's not just
 diversity it's not just diversity and inclusion is diversity and inclusion and
 belonging I'm whining because I feel like I don't belong that's a position of
 weakness it's pathetic and it's only political correctness that keeps people
 who can see this and believe me a lot of people can see it from saying so out
 loud so you want the black American community to represent strength correct
 and I want us to deal with what it is that we have to deal with in order to be
 able to project strength in an increasingly competitive world let me
 ask you I know you said you're angry or dislike affirmative action let me ask
 you about something that even to my ear cut wrong now I'm relatively apolitical
 so President Biden when he was running for president gave a campaign promise
 that he will nominate a black woman to the US Supreme Court saying quote the
 person I will nominate will be someone with extraordinary qualifications
 character experience and integrity first sentence second sentence and that person
 will be the first black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme
 Court do you wish he only said the first sentence and not the second yes I wish
 that he had only said the first sentence even if his intention was to do what he
 said he was gonna do in the second sentence in other words I wish that he
 had simply said if I have the opportunity to nominate someone to the
 Supreme Court it's gonna be a superbly qualified person to carry out that
 position and he might have kept to himself his intention to name an
 african-american woman to that position and then going ahead and named an
 african-american woman to that position and I'm sure that Katanji Brown Jackson
 I don't doubt that she's accepted qualified she has a distinguished
 career she served as a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals she's a
 graduate at Harvard Law School she has a background you do not have to be a
 world-class constitutional legal scholar to get onto the United States Supreme
 Court a lot of members of the United States Supreme Court have had different
 kinds of legal careers before they were elevated to that position Earl Warren
 of the famed Warren Court of the 1950s and 60s was a politician as well as a
 leading jurist and whatnot I mean many kind of people in the US Supreme Court
 I have no doubt that Judge Katanji Brown Jackson is a qualified member to be on
 the Supreme Court I wish that Biden had not done what he did he could have
 disappointed a black woman by saying that he was limiting his considerations
 to black women and what are black women as a percentage of all potential
 appointees to the Supreme Court 3% 4% I don't know we could look the number up
 the by saying that he puts an asterisk on the appointment but it's worse than
 that because she will live down the asterisk of a person is inclined to do
 that she will have the opportunity to show through her performance exactly
 what kind of jury she is just as Justice Clarence Thomas has shown through his
 performance that he was qualified and more than qualified to be on this United
 States Supreme Court what I dislike was the pandering he was seeking votes from
 black people by pandering to us and he's treating us like children why should I
 care what color the person is who's on the United States Supreme Court what I
 should care about is what kind of opinions they're gonna write when they
 on their unites do I suppose that being a black woman means that you're gonna
 write different kind of opinions and others well perhaps perhaps that kind of
 identity politics at the highest level of American legal establishment is
 something that rubs me very much the wrong way what I should care about is
 the nature and the future of the law I'm actually struck by this because the
 court is conservative it has six conservative members on it and it has
 three liberal members on it and if I were and I'm not a liberal Democrat the
 highest concern that I would have about an appointment to the Supreme Court is
 is this a person who is going to be effective in advocating my liberal views
 within the highest council of American law now the fact that that person is a
 woman or is a black person is way down the list of the things that I would
 think are important to the kinds of opinions that they're going to write so I
 mean I think Joe Biden this is just a piece of a larger political strategy to
 cobble together a coalition that will be successful at the polls in sustaining
 Democrats Jim Crow 2.0 this whole characterization of the conflict in the
 states about election security and voting rights is another part of that
 strategy he is pandering to black voters he is trying to frighten us thinking that
 if the Republicans win our rights will be taken away and I think it is a
 infantilization of African-American politics I think black people are not to
 be as concerned about the color of the skin of a person who is serving in
 government as they are about the content of their character and the focus of
 their of their political and ideological orientation which for me would be center
 or even center right but that's me and it should not have a significant impact
 nevertheless he said she can overcome the asterisks but to me it was deeply
 disrespectful that anyone would give an extra asterisk stuff to overcome he
 didn't have to say it all he had to do was do it if he wanted to put a black
 woman on the court that he could go ahead and done it the reason he said it
 is because he wanted black people to vote for him by saying it and I'm saying
 that treats us like we're children you know it's not a political statement I
 just thought as a leader that was not those that was kind of disgusting yeah
 let me ask you about Thomas all you mentioned him he's a colleague and
 somebody who was an influence what in the space of ideas so what broadly what
 impact has he had on your ideas and how do you think he shaped the landscape of
 ideas in our culture in general I think Thomas soul is in his 90s now he's been
 around for a long time he's still got it he's still going at it he's still going
 at it books continue to come out I think he's a great man I think Thomas soul
 regardless of his race he's black is one of the 100 most significant economists
 of the 20th century he has chosen as his subject a substantial part of his
 subject subject to investigate the deep causes and consequences of racial
 disparity of one kind or another he's written fundamental books about that many
 of them he's a social philosopher he is a economic historian he is a combatant in
 the conflict of ideas around how to think about society and this beyond
 racial differences although race has been a big part of what he's written
 about he's been critical of affirmative action and he didn't just stand back and
 wag his finger he got busy looking at the consequences of affirmative action
 in societies all around the world and he's written books about that he's been
 critical of the narrative about civil rights and racial inequality he believes
 in small government he doesn't think that efforts to redistribute income have
 proved to be the solution to the problem of racial disparity Tom has not been
 honored by the committee that hands out Nobel recognition in economic science
 and probably won't be because he's controversial and I reckon that that
 committee would be loath to encourage the blowback that they would be sure to
 receive if they were to take a controversial and politically focused and
 expressive black conservative in an honor in that way so I think another
 reason is that Tom as a methodology methodological matter is not especially
 quantitative he pays attention to data but he doesn't do statistical analysis
 and he doesn't do modeling so from a methodological point of view he's not a
 cutting-edge kind of mathematically sophisticated kind of quantitatively
 statistically oriented but he does descriptive stuff he writes in a style
 that is much more like a social historian than it is like a like a
 mathematically trained analytical economist on the other hand he is an
 economist in the Chicago School of Milton Friedman and George Stickler
 prominent amongst his teachers who takes price theory which is the analysis of
 the interplay of market forces mindful of incentives and so on to you know
 implement the basic insights from economic science you know there is no
 free lunch I mean there's always going to be a cost anything that you do and so
 on people respond to incentives demand curve slope downward you know
 competition tends to work best when people are free to enter and not and so
 on I mean that kind of thing but Tom is also a social historian and philosopher
 in the tradition of a Friedrich von Hayek one of Tom's books I've deeply
 admired knowledge and decisions is an extension of the Hayekian arguments
 about the limits of central planning and whatnot so I think Tom so Thomas soul
 African-American born as I understand it in Louisiana raised in New York City
 our graduate of Harvard College a military veteran a PhD in economics
 from the University of Chicago a black conservative social scientist of very
 high stature I think he's a great man and one of the great intellectuals of
 the 20th century and you're saying implicitly deserves a Nobel Prize yeah I
 do think so I mean I was awarded by the committee Gunnar Meridahl the Swedish
 economist wrote about economic development wrote a famous two-volume
 work an American dilemma about the status of blacks and I mean I think Tom
 could be you know put in that company very easily without any difficulty I
 agree Daniel Kahneman them so it doesn't have to be new psychology see nine
 economists yep Eleanor Ostrom the political scientist who was honored in a
 joint prize to give her and Oliver Williamson 15 years ago or so he could
 be put in that company really quite easily let me ask you you mentioned
 Obama in this in the very beginning that we were talking about how did it feel
 that seems like forever ago then 2008 Barack Obama became president now at that
 time perhaps you identify as conservative already but how did so
 politics aside just in general how did it feel that in 150 years where this
 country has come along well yeah I didn't identify in 2008 as a
 conservative to the same extent I do today I was I was kind of in transition
 yet again I was excited by the Obama candidacy at first I was skeptical
 because after all he's not black the man's father is a Kenyan and the man's
 mother is a white American and he identifies as black I find it
 interesting that the first black president of the United States and I
 could have put inverted commas around black and the first black vice president
 of the United States neither of them descend from American slaves Kamala
 Harris's father is of African ancestry in part he's a Jamaican immigrant and her
 mother is an Indian immigrant she was Kamala Harris raised up largely in
 Canada though born in the United States Barack Obama is as I've said of mixed
 ancestry and neither of his parents are the descendants of of American
 descendants of African slaves but blackness is flexible it's it's it's
 something that you can put on or you can take off to a certain degree for some
 people and so be it I was excited our time has come hope and change we are the
 ones we've been waiting for these are slogans from 2008 I can't believe I
 bought that crap oh interesting let me push back here you talked about it's I
 mean to me a Jew is a Jew skin color is skin color yeah I mean he Barack Obama
 is black okay when it matters when you're talking to a white supremacist
 yeah when you're talking to when you if you're a slave owner he's black just
 like you said when Hitler comes around a Jew is a Jew it doesn't matter how you
 identify doesn't matter what so in that sense don't you think that Barack Obama
 is black in the most powerful of ways which is designating how far the MLK the
 Dr. King vision oh sure and look I said it a little bit tongue-in-cheek yes yes
 of course but I think Obama has been very careful about manufacturing a kind
 of public persona that is intended to position him in the most effective way
 you mean like every politician yeah like every politician sure and that the racial
 identity piece is an aspect of that I mean anything I say here would only be
 speculation because I have no facts about the personal history of Barack
 Obama and I accept Barack Hussein Obama as Hillary Clinton what said I take him
 at his word about whatever she was talking about well was he a Christian I
 think is what the question was and you know there was some right-wing attack on
 Obama for you know having been raised and for some years in the Philippines and
 all of that or Indonesia I beg your pardon in Indonesia and his stepfather
 and all of that but she took him at his word and I take him at his word about
 his racial identity no but you were captivated by the power of his words and
 you regret to the degree you were captivated I mean I think in retrospect
 that whole campaign looks like a pie in the sky kind of fairy tale we are the
 ones we've been waiting for I can't quote exactly that speech that he gave in
 Grant Park in Chicago when he was announced as the winner of the election
 but today is the day that the rise of the ocean stop words to this effect I
 mean those who doubted that we could do it that tonight is your answer this was
 going to be a new day it was going to be a new regime well it wasn't a new day
 and it wasn't a new regime it was American politics more or less as usual
 Barack Obama turns out not to be the Messiah maybe there should be no
 surprise in that race relations got set back during Obama's tenure my beef with
 Obama is that you okay you're black you say you black you black you got elected
 now we have a black president a black president you can do stuff that nobody
 else could do you're a black president you could tell the people burning down
 the city to get their butts back in their houses and to stop it you know you
 could tell the race hustlers they all sharp into the world not only has our
 time come for those who supported my campaign your time is over for those who
 want to carry on a advocacy rooted in racial grievance the election of myself
 to this highest office proves that the institution of the state are legitimate
 and open to all comers I think Barack Obama when the shi t hit the fan if I
 had a son he looked like Trayvon I deeply regret that he said that he's
 president of the United States the color of his skin and the color of Trayvon
 skin the correlation between those two things if I had a son he looked like
 Trayvon now he says when he said it he only meant to sympathize with the
 parents but in fact when he said it from the highest office in the land and then
 sent his Attorney General Eric Holder out to enforce this narrative he doubled
 down on a racial narrative that I think is actually false I think the story that
 systemic racism in America as reflected in policing that terrorizes black people
 because of the color of their skin is demonstrably false I think that the
 central threat to black lives is violent crime perpetrated largely by black
 people against other black people I think there is such a thing as police
 brutality and I think there are reasons to have regulations of police but I
 think it is a second-order issue in terms of the quality of life of
 african-americans I think Obama could have told the people who after Freddie
 Gray died in police custody in a van in Baltimore and who undertook to burn that
 city down to get their asses off the street and go back to their apartments
 and stop it I think he could have said in the aftermath of Michael Brown being
 shot dead by Darren Wilson in Ferguson Missouri and there was a grand jury
 deliberation that elected not to indict officer Wilson and people took the
 streets in that city and stood on top of vehicles and so forth and so on he could
 have told them we don't mob around courthouses in this country we respect
 the rule of law get your butts off the streets and back into your apartments he
 didn't do that so to push back a little bit yeah good push back I think you're
 asking Barack Obama the first black president of the United States to do the
 thing that I think should be done by the second black president of the United
 States I think his very example given the color of his skin was the most
 powerful thing and actually doing some of these hard Thomas soul type of Glenn
 Larry type of strong words about race it may be too much to ask given the nature
 of modern-day politics he is a politician he is a politician he need to
 get elected he needed to get reelected yeah it was in his second term where most
 of what I'm talking about happened so he wasn't facing further election but
 Obama was what 46 or 47 when he was so inaugurated he served for eight years so
 he's in his mid 50s he's got another half century or 40 years of life God
 willing his post presidency I think was what was primarily on his mind not
 getting elected to anything but being enshrined in a certain way and the the
 persona that he is now embodying which depends upon a racial narrative that I
 and Thomas soul and others object to I think was very much in the forefront of
 his mind when he made decisions as the chief executive officer of the country
 that we've all now have to live with yeah but the fact is he opened the door
 in a way that hasn't been done in the history of this the United States that
 I don't see there being a even a significant discussion when an an
 african-american a black man or a black woman runs for president maybe a black
 man let's say because there still hasn't been a woman president I just see that
 that broke open the possibility of that that's not even a discussion and that
 that example by itself I mean to me the role of the president isn't just policy
 it's to inspire it's to do the yeah it's to do the dr. King thing which is I have
 a dream and Barack Obama is an example of somebody that could give one hell of a
 speech it got you to believe Obama is a smooth operator without any question
 he's a master of his craft he you know he did the impossible I mean he beat
 Hillary Clinton in that primary fight and he beat John McCain in that general
 election and hats off to him and moreover he remains a iconic figure in
 American culture I don't think there's any doubt about that let me just mention
 Clarence Thomas is also black Clarence Thomas has a story that is vivid and
 inspiring just like Obama's story he overcome obstacles just like Obama did I
 mean extreme poverty and so forth and so on Clarence Thomas has served longer
 than any other member of the United States Supreme Court he is one of nine
 justices and it's three equal branches of government so Clarence Thomas by my
 arithmetic personifies 127th of the American state he is an iconic figure
 his example should be an inspiration to Americans of all races but especially a
 black American youngsters he happens to be conservative he very conservative so
 fucking what he too deserves to be in that pantheon he is not by the
 custodians of American education Clarence Thomas name is not on that many
 schools Barack Obama's name will be on many of them I'm not equating them
 they're different people the offices are very different but the same logic that
 you just used to extol the significance of Barack Obama's ascendancy could and
 should be applied to Clarence Thomas in my opinion yes but you know it's the
 office but also there is a resume and there's accomplishments but then there
 is oratory and charisma and a number of Twitter followers so there's ability to
 captivate a large number of people and that's a skill that a skill that
 correlates but is not directly connected to with how impressive your resume is I
 agree and moreover the judicial function the judge doesn't go out and give
 speeches of that sort because it's exactly antithetical to what he's doing
 he's a custodian of the law and that's not a popular feature figure in American
 policy he doesn't stand for election and it's a good thing too so I take that
 point here I want to say something else though that's provocative the next black
 president you say first black president shouldn't have been the one to do that
 the second one should is more likely than not gonna be a Republican I'm not I
 don't have a particular person in mind I'm just saying I agree and that's why
 it's gonna be super fun let me ask you to put put on your wise sage hat and give
 advice to young people so if you're talking to somebody who's in high school
 in college what advice would you give them about their career about life in
 general how to live a life they can be proud of well I'd say the world is your
 oyster I mean first order business you're not a victim I don't care what
 color you are I don't care you male female you gay straight whatever the
 world is your oyster you are so privileged you sit here in the United
 States of America a free country a rich country everything is possible for you
 believe me you can do anything okay secondly I would say mastery over the
 medium in which we're embedded is the key to the future so get educated focus
 work hard you know invest in your future by acquiring the skills that you need to
 be able to navigate the 21st century I would say the Chinese are coming and I
 don't mean anything against China I just mean to say the world's a small place
 and it's getting smaller and you know you better get moving and you better get
 moving quickly I'd say your identity your coloration your your orientation
 your your category is not the most important thing about you that you know
 so the the temptation to limit yourself and I give this speech to my my kids I
 say I quote James Joyce he has a passage in portrait of an artist as a young man
 in which he says do you know what Ireland is Ireland is an old sow that
 eats her Pharaoh this is Joyce he says Stefan Daedalus is the character that he
 has in mine in this Chronicle he says your ethnic inheritance he's talking
 about Irish nationalism are like nets holding you back that your challenge is
 to learn how to turn those nets into wings and thereby to fly okay flying
 into the open skies of modern society don't be your grandfather don't be your
 father don't wear your things so heavily that it keeps you from being open to
 everything that's new in the world wear it lightly yes everybody comes from
 somewhere but it doesn't have to be where you end up so you're not your
 father you're not your grandfather you are this wonderfully blessed human being
 in the middle of going into the middle of the 21st century and don't miss it
 don't don't live blinkert Lee don't live small live big live big and where your
 history lightly yeah everybody's got a mother tongue everybody's got a story
 everybody has a people but the world is a small place I love that you're quoting
 an Irishman one of the greatest writers of the 20th century a profound one but
 an Irishman nevertheless the the the levels of humor within that is not lost
 on me let me just mention the great Ralph
 Ellison the African-American writer Invisible Man is his masterpiece embodied
 this spirit okay we black Americans we do come from somewhere that coming from
 somewhere is from slavery in America that's our ancestral heritage but
 that's not what we are skin and bone these are superficial things the spirit
 and if I were a more religious person I could give a whole disposition about
 that but it's the spirit it's that light that's inside that's that's who we are
 and our challenge is to live in the fullness of it as opposed to this
 blinker thing when we don't look left we don't look right we're just fitting
 within this template that we inherit that is a travesty really Glenn you've
 lived an incredible life a productive one but just representing some powerful
 ideas some powerful ideals but life comes to an end yeah do you think about
 your death are you afraid of it well it is a really interesting coincidence that
 you'd pose me that question because I'm coming from a funeral today is Sunday on
 the preceding Tuesday five days ago I was at the funeral of Eugene Wesley
 Smith who was my brother-in-law he was my sister's husband my sister Leonette
 passed away in August of 2021 her husband has died at the age of 68 in
 April of 2022 and I was at his funeral he died suddenly of a heart attack that
 came completely out of the blue he seemed to be in perfect health he was a
 magnificent human being I could go into the details but you know take my word
 for it he was a businessman a steel trader metals trader he would buy and
 sell he worked mostly from his home office he had clients counterparties
 people he did business with all over the world he had three sons one of whom is
 in his early 30s two of whom are in their late 30s these are my sister's
 children she's deceased now he's deceased the older two sons are severely
 developmentally disabled and although they're in their late 30s they're not
 independently viable they don't function effectively they have to be cared for
 that responsibility has now fallen to the family but mainly to the surviving
 son who lives and with his wife and his two young children and has assumed the
 responsibility they've cared at home my sister and her husband Wesley Eugene
 Wesley Smith cared for their disabled sons at home they didn't want to see
 them institutionalized they had some help from programs at the state and
 social worker and so on but they mainly took on the burden of caring for them at
 home anyway I go on at length here and you know I don't know how much of this
 you'll choose to make use of it doesn't matter really I'm just trying to
 respond to your question I was asked to offer some remarks at the funeral and I
 offered them and I you know I spoke well of this great man he was a great man he
 had a straight back he was a stand-up guy he could be counted on his word was
 his bond he had broad shoulders he carried a lot of people with him
 business associates family members and so forth and so on he had a huge heart he
 was a giving and kind person he had a great mind he was an intellectual even
 though as a businessman much of his day was taken up with the you know minutiae
 of contracts and you know the details of the order being delivered and not being
 delivered of the quality of the product of the financing and so forth and so on
 there was still a powerful mind there yeah he was a powerful mind and he studied
 he read books he was interested in music and art he was he's a spiritual seeker
 had been ordained as a child minister in his youth and while he remained a master
 of the Christian canon he also explored Eastern religion and other spiritual
 paths and kind of stood above any particular tradition as a man who
 believed in God but thought that God manifest himself in many ways to human
 beings and that there was much to learn from other religious traditions as well
 this is Wesley we called him Wesley by his middle name Eugene Wesley Smith may
 rest in peace 68 that's five years younger than I am right now he dropped
 dead without any warning I could too so how does that make you feel what were
 the thoughts in your mind leading up to it having to give that speech in the
 days that follow first of all I wonder what would I say what would I say and
 you know there was no way to prepare and I decided you know I rehearsed in my
 mind this you know he has straight back he had broad shoulders he had a big heart
 he had a great mind you know he had a capacious spirit and whatnot and I used
 that as a template for making my remarks but my main thought was my god life is
 precious and life is fleeting and death is a part of life my death is a part of
 my life and I thought you know well I want to take better care of myself than
 I do you know etc etc but I also thought a lot of this is not in my hands at all I
 thought one should have his affairs in order my brother did not have all of his
 affairs in order in the sense that there is a lot of you know things are going to
 probate there was no will there's you know this is kind of unsettled I don't
 want that to happen to my surviving family members I want to have my affairs
 such that should heaven forbid I fall over one day and don't get up again
 people don't have to scramble about how to how to take care of things from from
 that point forward but as a human are you afraid and you know I'm afraid now I
 read this wonderful book called the swerve it's it's about Lucretius it's
 about the nature of things which is this great classical work from the Roman
 period by this guy Lucretius and I'm trying to think of the name of the
 author but you could look it up the swerve is the book it won like a
 national book award or a Pulitzer Prize is and it's the history of the recovery
 of this book by one of these Italian Renaissance Italian people who would go
 into the monasteries in Central Europe and look through the scrolls and they
 discover these classical works from antiquity which had been lost through
 the Dark Ages and they re-publish and read these works and Lucretius's great
 work on the nature of things was one of these books Poggio Bacchalini I don't
 remember the Italian guy's name but this all could be looked up yeah Poggio
 Bacchalini yeah 15th century 15th century and the name of the author is
 Stephen Greenblatt yeah Stephen Greenblatt a magnificent book and a
 terrific story anyway one of Lucretius's points he was an atheist I mean he was a
 Roman I mean he was he didn't believe in mysticism and he argued it's
 irrational to be afraid of death why should I fear death death is coming to
 all of us the point of being afraid I mean I'm wasting my time fearing
 something that I have no ultimate control over it's irrational to be
 afraid of death yeah because it you can't predict when it happens you only
 know that it happens so why be afraid how's that and therefore live every day
 fully live every day purposefully you know and so on but these are all just
 words you know I I don't want to die I want to live forever I'm not gonna live
 forever I don't want to I don't want to suffer I see people suffering I saw my
 late wife Linda Datcher Lowry dr. Linda Datcher Lowry professor of economics at
 Tufts University whom I met in graduate school at MIT black woman from
 Baltimore we married we raised two sons together she died at the age of 59 from
 metastatic breast cancer and I watched her suffer and I watched her die and it
 took a while and we care for her at home right up until the very end she died in
 our bed with our sons on either side of her and the dog curled up by the by the
 door the porch door in the bedroom and she expired and I watched her suffer and
 I watched her die and I don't want to suffer who does I don't want to die I am
 likely to suffer before I die I am likely to see my death coming and to
 lament it there is a book by Richard John Newhouse the theologian called as I
 laid as I lay dying as I lay dying Richard John Newhouse he had stomach
 cancer and he thought he was dying and he wrote this book as he lay dying and
 then he recovered he had he went it went into remission and he had another couple
 of years he thought he was dying and he had another couple of years and I can
 remember meeting him at a bookstore in suburban Boston when he was on a tour
 he was a friend of mine a theologian and public intellectual he founded the
 Institute on religion and public life in New York City which still exists Richard
 John Newhouse and he's contemplating his own death from the point of view of a
 Christian minister he was a first Lutheran pastor and then he converted to
 Catholicism or as he would have put it I returned to the church because he you
 know thought the Renaissance was over I mean I'm sorry the Reformation Richard
 thought was over he says there's only one church you know etc get into theology
 stuff here but I'm saying all that to say I read that book aloud to my wife Linda
 as she lay dying in that bed I read that book and it was filled with hope I mean
 it first acknowledged the dread yes I lie dying I don't want to die I'm a
 Christian minister Christ was raised from the dead I'm supposed to believe in
 everlasting life but the fact of the matter is this is me and I'm lying here
 and I'm dying this is the end of me how are you gonna do anything other than
 dread the end of me so let's acknowledge that I don't want to die okay I'm just
 gonna tell you that up front but that is not the end of my death is not the end
 of life I have lived well and fully I will go and do my best right up until the
 end I will accept what is inevitable and I will hold out this belief and he's a
 Christian minister so he holds out this belief and he knows he knows that the
 belief is not rational it's not a reasoned deductive scientific conclusion
 it's spiritual in the most fundamental way it is something that people hold on
 to and they have hope and he had hope I don't know if I have that hope I used to
 be but I'm no longer a Christian and I'm no longer a theist really I I'm with
 Lucretius there I mean there's no nothing there's no magic that's going on
 here there's no you know unseen hand behind the scene that's arranging things
 what I believe is that when I look at the natural world I see I see the
 evolution of the species I see the organic development of the of the
 planets I mean the earth is going to not exist in a finite number of years I
 think with a very high probability the Sun is gonna die it's gonna you know
 implode it's gonna go supernova whatever is gonna happen and there's not gonna be
 any there there what's the meaning of life Glenn Larey what's the why or is
 that something economists and social scientists and mathematicians are not
 equipped to answer surely you know I think we live we try to live well and
 meaningfully within our time we bond we reproduce we try to pass on and we
 accept our limitations and our mortality we try to contribute and that's through
 our children and through our work and we're in this together we're not in
 this alone we are connected to other people I get a lot of gratitude out of
 teaching I'm a teacher my students are gonna outlive me they're gonna have
 students I'm a writer my writing is gonna outlive me I don't want to be you
 know self-important or pretentious here I doubt that I'm gonna be the James
 Joyce of the 21st century they may not be reading my stuff in a hundred years
 as people will certainly be reading Ulysses in a hundred years but I try to
 have a impact on my on on the world that I'm a part of and try to leave a legacy
 that's dignified you know I mean I could give some flowery words a truth-seeking
 and whatnot what about love love what what what what what role does love play
 in this in this life thing go around I mean love without love I mean what have
 we got I mean we don't have we don't have family and you know we certainly
 have missed out if love is not a central part of our of our existence but stop
 asking me questions like that Glenn thank you for doing everything you do for
 thinking the way you do for being fearless and bold and in the Glenn show
 and your writing and in your work and just being who you are thank you for
 being you and thank you for giving me the huge honor of spending your extremely
 valuable time with me today this was awesome it's been my pleasure Lex I mean
 really and it has been like four hours man I mean you wear me out for me I love
 it thanks for listening to this conversation with Glenn Lowry to support
 this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let
 me leave you with some words from Dr. Martin Luther King jr. if you can't fly
 then run if you can't run then walk if you can't walk then crawl but whatever
 you do you have to keep moving forward thank you for listening and hope to see
 you next time