hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm here with Glenn Lowery who needs no introduction Glenn welcome thank you Tyler good to be with you would you like to start with economics or with music why don't we start with music I'm not sure what you have in mind but I'm game let's try some music questions let's say that that your views the Glen Larry
worldview where writ large is a political movement what would the music be for that movement it would be uh Bebop era Jazz late 50s early 60s uh it would be Charles Mingus it would be Miles Davis it would be a young John Coltrane it would be a young McCoy Tyner uh it would be Thelonious Monk it would be in that space and why is that music the correct association with your political movement
oh uh 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 and 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
in 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 highlights Jerry Butler Major Lance the Dells right does any of that become the music of your movement yeah yeah that's that's uh that's in a different register
I'm dancing now rather than sitting back nodding my head to the you know Exquisite improvisational runs I'm dancing to that and and I'm I'm dancing with a girl you know so it's going to be romantic it's going to 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 um 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 uh to to answer that um but 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 just Smokey Robinson um or some of these others but I don't know I mean this is beyond my my uh knowledge I I wanted to credit the organizational and marketing Genius of Barry Gordy at Motown as part of the story uh but it might be that it was too gritty what about the sound of
Philadelphia since we're going back I mean uh there were there were other you know uh uh r b uh studio uh dynamics that were going on uh and they haven't all feared as well uh as Motown has done 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 10
Tarantino film Jackie Brown of course yeah it has a isn't it a tsop soundtrack we'd have to ask GPT right GPT or or Google oh okay okay yeah these days it's GPT uh I'm 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 listened
with something firing in the back of your brain about warning warning but you still listen ing 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 uh Arc of of this celebrity life uh uh it happened that I was in Bogota
Colombia teaching summer school uh when Jackson died and uh our our host took us out to one of these four-hour lunch extravaganzas at a restaurant out in the countryside that it was beef beef and more beef and it just kept coming the weight persons were dressed as Michael Jackson impersonators and there were big screens playing Michael Jackson videos everywhere you looked uh and this
was in Colombia but uh you know such was the force of Michael Jackson's celebrity and and uh genius a musical genius and personality and whatnot I don't know I 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 from the title of the album perhaps I'm gonna I'm gonna acknowledge uh while I do have two daughters they're in their 50s so the time have anything to say yeah I think they're old enough uh but nowadays can you really control what your daughters 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 maybe you should tell you if you don't want them to listen to Prince that they have to listen to Prince that it's a mandatory rite of passage to listen to Prince that might get them to uh not listen do you ever enjoy bluegrass music what's the widest stuff you listen to a lot and really like you know I don't Listen to As Much music
as I used to um and you know I'm I'm partial to to Jazz um a blues uh I work out Monday Wednesday Friday with a trainer who has a small studio uh with a good sound system uh we listen to hip-hop uh 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 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 uh to find it it's just something that comes across my screen so I'm I I'm not very knowledgeable at all about about Bluegrass or about the country uh 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 uh 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 Supply today versus supplying tomorrow so he has to anticipate a return in price terms that's comparable to what he 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 I think it's I I think that's worth exploring uh if the quantitative magnitudes probably matter maybe the monopolist Monopoly is so strong that he
overshoots in terms of internalizing the kind of pagovian you know tax that you want to slap on to the to the market price uh in a competitive environment so it might be the monopolist is too much of a monopolist but at least uh it's worth I think thinking about better than relying on Monopoly would be having a government that could estimate what the right uh and you know non-priced
external costs 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 say fossil fuels more than they tax them now here's a 19 I think 79 release from Glenn Lowry our larger small firms better at Innovation what do you think these days [Laughter] I think that that was a nice little paper the gje circuit 1979 I was proud
of it uh I took this problem that guys like Mike Shearer the uh uh distinguished IO guy at that time or Mort came in or other people had been worried about us Market structure and Innovation what's the relationship between the two and I I had a nice you know little uh stick figure model where I could uh analyze that issue but I never got Beyond an industry with identical firms
and they 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 um and uh you know I I uh I'm trying to remember well 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 uh 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 Lowery
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 going to write papers more or less like that uh uh for the rest of my academic life I thought you know getting into a top five journal uh and getting elected a fellow of the
econometric society and uh getting grants from the National Science Foundation was the be-all and end all of of my professional life so I was at Northwestern in my first job in the late 70s and I get this the year that I was high at Roger Meyerson it was also hired in uh the theory group at Northwestern the next year Bank holmstrom showed up the following year Paul Milgram showed up
Leonid hurwitz was always around because he and Stan writer were were very close buddies Leo was up at uh up at uh 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 and uh the Revolution and theory of auctions and bargaining and uh stuff like that that
was uh going on uh in in my midst and I didn't appreciate fully at the time the extraordinary um and uh you know revolutionary character of the developments and 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
uh I did the 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 Myerson or do you a bit want to shake them and say well I want more of you to go the Glenn lowryway 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 um I I I I want them to get jobs um you know I I want them to have a uh a successful launch uh so I I want to get them focused on the question and writing uh and now I must say I'm not advising very many graduate students these days in heaven 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 uh and I want them to use rigorous methods appropriate to the you know high standards that we have but these days uh my kind of Applied Theory life that uh I took up more or less successfully in the decade after I left graduate school is passe um everybody is uh calibrating and estimating and they're looking for the a
natural experiment or a quasi-natural experiment or whatever it is and they they're they're doing uh the kind of empirical work that you're you can do now with the computing power that we have and the data availability and whatnot the profession is completely different so I 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 uh uh and and B this does the you know uh you want to get a job I mean you know you you want to be able to uh sell yourself but I I confess to being a little bit alienated from from the profession these last uh years especially as my public intellectual profile has has risen um I I don't spend that much time worrying
about what to tell graduate students I don't teach graduate students I I used to teach microeconomic Theory uh to our first year PhD students uh but uh two years ago I stepped aside from that um 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 are eight of us and
there's only those two courses so you know I I thought it was time for me to make room for some other people to teach Theory to our graduate students so I'm I'm not doing very much uh 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 Tom shelling the year is 1980 84. 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 rasovsky put together to try to find someone who could fill 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 Ann Arbor uh and uh this uh early uh 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 am I ever going to write another paper so I'm telling I'm saying this to Tom and he's sitting sober listening nodding and suddenly he 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 was 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 I couldn't get it and 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 Shelley 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 Missouri or someplace like that where there's a Presbyterian 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 uh 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 uh but that's corny doesn't that sound corny to you yeah but corny's good what about Providence Rhode Island right
that's that's where Brown is what do you think uh you know I was past the kid uh bearing age by the time I got here uh 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 it you know it's costing them fifty thousand a year per kid or whatever it costs which ain't nothing uh 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 um there are challenges but up here on the east side it's a bedroom community of middle upper middle class uh mostly
single uh family uh housing on uh decent sized Lots it's quiet there's crime in Providence there's not so much crime on the east side um so uh it's not it's not a bad place and I like the smaller town Providence is maybe 200 000 relative to I lived in Boston for many years I was born in Chicago uh there are no traffic jams to speak of around here uh 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 like those 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 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 I again I confess ignorance but I'll nevertheless plunge a hit uh they all wanted uh you know get the
brass ring uh I agree with you that the prospects for them are Rosie All Things Considered but not everybody is going to get into Stanford law school or Yale Law School um or the Chicago business school or get hired uh as a young 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 that each and every one of them has to be in the top 10 percent when only 10 of them are going to be so uh 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 plan you've taught these people for so long now is it different for black students
at top schools such as brown similar set of mental health problems or quite a different situation what do you think 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 advantaged 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 it 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 uh kids of color as they say uh who didn't have those advantages and nevertheless find themselves because
they're Cracker Jacks smart and they they uh 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 uh in uh in this uh in this environment which is uh pretty uh High pressured and and high in a 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 is 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 social uh contagion uh aspects of the
question I thought I was thinking mostly about enforcement issues can keep it from coming across the border uh treatment issues what do you do with people who are uh who are susceptible to the addiction and who are who find themselves in trouble uh about well there's some accountability uh for the opioid uh epidemic problem uh with uh the uh pharmaceutical uh companies and so on that's the kind of
thing that I was thinking about but breaking through to other uh 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 but heroin is not an unknown uh you know drug of choice in those precincts and I I gather their their 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 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's gonna happen and in it I tell the story of being
addicted to uh freebasing 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 the support of my lovely wife the late uh Economist Linda Lowry uh 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 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 son's Glenn and Nehemiah 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 the Euphoria was certain 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 uh 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 laughs 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 Junctions 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 I it's always self-aggrandizing it's always not as Craven not as callow not not as vicious uh not as uh obsessively mono maniacally 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 my nerve when I got
to Harvard in the early 1980s I didn't do what Tom shelling advised me to do which just put 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 the ship I I left economic theory behind entirely and I became a Reagan conservative uh 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 a upsetting remark to some people who 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 and you know that 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 can 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 uh legs under him uh I 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 to 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 uh now I could blame affirmative action I could blame the larger political environment what not but I know within myself I was afraid of failing every time I opened up econometric 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'd learned that about myself uh 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 I want to save 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 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 point or 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 Awards the ones who are doing the carjackings the ones who are doing the crazy that you see when you turn on your television and you look at what's going on in Chicago or Baltimore or St Louis or Philadelphia those people are us they're our 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 are my right wing um you know acolytes uh 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 take their 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 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 what's your account of why that remains insufficiently known maybe human nature maybe it's very easy
Us in them I mean I could by the way flip the script on that and say to the radical black activists who are ra ra ra demanding black lives matter Justice that the working class uh uh you know struggling uh uh uh white truck driver uh you know gas station attendant uh uh guidance working or woman that's working uh who's uh attracted to the populist rhetoric and who might want to vote for
Trump but there was a 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
instinct to react with a ad hominem and react with a with a categorical dismissal and with a stereotype uh it may be that the impulse to resist the ability to resist that impulse is difficult for anybody to come by um I 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 uh more uh moderate and uh self-effacing and uh humble uh 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 uh walking thinking doing and acting as Christ would do as he would have us do uh that there's just a lot there uh 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 the walk on that which aspects of the U.S black
experienced you wish that you knew more about the way let me just comment I like your Technique I I like your your podcast interview technique I may well emulate it uh all I need is a list of 20. all I need is a list of 20 Questions we could talk about forever uh I have this ongoing conversation with my friend John McWhorter at the Glenn show 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 uh problematic kid in the ghetto and John says Omar makes me sad and Omar makes you mad 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 create 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 close 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 don't understand um I don't know what those frustrations are I 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 uh 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 uh uh religious people who are working
on the ground in these communities they're 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 a quote-unquote progressive political program but 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 um and how they feel about it and I don't trust the re 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 were 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 foreign 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 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 uh in our conversation I'm not asking him to agree or disagree with anything I just want to take up the question uh he refuses to do so God love him uh 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 me and so I won't I won't talk about it who is your strongest critic on race the best critic of you yeah uh okay you're gonna think I'm dodging your question my wife loan Lowry it's not a Dodge at all it's probably an excellent answer not that I know I think it makes sense to me I think it's correct frankly every time I go into one of my rants at the Glenn 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 uh you know she'll say something like the real structural issues here have to do with economics they have to do with a decent social provision they have to do with corporations getting away without paying any taxes have to do with inequality
they have to do with the defects of capitalism to which you are seemingly indifferent or unwilling to acknowledge uh and all 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 um 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 where else with uh you know practically they get away with murder they they you know and no one ever holds
into 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 I paraphrase but this is pretty much her argument she she doesn't really disagree with me about a lot of the stuff it's just that
she thinks yeah 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 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 foreign 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 name but a bomb Trader guy uh who had made a lot of money uh uh and uh 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 I was a high flyer I had shaken hands with the president of the United States I I had spoken on five continents I had you know I was making money and and I was famous uh and I would 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 whom I did not respect from the way in which I conducted our marriage for years um not to the people from Once 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 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 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 cul-de-sac into which I uh ultimately wandered and uh the only way you become religious but moving from religious to agnostic how does that then
change your views oh I'm sorry no no uh and agnostic is not atheists 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 a mystery here and and and I don't know and uh I I think the Quest for belief is Noble uh I 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 uh so an old different than 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 he became alienated by the Lutheran clergy because they were two
post-modernally liberal and relativists 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 Melia 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 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 of people whose belief was firmer than my own so I don't know if I'm answering you or not uh Tyler uh I I am not an atheist is what I'm trying to declare and I'm to
some degree degree in awe uh of the the the the majesty and the dignity um 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 trujillo's rule in the in Santo Domingo in the 1950s and the other is the dream of the celt
which is about Roger casement an Irish uh uh Diplomat and uh humanitarian who served the British crown in the first Decades of the 20th century exposing uh 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 uh he uh ended 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 uh
and I just love both of those both of those novels American pastoral is another one that I that I'm really very fun Phillip Roth uh uh I could go into details but you know uh let's leave it with uh Joseph what's your favorite movie uh [Laughter] uh that's a hard question what is my favorite movie uh 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. uh we've been 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 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 Excellence dignity uh what's his name Harold Abrams Abraham Abrams uh the runner uh you know Jewish guy in uh upper class British Society uh he he was you know somebody that I could identify with but there I like that movie a lot I also like Pulp Fiction uh I mentioned uh I I
like uh oh no I mentioned Jackie Brown but I do like Pulp 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 it's not my favorite movie it's the Banshees of Innis Sharon this is 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 in a way it it uh I like that kind of movie maybe I shouldn't 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 whiz bang and what is there in the black visual art that is especially important or meaningful to you uh
black this 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 we need my wife Linda on the scene every piece that I have in this house of that sort of sculpture or uh sketching or um uh painting is something that I inherited from a previous life when I was the green eye shade guy uh worrying about my research and
whatnot and and where my wife was a fine researcher in her own right was uh also uh had an aesthetic sensibility cult 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 I'm gonna back 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 it wither and die I watched her suffer and bravely and in a in a dignified Manner and and without self-pity almost almost without self-pity um and I would ask myself as I was watching
this where I in the same situation knowing that there was no hope then I'm going to die that I'm going to die from this cancer in my liver and in my brain that it's going to kill me and the question is when and the wind doesn't measure in years it 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 uh would be enough because I'm the one that's gonna 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 nature 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 it's 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 uh belief could I manage to pass away as I must uh in a manner that is Honorable and dignified and and so I don't I don't know I I I I am worried for myself as that moment approaches it will come we're all looking forward to your Memoir and Glenn Lowry thank you very much it's been my pleasure Tyler it's been bracing uh but but enjoyable