 Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler today. I'm here with Glenn Larry who needs no introduction Glenn welcome Thank you Tyler good to be with you Would you like to start with economics or with music? Well, we start with music. I'm not sure what you have in mind, but I'm gay Let's try some music questions Let's say that that your views the Glenn Larry worldview were writ large as a political movement What would the music be for that movement? It would be bebop era jazz late 50s early 60s It would be Charles Mingus. It would be Miles Davis. It would be a young John Coltrane. It would be a young McCoy tiner It would be Thelonious Monk It would be in that space And why is that music the correct association with your political movement? Oh Actually, it's a association with my life story and upbringing and it was like the coolest and the hippest and You know, I was born in 1948. So I was like 14 years old in 1962 and stuff was happening in my uncles and Cousins and whatnot and everybody was listening to this stuff and I would just import that into my political movement. There's no politics and that music that I'm aware of but Should we be looking for politics in music? Well, I think it's whether we're looking for politics in you, right? Okay, let's say we take the more narrowly Chicago R&B tradition Curtis Mayfield Chylites Jerry Butler major Lance the Dales, right? Does any of that become the music of your movement? Yeah. Yeah, that's that's a That's in a different register I'm dancing now rather than sitting back nodding my head to the you know, it exquisite improvisational runs I'm dancing to that and and I'm dancing with a girl, you know, so it's going to be romantic It's gonna have all of that kind of adolescent stuff in it But yeah, I could I could get to Curtis Mayfield and the shy lights and Well in Motown, too, which was right down the down the street from Chicago. It was sort of part of the same world Why has stacks faded more than Motown with time for listeners? That's an economist question, isn't it? I actually don't know the I don't know the data well enough to To to answer that But everyone still knows Diana Ross the Supremes Otis Redding is somewhat known But a lot of the stack sound was maybe too gritty or not polished in the right way It's not played in music as often. I think that's my impression Yeah, or the smoky Robinson or some of these others, but I don't know. I mean, this is beyond my My knowledge I wanted to credit the organizational and marketing genius of Barry Gordy at Motown as part of the story But it might be that it was too gritty. What about the sound of Philadelphia since we're going back? I mean There were there were other, you know R&B Studio Dynamics that were going on and they haven't all feared as well as Motown has done and I agree with that I'm not sure why Al Green still turns up in movie soundtracks. I notice but a lot of the rest of it. Maybe not Did you ever see Jackie Brown? That Quentin Tarantino early Quentin Tarantino film Jackie Brown, of course Yeah, it has a isn't it a TSOP soundtrack. I The Dell so we'd have to ask GPT, right? GPT or or Google. Oh Okay I'm still in Google, man. I got to get with it Should we listen to Michael Jackson with the same emotions as we did before or is he cancelable? I Don't know how you cancel Michael Jackson. I mean you probably listen with something firing in the back of your brain about warning warning But you still listen Much sadder though, right? Yeah Yeah, they do but but the pop icon Michael Jackson. It wasn't just the lyrics. It wasn't just the tune. It was the whole It was the whole thing. It was the performance. It was the dancing. It was the tragic Ark of this celebrity life It happened that I was in Bogota Colombia teaching summer school when Jackson died and Our host took us out to one of these four-hour lunch Extravaganza's at a restaurant out in the countryside that it was beef beef beef and more beef and it just kept coming and all of the weight persons Were dressed as Michael Jackson impersonators and there were big screens playing Michael Jackson videos Everywhere you looked and this was in Colombia but you know such was the force of Michael Jackson's celebrity and Genius musical genius and personality but not I don't know. I don't have a problem listening to Michael Jackson. Although you're right I don't hear it being played on the radio At what age would you let your daughter listen to Prince's dirty mind album? I'm gonna tell you I don't know what's in Prince's dirty mind album Well, this is from the title of the album perhaps and I'm gonna I'm gonna acknowledge while I do have two daughters They're in their fifties So the time anything to say But nowadays can you really control what your daughter's listen to? If you tell them I think in some cases it has an impact at times a negative or reverse impact, right? But words matter Would you put it on? If you don't want them to listen to Prince that they have to listen to Prince that it's a mandatory Right of passage to listen to Prince that might get them to Not listen Do you ever enjoy bluegrass music? What's the whitest stuff you listen to a lot and really like? You know, I don't listen to as much music as I used to and you know, I'm partial to to jazz Blues I work out Monday Wednesday Friday with a trainer Who has a small studio? With a good sound system We listen to hip-hop We listen to blues we listen to a lot of blues bluegrass now I love a brilliant banjo solo as much as the next guy I mean I can really get with it when it comes up in the soundtrack of a movie that I'm watching or whatever But I wouldn't have gone out of my way To find it. It's just something that comes across my screen So I'm I'm not very knowledgeable at all about about bluegrass or about the country For that matter. Do you like the movie deliverance speaking of banjo solos? It's been a long time since I've seen it again But you know, yeah, it was it was disquieting at a very deep level I'd like to go back and revisit your early career in theoretical economics See what some of your current thoughts are on those pieces. Are you game? Okay. Yeah, okay Do markets exhaust natural resources in the ground too rapidly or too slowly under competitive conditions? What's your current view? Well in that you haven't internalized the environmental externality I'd say probably if I had to answer that question too rapidly or too slowly too rapidly Because there'll be too much of the environmental externality now whereas you should spread it out over time. Is that the implicit belief Well, no, just my thought my thought process was that the price Level the initial price level would be higher The theory tells us that the price is supposed to rise at the rate of interest or something like that because the supplier can substitute Supplying today versus supplying tomorrow So he has to anticipate a return in price terms that's comparable to what he'd get if he sold it all today So I don't know that anything about the environment Influences the rate of increase of prices and the pure theory of pricing of natural resources, but the level is too low So should we be happy when a lot of those resources perhaps are held by monopolies? Because the monopolist will restrain output, right and that brings us closer To an optimum or not. Yeah, well, I Think it's I I think that's worth exploring If the quantitative magnitudes probably matter, maybe the monopolist monopoly is so strong that he overshoots in terms of internalizing the kind of Pogovian, you know tax that you want to slap on to the to the market price In a competitive environment, so it might be the monopolist is too much of a monopolist, but at least It's worth I think thinking about better than relying on monopoly would be having a government that could estimate what the right in you know, non-priced External cost of the use of the fuel is and then slap that tax on but that's a political impossibility Sure, and governments very often subsidize safe fossil fuels more than they tax them Here's a 19. I think 79 release from Glenn Lowry our larger small firms better at innovation. Why do you think these days? I? Think that that was a nice little paper the QJ e-circ at 1979. I was proud of it I took this problem that guys like Mike Shearer of the Distinguished IO guy at that time or Mort came in or other people had been worried about its market structure and innovation, what's the relationship between the two and I had a nice, you know little stick-figured model where I could Analyze that issue But I never got beyond an industry with identical firms and there were either in of them or in plus one of them and that was my parameterization of Competition more firms more competition. I didn't get it at all into real Industrial organization which would have to do with you know oligopoly and you know a size distribution of firms in the industry and so on and you know I I'm trying to remember What I had to say about the relationship between number of firms and rate of innovation I think the rate of innovation is increasing in the number of firms, but I think that's what I I think that's what I found but It's a long time ago, Tyler When you were researching those papers and writing them, what did you see then as your career trajectory? What did you think what the 72 year old Glenn Lowry would be? I thought This is by the way before Glenn Lowry becomes at all political. I was just an applied theorist I was a student of Bob Solo Peter Diamond MIT in the 1970s. I thought I was just gonna write papers more or less like that For the rest of my academic life, I thought you know getting into a top five journal and getting elected a fellow of the econometric society and Getting grants from the National Science Foundation was the be all an end all of my professional life so I was at Northwestern in my first job in the late 70s and Get this The year that I was hired Roger Meyerson I was also hired in the theory group at Northwestern The next year banked Holmstrom showed up the following year Paul Milgram showed up Leonie at Hurwitz was always around because he and Stan Ryder would were very close buddies that Leo was up at up at Minnesota, but he was always around at conferences and and seminars and stuff like that I was right there at the at the birth of mechanism design and you know information economic and the revolution in theory of auctions and bargaining and stuff like that that was going on in in my midst and I didn't appreciate fully at the time the extraordinary and You know revolutionary character of the developments in economic theory that I was in the midst of I was still You know using my differential calculus and you know just just trying to write down these little silly models And I didn't have deep questions. That's just what I'm trying to get to I didn't laureates in your list of names as you know Yeah, that's what I'm saying Now when you meet promising young economists today in graduate school is your first thought Oh, let the person stay on that path and be the next Roger Meyerson Or do you a bit want to shake them and say well? I want more of you to go the Glenn Lowry way and be public intellectuals or some of the other things you've done What's your gut reaction to that? No, I don't I don't do that. I Want them to get jobs, you know, I want them to have a Successful launch So I want to get them focused on a question and writing And now I must say I'm not advising very many graduate students these days and haven't for some years now But I want to get them focused on producing a dissertation that's marketable So I want them to ask a good question And I want them to use rigorous methods appropriate to the you know high standards that we have But these days my kind of applied theory life that I took up more or less successfully in the decade after I left graduate school is passe everybody is Celebrating and estimating and they're looking for them a natural experiment or a quasi natural experiment or whatever it is and they they're they're doing The kind of empirical work that you're you can do now with the computing power that we have in the data Availability and what not the profession is completely different So I wouldn't advise a young graduate student to follow in the path of writing papers like the papers that I wrote because a they're not going to get in the AER And and be this does the you know, you want to get a job. I mean, you know, you you want to be able to sell yourself But I I confess to being a little bit alienated from from the profession these last Years, especially as my public intellectual profile has has risen I don't spend that much time worrying about what to tell graduate students. I don't teach graduate students I used to teach microeconomic theory To our first year phd students But two years ago. I stepped aside from that We have like eight theorists in our department and the younger Full professors weren't able to get at the graduate students in the first year, you know, there's there eight of us And there's only those two courses. So, you know, I thought it was time for me to make room for some other people To teach theory to our graduate students. So I'm not doing very much Interacting with graduate students these days What's your favorite thomas shelling story? Okay This is a story about me as much as it is about thomas shelling the year is 1984 I've been at harvard for two years. I'm appointed a professor of economics and of afro-american studies And i'm having a crisis of confidence thinking i'm never going to write another paper worth reading again Tom is a friend. He helped to recruit me because he was on the committee that henry rasovsky the Famous and powerful dean of the college of the faculty of arts and sciences at harvard who hired me The committee that uh rasovsky put together to try to find someone who could feel the position that I was hired into professor of economics And of afro-american studies. They said afro-american in those years. So tom was my connection He's the guy who called me up when I was sitting at michigan in an arbor in this early 82 and said, you know, do you think you might be interested in a job out here So he had helped to recruit me. So I had this crisis of confidence. Am I ever going to write another paper? I'm never going to write another paper. So I'm telling I'm saying this to tom And he's sitting sober listening nodding And suddenly starts laughing And he can't stop and the laughing becomes uncontrollable and I am completely Flummoxed by this. What the hell is he laughing at? What's so funny? I just told him something. I wouldn't even tell my wife Which is I was afraid I was a failure that I that it was an imposter syndrome situation that I could never measure up Everybody in the faculty meeting at harvard's economics department in 1982 was famous everybody You know, and I was six years out of graduate school and I didn't know if I could fit in He's laughing and I couldn't get in after a while. He gains he regains his composure And he says You think you're the only one This place is full of neurotics hiding behind their secretaries and their 10 foot oak doors Fearing the dreaded question. What have you done for me lately? Why don't you just put your head down and do your work? Believe me, everything will be okay. That was tom shelly He was great. I still miss him. I have a few questions about america for you Where's the best place to raise a family in the united states today? Oh gosh I mean, it's gonna sound like a cliche I'm gonna say something like a small town in ohio or missura or someplace like that Where there's a presbytery and church or a lutheran church on the corner Where it's suffocating in the sense that everybody knows everybody else's business, but people are you know schools are halfway decent You can let your kids play until the sun goes down without worrying about their well-being And you can leave your back door unlocked if you dare But that's corny doesn't that sound corny to you? Yeah, but corny's good What about providence rote island right? That's that's where brown is. What do you think? Uh, you know, I was passed the kid bearing age by the time I got here in 2005 but um, I see my younger colleagues and If you can get past the problem that the public schools are are challenged and you know, you you have to work really really hard To find a school and a program and a community that you could be confident sending your kids to and so a lot of My colleagues send their children to private schools and you know, it's costing them 50 000 a year per kid or whatever it costs Which ain't nothing If you can get past that problem providence is not it's not so bad I live on the east side of providence and Brown University sits up on a hill You go down the hill across the river into the flatlands And that's where the quote-unquote real city of providence is and it's a working class town It's doing better than it had been doing 30 years ago. I I think it's you know, the restaurants are good The economic climate here seems to be healthy There are challenges, but up here on the east side. It's a bedroom community of middle upper middle class mostly single family housing on Decent size lots. It's quiet. There's crime in providence. There's not so much crime on the east side So it's not it's not a bad place and I like the smaller town Providence is maybe 200 thousand Relative to I lived in Boston for many years. I was born in Chicago There are no traffic jams to speak of around here in providence when I wanted to vote Uh and had to go to city hall in order to cast my ballot um I could park my vehicle Across the street from city hall and walk in cast my ballot walk back back out again Things like that. I'd like this myself personally the the smallest scale of This town that I'm living in Why do undergraduates today seem to have Worse mental health issues than they did say 20 years ago You're asking the wrong guy, but I'll I'll venture you teach them, right? I do teach them and they're under enormous stress You must have noticed that from what right levels of wealth are higher If they're going to brown their future while not assured is certainly not looking bad. What what's really going on here? Uh, okay, I again I confess ignorance, but I'll nevertheless plunge ahead Uh They all want to uh, you know get the brass ring Uh, I agree with you that the prospects for there are my rosy all things considered But not everybody is going to get in the stanford law school or Yale law school um, or the chicago business school Or get hired uh as a young uh associate at one of the investment banks or something They're fiercely competitive. The great grubbing is mind boggling um, and uh, they they seem to be driven by this uh idea that they have to be Uh that each and every one of them has to be in the top 10 percent when only 10 percent of them are going to be so You know that's part of it, but you you're asking the wrong guy You need a culture a culture critic to respond to a question. You are a culture critic Glenn These people for so long now. Is it different for the black students? At top schools such as brown Similar set of mental health problems or quite a different situation. What do you think? Uh, I think it's a different situation. Uh, I won't qualify my response any further by saying I don't know what I'm talking about. Let's just stipulate that I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm going to talk anyway uh I think They they are Uh for the black students the kinds of pressures that I mentioned which might be moderately ameliorated by the fact that Affirmative action both in post-graduate admissions programs and in employment Gives them a leg up a black kid with a decent portfolio coming out of brown probably is in a relatively advantage competitive position for the next step but uh They're you know, they they are they're Black kids and they're in a depending on the background now. They make you feel exactly perfectly comfortable in an elite environment if they come from uh, the increasingly large number of prosperous black families who are sending their children off to places like brown Uh, but I've known many kids of color as they say Uh, who didn't have those advantages and nevertheless find themselves because they're crack-a-jack smart and uh, they they got discovered here or there and channeled into the funneling mechanism that leads to them getting admitted to brown who didn't feel all that comfortable socially uh in uh in this uh in this environment, which is uh pretty uh high pressured and and high You know, it's pretty elite self-consciously elite almost smugly. So um But you know, I'm I'm in my 70s and the kids don't come and cry on my shoulder. They so I I don't know what's keeping them up at night Moving somewhat away from the elite fentanyl as the driver of a high death rate in the united states How's that one going to end? Do we just cycle through where all the people who can get addicted Become addicted and a lot of them die and then it burns out after a generation. Is there something we can do? Will it continue to spread to blacks and not just say whites in the midwest? What's what's the equilibrium? That's a good question. Uh, it could be very bad Uh, it could be that we're not at the beginning of the end that we're just kind of at the end of the beginning with it I hadn't even thought about the contagion a social uh Contagion uh aspects of the question. I thought I was thinking mostly about enforcement issues Can you keep it from coming across the border? treatment issues, what do you do with people who are uh, who are susceptible to the addiction and who are will find themselves in trouble about Well, there's some accountability for the opiate epidemic problem with the pharmaceutical companies and so on that's the kind of thing that I was thinking about but breaking through to other Ask uh elements of the population and you're right. It's not yet as far as I know anything like the crack crack epidemic of the of the 80s and uh early 90s was for urban uh black america uh, but heroin is not uh an unknown uh, you know drug of choice in those precincts and I I gather they're They're highly substitutable. So again, I'm going to confess ignorance, uh, but I'm worried You've got me worried now In your life when you stopped taking drugs Did you feel you had lost anything positive or was it just pure gain? Like that was just a terrible thing and once I could stop I was just flat out better off Or is there some kind of fun that you actually lose? You know, that's a good question. Uh, I'm actually at the uh end stage is now finalizing my my draft of my memoir manuscript That I'll be submitting to the publisher in a few weeks literally This is actually going to happen anybody who's followed me knows I've been talking about writing a memoir for almost a decade and You know, people were saying, where's the book? Where's the book? Well, the book is going to happen And in it I tell the story of being addicted to uh, free-basing cocaine crack cocaine in the late 80s And I went into treatment and I went to a halfway house and I went and I fought in an Alcoholics Anonymous narcotics anonymous to support in my lovely wife the late Economist Linda Lowry Thank god for her for the church that community that took me in and so on and I kicked it But I thought I was missing something I I thought that there was a kind of Fun you call it a kind of excitement a kind of Sensation of you know euphoria and so Having gone two years sober I took myself back to one of my uh Places where I would cop. I bought a little cocaine I prepared it and I smoked it And the feelings of euphoria came back just as I had it remembered them But also with them came a sense of shame I mean there was no doubt that I was experiencing A titillation a euphoric sensation. There was quote-unquote happiness there But having gone through as it were the valley of the shadow of death and having emerged from it to the arms of a Loving wife who stuck with me and a young family that was coming along my sons Glenn and uh neomaya Who are in their 30s now having done all of that? I realized I asked myself is this What you were willing to risk everything for? And I realized that the obsession there was no doubt about the euphoria of the euphoria was certainly certainly there But my obsessive pursuit of it, which had nearly destroyed me Uh was a way of living that was just undignified and uh contentious Uh, and so I I put the pipe down after a couple of hits Packaged everything up threw it in the trash and never touched cocaine again So I was wondering about your question about what was I missing? Uh, and I decided having done this thing this unforgivable thing from the alcoholics anonymous point of view It was unforgivable what I did Uh, but I just had to find out Now this process of writing your memoir obviously you had already lived those years But to write them up put them together edit them rewrite What's the main thing you learned about yourself? Uh Okay, so one of the motifs in the book is to distinguish between the cover story and the real story because there's so many junctures in my life where Living my life and thinking back on it unreflectively just thinking back on it I embrace the cover story. Oh, I did that because and I it's always self-aggrandizing. It's always Not as craven. Not as callow. Not not as vicious Uh, not as uh obsessively monomaniacally narcissistic as it actually was I never remember it the way it actually was so what I've done in uh Producing this book and reliving these critical junctures, you know, for example, for example I really did lose my alert my nerve when I got to harvard in the early 1980s. I didn't do what tom shelling Advised me to do with just putting my head down and write my little papers about natural resources or Imperfect competition or imperfect information or whatever. I didn't do that I I jumped ship. I I left economic theory behind entirely and I became a Reagan conservative political pundit black guy I was pretty good at it and I would say in retrospect I was more often right than wrong in some of the political positions that I took this will come as A upsetting remark to some people who know and love me But I I think conservatives have the better of those arguments in those years But be that as it may the real reason I'm just giving an example You asked me what have I learned about myself and I've learned that my capacity for self delusion Is almost unbounded and it's a very dangerous thing too Because I had persuaded myself that the economics department was cold At harvard in the early 80s and the end, you know, I didn't have any buddies except for tom I had persuaded myself that Harvard Saddled me with these dual responsibilities and afro-american studies and in economics And almost impossible, you know, you keep you're going to be a humanist and you're going to be a theoretical social scientist at the same time It's almost impossible for anybody to do let alone a 34 year old guy who's you know barely got his legs under him I had persuaded myself of everything other than the real story And and the real story was that I choked I blinked I lost my nerve. I was afraid of failure I found something else that I could do That would generate a claim I went from the economics department to the kennedy school They were very happy to have me at the kennedy school of government. It's a wonderful place a wonderful place It's just not a place if you're a serious economic theorist that you would want to spend most of your time uh, and and uh, it was just too easy for me to do Now I could blame affirmative action. I could blame the larger political environment and whatnot, but I know Within myself I was afraid of failing every time I opened up econometrica and I saw another Paper from Roger Myerson or paul milgram. I was asking myself would I ever write a paper like that and I and I had it out Here if I go over to the kennedy school and become a pundit. No one's ever going to ask me to write a paper like that I learned that about myself through forcing myself to Be honest in retrospect about what was really going on with me and there are many other stories like that I won't Try to recount them all because I want to say something for the book I have a few questions about race for you. Do you have any interest in that topic? Let's take the the part of the white right wing that really likes you And I know there's different phases in your thought, but overall they really like you What's the main pointer insight they are missing when it comes to race that you would like them to know, but they don't Thanks for asking that question. I think I have an answer those people Who are languishing in the ghettos? the housing projects uh the lockups The emergency rooms of the hospital wards The ones who are doing the carjackings the ones who are doing the crazy shit that you see when you turn on your television And you look at what's going on in Chicago or Baltimore st. Louis or Philadelphia those people Are us There are people Those are americans They are us. That's us. It's not them That's what I'd like them to understand that I don't think that they my right wing You know acolytes I I don't think many Of them get that I think they think this is an alien imposition upon an otherwise more or less pristine Euro-american canvas they think their shithole pockets of america that they need to protect themselves from and True enough they do sometimes need to protect themselves But those are our people over there. That's our failure. This is an american story Not a black american story And why doesn't that lesson get through is it that it's not articulated well enough the people are closed minded Racism or what's what's your account of why that remains insufficiently known? Uh, maybe human nature. Maybe it's very easy us and them. I mean I could by the way flip the script on that and say to the radical black activists who are Demanding black lives matter justice that the working class of You know struggling uh White truck driver, you know gas station attendant Guy that's working or a woman that's working Who's attracted to the populist rhetoric and who might want to vote for trump? But those are people too. They're people not so differently from ourselves that they have a story Everybody has a story Uh, that a little bit of generosity would go a long way I could say that to black activists and they would have a hard time hearing it it may be that empathy And a kind of suspension of disbelief a kind of interrogation of your gut visceral instate to react with a at hominem and react with a With a categorical dismissal and with a stereotype It may be that the impulse to resist the ability to resist that impulse is difficult for anybody to come by um, I would also say that uh, and you know I speculate here a little bit, but you're not going to let me stop speculating That uh, the political interest of of various actors who have to marshal majorities at the electorate And who have to develop narratives that get the juices flowing in one way or another for their supporters Militates against that kind of more moderate and self if facing and humble posture I'm not the christian that I used to be when I was coming out of drug addiction. I was you know more much more observant and fervent, but uh, it seems to me that in that in the teachings Uh, that I can recall from my encounters with christianity about about humility about walking Thinking doing and acting as christ would do as he would have us do Uh, that there's just a lot there and um, I I you know, I think that it's uh Not as it's it's a lot easier to talk to talk than it is to walk to walk on that Which aspects of the u.s black experience do you wish that you knew more about? By the way, let me just comment. I like your technique I like your your podcast interview technique. I may well emulate it All I need is a list of 20. All I need is a list of 20 questions. We could talk off forever uh I have this ongoing conversation with my friend john mcwater. Um at the glenshow Where we talk about omar omar is a type. He's just a you know stand-in representation of uh dysfunctional Probably on the wrong side of the line in terms of law enforcement bragging about having Babies by three different women Can't keep a job dropped out of school Uh, etc a problematic kid in the ghetto And john says Omar makes me sad And omar makes you mad. He says he says this to me. This is one of our things. How do we react to the fact of? this dysfunction That is so prevalent in low-income black communities That creates such problems for others who share those communities with them and for society more broadly That redounds to the discredit Of uh of african-american society. You can't be proud of a quote thug closed quote. Can you? Uh our reaction to this dysfunction He makes me mad I don't understand him Uh, I don't understand how you Take a pistol Fire it out the window of a vehicle in a residential area Where you know people are sitting on the front porches and you have no idea where that bullet is going to land And then crow about it. I I don't understand um I don't know what those frustrations are Uh, I don't I don't know the story. I don't know omar's story. Not really I I know stereotypes about the story Cartoon representations of the story Uh, is he angry? Is he uh disconsolate? Uh, does he have hope? What does he believe in? Uh, and I'm saying he and I'm saying omar, but of course it doesn't just apply to the guys Uh, I don't really know. I don't really know what's going on and when I meet people social workers cops uh nurses uh Religious people who are working on the ground in these communities They they're trying to tell me a little bit about what life is like and So on and you know I I wish I knew more about it I wish I could have more factually grounded empathy For the people who I am so quick to castigate For creating the problems But whose genuine life stories I don't know so much about and I I wish that the uh creative arts and and the journalistic practice Would would get grittier Wouldn't be so much in the service of uh a quote-a-quote progressive political program But would just tell me what's going on with Uh, I want to go inside those housing projects and find out what people are actually saying to each other and doing to each other Uh, and how they feel about it and I don't trust the Reportage that I get because it's all too Tendentious and in the service of making sure that Donald Trump doesn't get any more votes than he might otherwise get Or that the black lives matter comes out looking Uh, smelling like roses. I want to know the real story uh, which I If I flatter myself with this forgive me think would allow me to be less mad And more sad when I encounter the mischief that Omar is creating throughout the country Now we've had John McWhorter on this show and I know you and he have had many many dialogues If you had to boil down the differences between you and him and your views To the smallest most abstract number of dimensions possible To what would you attribute those differences like what's the key difference and where does it come from? He cares What his colleagues at the new york times think about him? And I stopped giving a damn about that a long time ago And before he wrote for the times that's pretty recent, right? Yeah, the times is just the last year or two But I mean he he lives there in new york. He goes to the cocktail parties and stuff. I mean I I'll give an example. I don't think I'd betray his confidence in saying this. I cannot get john to discuss The transgender debate In our conversation I'm not asking him to agree or disagree with anything. I just want to take up the question He refuses to do so god love him And he says there's no, you know, it's a it's a complete Losing that I mean, you know All that is going to happen is if I say what I actually think a ton of bricks is going to follow on me And so I won't I won't talk about it Who is your strongest critic on race? The best critic of you Uh, okay, you got to think I'm dodging your question my wife lawan lawry It's not a dodge at all. It's probably an excellent answer not that I know but it makes sense to me I think it's correct. Frankly Every time I go into one of my rants at the glint show and I start You know complaining about whatever affirmative action or the defund the police movement or critical race theory or whatever She will say that You know She'll say something like The real structural issues here have to do with of economics They have to do with a decent social provision. They have to do with corporations getting away without paying any taxes They have to do with inequality They have to do with the defects of capitalism to which you are seemingly uh indifferent or unwilling to acknowledge And all of this culture war stuff that you engage in this is my wife talking to me about complaining about critical race theory or whatever Is just a dodge It's a it's a smoke screen from confronting the underlying power dynamics That generate and sustain inequality and privilege and disadvantage and whatnot in the society And that's what I want you to talk about. I want you to talk about why people can't pay the rent About why the wage is so low about why they can't get decent health care Uh And about why the fat cats get away on wall street and everywhere else with You know, practically they get away with murder. They you know, and no one ever holds them to account. You're an economist Why aren't you developing and uh expositing critical theories that address yourself to the real foundation Of disparities of power influence and success in our society instead of shooting fish in a barrel I paraphrase but this is pretty much her argument She she doesn't really disagree with me About a lot of this stuff. It's just that she thinks It's the wrong target But is she right? That's the last chapter of the memoir In your own evolution of your views on religion Am I correct in thinking you've moved from a christian evangelical to some kind of agnostic or how would you describe it? Yeah, I think that's probably accurate How did that change your views on abortion that evolution? Not at all frankly. I was always one of these people who thought um That uh The the fetus before it's viable outside the womb That's one thing and people might decide to terminate the pregnancy I could have a private conversation with someone about that but that the law shouldn't intervene but that late term that's a human being And uh, you can't just Uh dispose of it for your convenience. I've always thought that I thought that even before I was A christian So which of your views did change the most due to the evolution of your religious opinions? I'd say this is off the top of my head here my willingness to Hold myself to account and accept responsibility for The way in which I was conducting my life Uh, I mean I thought I don't know if you remember the the bonfire Of the vanities the bonfire of the vanities. That was uh tom wolf Uh comic novel from the mid 1980s and he had in there Uh, I can't remember the protagonist's name, but a bond trader guy Who had made a lot of money? and Got himself caught up in a series of unbelievable fiascos that ended up ruining him And the bond trader guy was a master of the universe and I always thought of myself as a master of the universe notwithstanding my A crisis of confidence when I moved to harvard or whatnot. I was a high flyer. I had shaken hands with the President of the united states. I had I had spoken on five continents. I had You know, I was making money and and I was famous Uh, and I and and the world was my oyster and I was accountable to no one Not to the loving woman who was by my side and who I did not respect From the way in which I conducted our marriage for years um Not to the people from whence I had come Off of the south side of chicago who were looking to me for a certain kind of leadership that I was Not interested in providing Uh, I had no real Connections with community. I mean I had these folk communities that I would flit around with But I didn't have real deep personal relationships that went across class lines or racial lines for that matter um I was a performer. I was self-absorbed. I was a narcissist uh, and uh I didn't take responsibility for that and it ended up getting me into the Cult of sec into which I uh ultimately wandered and uh the only way out become religious but moving from religious to agnostic How does that then change your views? Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe I misunderstood the question No No, uh And agnostic is not atheist right and it's a saying that it's there's a kind of mystery there and there's a kind of awe and it's it's a You have a suspension of disbelief, which I certainly indulge when I became religious and there's a kind of suspension of belief I mean, what what am I asked to believe as a christian? I'm asked to believe literally That a man born of a woman Was divine and that on the occasion of his death. He was raised from the dead and he lives on to this day I can't believe that I don't know that I ever actually believed it but but uh There's mystery here and and and I don't know and Uh, I I think the quest for belief is noble Uh, I and I I think the arrogance of a kind of presumption of omniscience on my part. Well, you know, I know that that's just a lot of bunk offends me So An old dear friend of mine was the great sociologist peter berger Uh now dead but for many years a great man Who wrote many books about many things? Uh, including about the sociology of religion and uh, he was lutheran and uh, he became alienated by the lutheran clergy because they were too post-moderny liberal and Relativist and whatnot in his view But he used to go to a greek orthodox church in brookline massachusetts And sit in the back pew and listen to the music and smell the incense and hear the bells and he just immersed himself in that milieu And he wasn't looking for an answer. It wasn't a logical proposition It was it was simply being in the midst of the faithful And I do that sometimes I I don't go to church on a regular basis, but especially in the years after my late wife Linda Lowry passed away in 2011. I found myself sometimes just You know wanting to be in the midst of people Whose belief was firmer than my own? So I don't know if i'm answering you or not, uh, tyler I am not an atheist is what i'm trying to declare and i'm to some degree degree in awe of the The the majesty and the dignity and the humanity Of of these people who are seeking to have a relationship with the creator of the universe What's your favorite novel? uh Okay, it's mario vargas yosa and i've got two One of them is the feast of the goat, which is about truyo's rule in the in santa domingo in the 1950s And the other is the dream of the kelp Which is about roger casement an irish diplomat and humanitarian Who served the british crown in the first decades of the 20th century? exposing terrible humanitarian disasters in the congo where the belgians were doing what they were doing And in the upper amazon Where the spanish were doing what they were doing And he got knighted sir roger casement But he was an irish patriot and he uh and also a closeted homosexual and He uh ends up being executed because he gets caught in a scheme collaborating with the germans in 1915 to try to stage some event that was going to be the occasion for provoking an irish revolt Etc. Etc long story, but it's mario vargas yosa a master Of this kind of historical narrative And I just love both of those both of those novels american pastoral Is another one that I that i'm really very fond philip roth I could go into details, but you know, uh, let's leave it with yosa vargas yosa What's your favorite movie? uh That's a hard question. What is my favorite movie? Uh Chariots of fire why that one? Well, my wife linda and I may she rest in peace She passed away from metastatic breast cancer in 2011. We were married in 1983. We first met in 1974 We were together for 37 years Uh, and that was her favorite movie and I love the movie Uh so You know, you know the story of the movie I I I I It it was an era in hollywood of movie making that I I don't think it will ever see again I don't know if we're ever going to see it again Uh, uh, wonderful characters wonderful human Uh aspiration competition excellence the pursuit of excellent dignity What's his name herald abrams abraham abrams? The runner, uh, you know jewish guy in the upper class british society He was you know Somebody that I could identify with but they're I like that movie a lot. I also like pope fiction. I mentioned Uh, I I like, uh, oh no, I mentioned jackie brown, but I do like pope fiction Uh, I like the godfather one Uh I was going to report that I just saw a fantastic movie that reminded me of why I like movies This is not my favorite movie. It's the banshees of ini sharing This is a a a movie set in ireland Uh about a friendship that goes rotten and I won't even try to say anything more about it and it's quirky and weird in a certain kind of way and yet it's deep and and um It's unpretentious in a way it it Uh, I like that kind of movie. Maybe I shouldn't and and what is another movie like that kind of movie? They don't make them like that anymore. They don't make movies anymore. They it's all wis bang and What is there in the black visual arts that is especially important or meaningful to you? uh Black visual for me it's Haitian art, of course, but I suspect your answer is different Yeah, I don't know anything about black visual arts to be we we need my late wife linda on the scene every piece that I have in this house of that sort of sculpture or uh sketching or Uh painting is something that I inherited from a previous life when I was the green eyeshade guy uh wearing about my Research and whatnot and and where my wife was a fine researcher in her own right was also uh Had an aesthetic sensibility that she cultivated assiduously And it wouldn't have only been black, but the black visual arts would have come into it. So I I I'm gonna beg off. I don't know anything Very last question Do you think you will do a good job facing death? I sure hope so But I've got my doubts So I've mentioned my wife linda my late wife and and she did pass away um 11 and a half years ago And of course We were together in that room Pretty much Continuously for the last few months And I watched her wither and die. I watched her suffer um and uh Bravely and in a dignified manner and and and without self pity almost almost without self pity um And I asked myself as I was watching this Were I in the same situation knowing that there was no hope? That I'm gonna die that I'm gonna die from this cancer in my liver and in my brain That it's gonna kill me and the question is when and the wind doesn't measure in years and may not even measure in months could I have carried myself With the courage and the dignity that she exhibited it And I've got serious doubts about it um I I think Right now. I I don't know What will happen when this moment comes because it's coming But right now I imagine that I'd be furious Beyond consolation why me? uh That I would be impossible to deal with um Nothing anyone could do solicitous of my needs Would be enough because I'm the one that's going to die That all of this stuff that they tried to teach me when I was becoming a christian about grace and about belief and Uh about acceptance and and and about faith Would be of no consolation whatsoever Nietzsche would be my friend You know not the new testament I imagine And that bitter old dying man Feeling sorry for himself Angry at his fate is not who I want to be in my last days I don't want to be that guy but I fear that that's the guy that I would be And I fear further than that that my stepping away from christianity makes us more likely that that's the guy that I would be And even though I think it's ridiculous to assert that a person lives on after they die The person is the brain and the consciousness Which will go to dust There's no life there. I think that's an absurdity at one level On the other hand it may be that only by embracing some such belief could I manage to Pass away as I must In a manner that is honorable and dignified and and so I don't I don't know I I I am worried for myself as that moment approaches it will come We're all looking forward to your memoir and glenn larry. Thank you very much It's been my pleasure tyler. It's been bracing uh, but but enjoyable