Hip-Hop A CIA Psyop | The Truth About Police Brutality | Roland G. Fryer | PBD Podcast | Ep. 388
Patrick Bet-David, Tom Ellsworth, and Vincent Oshana are joined by economic and Harvard University professor Roland Fryer!
Roland Fryer is an American economist and professor at Harvard University. Despite a challenging childhood, he excelled academically, becoming the youngest African American to ever receive tenure at Harvard at the age of 30. Fryer's research focuses on issues of race and inequality, particularly in education and police use of force. He's a recipient of prestigious awards like the MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal.
Check out Roland Fryer's work with Equal Opportunity Ventures: https://bit.ly/49oqNg6
Read Roland Fryer's publications: https://bit.ly/3IYW8eA
00:00 - Show Intro
2:15 - Patrick plays a clip of how he became aware
7:10 - Roland explains what he hopes to accomplish with his research on race and inequality.
9:37 - Did Roland ever receive pity from his colleagues at Harvard?
11:28 - Roland discusses the backlash he received after publishing a study that reports black Americans are no more likely to be shot during encounters with police then white Americans.
19:27 - Roland explains what the results of his study did for his own opinion of the police.
20:23 - The truth Roland's study uncovered and how it threatened others
27:42 - Roland discusses his feud with former Harvard President Claudine Gay who tried to get him fired.
34:05 - Does Roland feel safe publishing studies that counter the establishment's narrative?
38:19 - Was gangster rap a CIA psyop?
45:04 - The history of privatized prisons and the result on incarceration rates.
52:54 - Is affirmative action effective?
1:00:18 - Does DEI actually offer diversity, equity and inclusion?
1:02:29 - Should skin color matter for college admissions?
1:17:43 - The history of systemic racism in the United States.
1:27:35 - Milton Friedman's thoughts on the greed of wealth across the world.
1:32:58 - The benefits of socialism and the left's infatuation with it.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to hate it.
Ideally running, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
All right, so this is a podcast I've been looking forward to doing for a long time.
Dr. Roland Fryer, for some of you guys that don't know who he is, you may have seen a clip that recently went viral.
And when you hear about his background, maybe one of the most interesting stories we have in the entire country today.
So his background, I mean, I heard him say he's 45 years old and the only living member in his family that's left that he's in contact with.
Just a very interesting life.
You know, going from a former gangster, tough life, gets into Harvard, becomes, I believe, the youngest.
After his postdoc, he gets his PhD from economics in Penn State University in 2002.
Then Friars Rise at Harvard was meteoric.
Following a postdoctoral stint at University of Chicago, he joined the Harvard faculty by 2007 at the age of 30, achieved tenure, becoming the second youngest professor ever to do so at Harvard and the youngest African American to earn that distinction.
His research focused on racial and ethnic disparities in economics, particularly in areas like education and police interactions.
And he recently, I don't think this is recently, I think it's 2016 when he did it.
He'll correct me because, you know, you have to see what this study was about.
So he goes to school.
He's at Harvard.
He decides to do a study about systemic racism, about the link with police brutality towards blacks, then others.
And then the results are surprising.
And you'll hear what happened here with that.
We'll get into.
But with that being said, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here.
Yes, this is probably not the typical podcast you get on.
You're more used to, you know, Barry Weiss, more economics, more university professors.
But you'll see why we've been looking forward to having this podcast with you.
Rob, can you start off with the clip?
I want you to watch this first.
So this is him and Barry Weiss.
And now you'll recognize after this who we have on the podcast today.
Go ahead.
And it was in this moment, 2016, that I realized people lose their minds when they don't like the result.
So what my paper showed, you'll see tomorrow, like some of you, was that, yes, we saw some bias in the low-level uses of force every day pushing up against cars and things like that.
People seem to like that result.
But we didn't find any racial bias in police shootings.
Now, that was really surprising to me because I expected to see it.
The little-known fact is I had eight full-time RAs that it took to do this over nearly a year.
When I found this surprising result, I hired eight fresh ones and redid it to make sure they came up with the same exact answer and I thought it was robust.
And then I went to go give it and my God, all hell broke loose.
It was a 104-page dense academic economics paper with 150-page appendix.
Okay?
It was posted for four minutes when I got my first email.
This is full of shit.
Doesn't make any sense.
And I wrote back, how'd you read it that fast?
That's amazing.
You are a genius.
And I had colleagues take me into the side and say, don't publish this.
You'll ruin your career.
I said, what are you talking about?
I said, what's wrong with it?
Do you believe the first part?
Yes.
Do you believe the second part?
Well, it's the issue is they just don't fit together.
We like the first one, but you should publish the second one another time.
I said, let me ask this.
If the second part about the police shootings, this is a literal conversation.
I said to them, if the second part showed bias, do you think I should publish it then?
And they said, yeah, then it would make sense.
And I said, I guarantee you I'll publish it.
We'll see what happens.
So it was, you know, I lived under police protection for about 30 or 40 days.
I had a seven-day-old daughter at the time.
I remember going and shopping for her because, you know, when you have a newborn, you think you have enough diapers, you don't.
So I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with the armed guard.
It was crazy.
It was.
By the way, first time I saw this reaction, you know, to this, it takes a lot of courage and bravery and brass to do this.
Keep in mind, 2009, I think you're one of the top 100 Time magazine.
And at the time, if you're 45 today, you're what, 30 at that time, 30 years old to be on time.
I mean, that's a prestigious place to be.
When you were reporting this, how much did you think about this could potentially affect my career?
Not at all.
I think I was just naive, man.
You call it brave.
Maybe I was just dumb.
But I didn't think about it at all, honestly.
And I have an attitude that if you tell me I can't do something, I'll show you that I can.
And so when people said, oh, you can't publish this, it wasn't coming from a place where they cared about me or cared about the people in the neighborhoods who I've been working for since I got to Harvard.
And so my basic view was, look, the people in the street know the truth.
And we can't keep lying to them, right?
Like, I mean, I said the same different time in that clip you showed.
I say all the time, like, the conversations we're having in academia don't hit the ground in the neighborhoods that I care the most about, right?
Like, if you go to my old neighborhood, and we talked about Louisville before the show, you go to Louisville and call someone BIPOC, they'll punch you in your face, right?
Like, that's not, they don't care about those kinds of things.
And so I've always had the view that if this was your family, you'd tell them the truth, even if it was a hard thing to say.
And you'd find a way to say it with empathy and with love, but you wouldn't lie to them.
And so the idea that you would hide results because you are afraid of what people would say or how they would feel or how it would affect your career, it's just never been about me.
It's about the folks in the neighborhoods we're trying to help.
What are you seeking?
Because, you know, sometimes everybody's seeking something else.
Like for me, you know, I have a certain life that I've lived and I'm trying to get to the bottom of a certain truth for myself that to maybe tie a certain issue in the past, conflicts that I was trying to overcome.
What answer are you trying to get to the bottom of for yourself?
I'm going to put every ounce of effort I have in trying to make sure that kids, black or brown, don't have to endure what I did to get here.
I'm trying to make the journey worth it, right?
So if you had come to me at age, whatever, 15, it's one of the loneliest days of my entire life.
I walked out of the Denton County correctional facility.
I just visited my father in there.
And I remember that conversation because he was bragging about how comfy the slippers were that they gave the people in jail.
Thought that's like the dumbest shit I've ever heard.
I walked out of there and I looked up and I'll never forget it.
It was just one of these beautiful blue Texas guys.
And I've never felt more alone in my life.
I was 15 years old.
Where was I going to go?
There was no one else.
I didn't even know who my mother was at that time.
My grandmother was here in Florida.
And if you had come to me at that time and you'd said, Look, I know things seem pretty impossible now, but these experiences are going to make you impervious to the BS when it comes to race in America.
And you are going to be able to analyze data and maybe make some progress for the next generation of kids.
I'd like to think that I would have taken on that challenge.
But if you'd come to me during that day and said, if you can get through this, we can have Chardonnay at 10.30 at Harvard University to hang out.
We can talk about Plato.
I would have said, no, thanks, man.
Could you just get my dad out of jail?
And so for me, it's, you're right.
I mean, when I first got to Harvard, I felt guilty.
I had to figure out I got to do something, right?
And I feel like the time, I feel like the clock is running out.
So I'm in a big hurry to make a big difference.
Were you in Armenian?
There's a phrase that I couldn't stand.
They would say to us, you know, because of where we were at.
Mechga, mecha, mechka.
Like, oh, poor, poor, poor Patrick, poor Ben Davids.
And I couldn't stand that phrase.
When you went to Harvard, did they treat you like, you know, hey, you know, you came from here and poor you, let us treat you this, or were you treated like anybody else and, you know, the standards and expectation to perform?
And if yes or no, did it do anything to you?
It's interesting.
I don't know if anyone said poor me, but I do believe they looked at me different.
I felt like they looked at me like I was an exception.
Someone had beat the odds.
Someone who was curious.
The New York Times had a profile of my life in 2006 or so.
And I remember, you know, colleagues coming up to me and going, man, you sure you want all that in the newspaper?
Because they talked about my family, you know, dealing drugs and blah, blah, blah.
I wasn't trying to hide anything at that point.
But the idea that I was an exception used to really piss me off.
Yeah.
Because this is not about helping a few of us beat the odds.
That's insulting.
This is about unfettered competition so we can change the odds.
This is about figuring out how we give people real opportunities so that they can do for themselves.
I don't need you to pluck a few of us and pat us on the back.
What we need to do is figure out how do we find hidden talent wherever it lies across the globe.
It's interesting.
So let's go back to the study.
And you've shared a little bit about your background for some folks who don't know.
The study that you did, this specific study in 2016 that we played a clip for earlier, when you're going through this process with this study, were you yourself expecting those numbers?
Or were you yourself surprised as hell when you saw it?
And then how did that change your perception and opinion of things?
No one was more surprised than me, right?
Like I'm not proud of it, but I don't really like the police that much.
If I'm going to the airport after this, if they pull me over, I'm going to be nervous, man.
It's not, I think a lot of us would be.
So I figured this was going to be the easiest thing in the world, right?
People were out protesting and stuff like that after Michael Brown.
But flying to St. Louis and locking arms was just not my thing.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be done.
It's just not my thing.
So I thought, here's what I'll do to help.
I will figure out empirically what's really going on because we had only seen a few videos at that point.
And I remember going to a colleague of mine and saying, here, I'm going to study the police, and here's an idea.
And what he quickly told me was, you don't understand anything about the police.
So how are you going to be going to figure out what's going on with race and policing in America?
So I embedded myself in police departments.
We can talk about that if you want at some point.
But I was extremely surprised.
I was sure that there was going to be bias in police shootings.
As the clip said, when I got the results back, I hired new research assistants to do it over again just to make sure.
But once you have the results, once you have what you think is the truth given your data, there's no other choice but to go out with it and try to educate people on what the data actually says.
And what is the data?
If you can just actually give us the data, what was in the data?
What we found was that on lower level uses of force, so when it comes to pushing someone up against a car, pulling a gun, putting handcuffs on them, but not arresting them, things like that, there were large racial differences in police use of force.
So black civilians are 50% more likely to have force used on them in any given interaction.
Even when the police say they're perfectly compliant and they're not arrested and there's no contraband, et cetera, they're still more than 20% more likely than white civilians to have force used on them.
But when it came to lethal use of force, shootings, we found absolutely no racial bias in that in any way, shape, or form.
And our data, I believe, is a lot better than what has been discussed in the popular press because they're looking at kind of statistical snapshots.
They're saying, well, the fraction of black people who are shot by the police is 50% and they're only 13% of the population.
Ergo, it must be discrimination.
Sorry, I don't know if they forgot statistics 101.
That's not how it works.
What we did was say, look, here is two people are in a situation with police.
Their behavior is the same.
The other conditions on the ground are the same.
The police decides to shoot one and not the other.
Is race a factor?
In other words, accounting for everything else about that situation, does race predict whether or not a police officer will pull the trigger?
And the answer emphatically is no.
And that is the result that caused panic in a lot of people.
Most people like the first result.
What did it do to you?
What did it do to you?
I mean, because there's certain, you're seeking the truth, because that's what you keep saying with Barry Weiss, right?
I'm trying to get to a truth.
And I love what you said.
And you said it again earlier today.
You said in one of the documentaries I watched, I think it was like 26, 27 minutes where it says, I'm not trying to beat the odds because one guy, what does it feel like, Roland, that you beat the odds?
You're like, I'm not trying to beat the odds.
I'm trying to change the odds, right?
But individually, we're also going through a journey.
There's a difference between saying, guys, look what I found.
You will not believe this report.
Look at what I found.
But what am I going through?
What are you going through with the life that you live?
At that time, I was not aware of what was going to come.
So when we had the results, we pursued two tracks.
One, you obviously publish it and we published it on a top economics journal.
Great.
Seven people read it.
Maybe six.
The second path is we wanted a more popular version of the article.
So the New York Times wrote about it.
And for me personally, when people respond, you know, people send me an email and say, hey, your paper is crap.
Or hey, your paper's great.
I do all I can to return every single one of those.
And so for me, I sat for days and returned thousands and thousands of emails from regular old Americans in Kansas and in Idaho and in Chicago who said, I don't know if I believe this or not, but thank goodness there's actually data and we can actually have a debate about it.
And we went back and forth.
And that's kind of what I do for a living, right?
I'm a professor.
I'm supposed to be teaching, not just in the classroom.
But if you release a paper like this, this is what you do.
So what happened to me?
I got a chance to teach.
And if you remember that time, I didn't do any other press.
This wasn't about me out there thumping my chest trying to be on whatever news channel saying, hey, look what I found.
We put it out there.
And then I, over email and other means, tried to communicate directly with people about what the results were about.
But what I'm asking is, what did it do to you?
So because life, okay, I grew up in Iran and I see 10,000 men marching, flagellating their backs, screaming mad, bad ombre called death upon America.
America must be an evil empire.
Then I watch Rocky IV and Rocky and Drago are fighting.
Drago, Drago, Drago.
And then Rocky, Rocky.
And if you can change, he can change.
Anybody can change.
I'm like, man, maybe we can bring Soviet Union and us and unify and realize we have a lot in common, right?
And I'm like, wait a minute.
But that's a movie.
That's fake.
This is real.
America must be evil.
Then you go to Germany, live at a refugee camp.
Parents get a divorce.
Mom says, because that entire family were communist, their Bible was Karl Marx Communist Manifesto.
Rich people are greedy.
Dad, on the other side, as an imperialist, they believe poor people are lazy.
And then I get into the military.
I get out again to sales.
And then I see the person that bitches the most, work the least, the guy, I'm like, wait a minute, what's going on?
And it changed my opinion about economy, about work, about politics, about capitalism, about who to vote for, about who not to vote for, about who's manipulating, about who wanted to use me, about who wanted to keep me poor, about who wanted to kind of make sure I didn't figure out the secrets to life that I can go out there and figure myself out about how they use fear to control, to keep your mouth shut.
All of these things that I'm going through as a kid, right?
And I'm like my 20s.
And I'm like, oh, wait a minute.
This doesn't make any sense.
What did you go through one-on-one, not anybody else?
Did it change anything away from what you witnessed in your life to go back and say, man, I remember Bobby back in high school.
Unfortunately, they sold him.
He bought it.
He's dead now.
He was smarter than me in math.
If he knew what I knew, he could have been, that sucks.
So it's really the social economic.
It wasn't a skin color, but he was convinced it was a skin color.
Why do we buy?
Did you go through that evolution yourself?
Yeah, of course, of course.
On a couple dimensions.
One, I was disappointed in social scientists.
I didn't realize there was so much politics in academia until that point.
I really thought that we were out there, all of us, searching for the truth.
I mean, we sit in these seminars and we beat the crap out of each other's ideas and papers, and it's all about trying to get to a place of what's correct and what's not.
And to see people who I respected for years lose their way because there was a result they didn't like, it was very shocking to me.
Could I ask a question, Roland?
So you do this research, you have a fact-check, double-check, and the truth is there.
Why do you think that truth is such a threat to your colleagues, to the powers that be going up the ladder to Harvard, to just the powers that be?
It's such a threat.
Why do you think that is?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I don't think the results themselves were a threat to them.
I think they wanted to be on the right side of a particular issue.
I never thought of people as sheep until that moment.
Oh, wow.
You know, it's crazy you say that.
My entire life growing up, I don't have a four-year.
I don't have a two-year.
I don't even have an associate's at a 1.8 GPN high school.
I was a math guy.
I love calculus.
Love math analysis.
I can do math all day long.
Had no interest for anything else.
Trouble teenage, you know, kids got divorced, all this stuff.
So my route was, I'm going to go to the Army.
He went to the Air Force.
He was the airman of the year in the Air Force.
So we're military.
tom's dad was a rocket scientist literally was a rocket scientist i'm not saying this as a so tom went he became a professor adjunct professor at pepperdine at biola He's probably had $2 billion of exits and raising money.
So he goes to Silicon Valley.
So when Steve Jobs and Bill Gates do that interview, that 300 people worldwide are invited to be there.
He's one of them.
That's Tom.
Tom's background is that.
So Tom is academia, more coming from this side.
But a part of it, I remember when I went to Harvard and for their OPM program, owner-president management program.
You have to do $10 million a year to be able to go there.
And I qualify.
So I'm like, Tom, Tom's like, Pat, just go.
I'm like, Tom, we're running a company.
He's like, Pat, I'm telling you, go.
We got the company.
Tom, I hired Tom to be the president of our company at the time.
So I go for three weeks.
Now, let me tell you what time it is when I go there.
I go during the debate between Hillary Clinton and Trump.
Oh, wow.
And I go to this Chow Hall.
I thought Chow Hall, like, you know, military.
But this is a different Chow Hall.
It's C-H-A-O.
It's an Asian man that gave $100 million to Harvard Chow Hall.
It's named after him.
Mr. Chow.
Okay.
Chow Hall.
So I go to Chow Hall.
There's 300 people from Harvard watching this debate.
And I'm thinking, Jellywood, Vinny, seriously, do it fast.
You're doing it slow, we can't hear it.
So I'm at this Chow Hall place, and I'm hearing these guys.
And I sit in the sideline say nothing.
And it's the line, because you'd be in jail, right?
Aren't we glad that a man like this isn't in the White House making the decisions and having control of whatever she says because you'd be in jail, right?
And boo!
I'm like, it has to be 50-50.
Now, like, I'm going to see 300 people in our room.
It's got to be 60-40.
I'm like, Trump just said something.
The Trump people should root for him.
Nothing.
So this kept going for the two-hour debate.
Not one, 300 people are in Chow Hall.
Not one person got up.
The OPM program is a three-year program.
I'm supposed to go every year for three weeks.
I go to my main person.
I said, are you guys 100%?
Do you believe in debate?
Of course we do.
Is this a place where you guys entertain opposing ideas?
Of course we do.
Can I ask why 100%?
So what do you think about Trump?
He says, oh, He's a bad would be a terrible president.
I said, Why is it 100% of you all agree that Trump's a bad person?
Why is that?
I thought you guys were about debate.
I said, I can't come back to the school.
Never went back.
I couldn't go back.
The reason wasn't, I enjoyed debate.
I want to sit down with Stephen A. Smith and I were talking two days ago.
Let's sit down and have a great conversation together.
I love it.
Yesterday I had a friendly debate with the lawyer for John Barnett, who is the lawyer for the Boeing whistleblower on, hey, he committed suicide.
Some of the stuff just doesn't add up.
Company lost $50 billion on valuation.
No, he just loved Boeing.
It was nothing bad.
Like, I don't know.
I got some questions.
I'm curious, right?
Let's have the banter.
But when I saw that, I said, this is not a university.
They're full of shit.
Now, this is my opinion.
You don't have to have that position.
This is my position.
Why?
And then COVID takes place, and then you saw how extreme they got.
And they say they're against for education.
And then parents asked and said, Hey, I know I'm spending this kind of money for my kids to come and stay in campus.
Now you don't want them to be on campus.
You want them to come from home.
Can we get some savings?
Nope.
Harvard degree is worth the whole price.
You got $60 billion in endowment.
So all of these things made me go from, you're from Harvard?
Oh my God.
How are you, Dr. Roland G. Fryer?
You're from Oxford.
You're from this.
You're from that.
To yeah, you know what?
I don't know if you guys believe in debate.
That's where my mind went to because what I witnessed on Harvard campus for those three weeks.
I could be wrong.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, I think it really depends on the individual faculty members involved.
It really does.
I mean, you know, I ask myself all the time, who is Harvard?
What does that even mean?
Right.
And if you were to come to my class, for example, I teach an undergraduate class that talks about issues like how much discrimination there is in the world, whether or not what education policy should we have.
What do we know empirically about the effects of slavery on current outcomes?
And you have fierce debate in that class.
And I think you'd be proud of what the students are doing in terms of different viewpoint diversity.
If you go to other places on campus, it might be different.
I don't know.
So it's a big place.
But it doesn't surprise me what you've described.
Rob, can you pull up what I just texted you?
I just literally Googled this right now because you know how you can go and find out and say the article came out saying what percentage of Twitter executives and employees donate to the left or the right.
And then it was like 99%.
I'm like, what?
And then have you ever seen this chart?
Or no.
Rob, can you pull up that chart?
Because that's public.
It's not hard to kind of find.
It's all over Twitter.
And we have it.
And then I said, okay, let me go a little bit further.
This is different.
This is just, let me go show to the top.
Harvard corporation members donated heavily to Democrats ahead of the 2022 midterms.
Look how much of it is red.
You got the Pritzker family, heavy duty.
You got the Wells.
There's zero red.
There's zero bipartisan.
The only person that is is Paul Finnegan and slightly red, all blue.
This is pretty much 95% is all blue.
So now, does it mean blue is right and red is wrong?
Does it mean conservative policies and living a conservative life fiscally is a bad thing?
Does it mean maybe if I go to Harvard, I come out, I have to be a liberal if I come out of Harvard.
Because if all these smart people at these places, God forbid, if I'm a conservative at a place like that, I may get ousted.
You know, and I know you have a very, very good relationship with Claudine Gay.
I know you guys are best friends.
Barbecuing, hanging out.
You know, you were having breakfast with her this morning.
It was great.
So you hear a Claudine Gay, and you come out and you report this win in 2016, 2017.
I just, I Googled literally right now to see your article about, you know, New York Times, star economist, you know, writes this article, and that was in 2017, okay, whatever it was, right?
And then they're telling you what you're doing.
The next one comes out.
Star economists at Harvard faces sexual harassment complaints.
And I went through your tweets.
There was nothing about your tweets that was sexual.
They were actually funny.
You're like, maybe if I didn't spend so much time studying stuff, maybe I'd be better in sex.
I'd love to go to France.
I actually looked at your tweets.
Text.
Not your text.
I'm like, yeah, I mean, we all probably talk like that every once in a while, right?
So then they come after you.
Then Claudine Gay behind closed doors is trying to talk to Silari Bobo.
I don't know who it was, trying to get you to lose your tenure.
This is pre-Her being president.
And do you kind of sit there and say, dude, are we not protected?
Am I not, are you guys not trying to target me?
Did that thought at all cross your mind that this school doesn't like some of the positions?
And Claudine Gay, maybe the average person on the left would say Claudine Gay should probably defend you, right?
If you're really about, he should be on my side, right?
When you were going through that, and obviously I'm not telling the whole story, but when you were going through that, how are you processing all that?
It was hard to process it.
And what I focused on was what I could do better, really, right?
Like I don't, when anything happens in life, you have a choice.
You can either look in the mirror or you can look out the window.
And the first thing I do is look in the mirror.
And you're right.
It's debatable whether or not telling jokes is worth that kind of penalty.
maybe I shouldn't have told them, right?
And so Do you really believe that though?
Do you really believe that?
Yeah, the first thing I did was I went to executive coaching because I didn't understand.
I know it may be hard for some people to think, well, you're a Harvard professor.
You must know better.
We talked about how I got to be a Harvard professor.
And nowhere in that journey was management training.
Nowhere in that journey was, hey, you know, I am very, very casual.
So when I think we're friends, we're friends.
And so I feel like we can talk about anything.
If you have Thanksgiving at my house, then I feel like we can banter in any way we want.
It's just the way I wrote.
And so it never dawned on me that, you know, for years, I had lots and lots of students in my house for Thanksgiving.
And so those students I had a different type of bantering with than ones that didn't.
And so I treated my, you know, workplace for people who, you know, I knew well, like my living room.
And I shouldn't have done that.
And I don't know if it truly hurt someone.
They said it, you know, a few years later.
They said it did.
And if it did, my God, I'm sorry, because that's not, you know, that's not what I had intended.
So it's really not about what I believe.
It's about what could be and whether or not I can actually change my behavior.
So that I've done.
Now, what was I thinking during that whole process?
It was very, very confusing.
And I had to figure out if I could actually do the work I wanted to do at a university.
And more importantly, I had to figure out, because the world was treating me very differently from Monday to Tuesday during that time of my life, how I could still be on this mission to have impact.
How was I going to get the work done that I needed to get done If I couldn't publish here or talk about academic papers there or have research assistants or what have you, how was I still going to make a difference?
And that's what I was truly focused on.
Yeah.
I mean, you sound very nice.
It's not about nice, man.
I want to be effective.
Yeah.
No, I get that.
But to me also from the outside, do you think the approach they took to get it public and the way it was was a form of trying to embarrass you a little bit?
Was it a form of making an example?
Because that could have been handled privately, you know?
Yeah, it felt personal.
Okay.
It felt personal.
But again, maybe I'm being, you call it nice, but what you going to do about that?
Right?
Like back in the neighborhood I grew up in, people would say, man, fuck school, man.
These people, people discriminating.
What the hell are you going to do about that?
You got a choice.
You can either get up and work your butt off and see what comes of it, or you can sit here and talk about what you can't do.
And so during that time, yes, I could have sat around, I'm not sure anybody would have listened during that time, but I could have sat around and said, woe is me.
It's not my style.
I've never done that.
Never.
And I wasn't going to start then.
What I had to figure out is, I got two kids in private schools.
How are we going to make that work out?
Right?
I got kids.
My kids, you know, I grew up hating rich kids and I got two of them.
They like Brie and shit.
How am I going to afford Brie?
Those are the problems I got.
Were you protected?
Were you protected from a Claudine Gay that tried to get you to lose your tenure so they could fire you?
Were you protected?
Do you feel protected that they can't touch you and do anything to you because you came up with a study that goes against Claudine Gay and maybe, you know, her connection to former president Barack Obama, who's loved by folks like Claudine Gay or the Democratic Party, where she may lose favor there?
Why would you write a paper like this?
This goes against our agenda of us being able to do this.
We can't come up with, do you feel safe today?
Like, meaning if you do the next thing and you come up with, like, for example, right now, let's just say the next thing inspires you.
Do you believe words have power?
I do.
Do you believe affirmations, you know, daily affirmations?
You give me the vibes of somebody that believes in daily affirmations.
Not at all.
Are you, are you, meaning, are you, but meaning, meaning, do you believe that when you said, I am never going to pout, I am never, I've never been that guy.
That's a little bit of affirmation.
Like you believe that's who you are, right?
So words have power.
So, you know, let's say next thing you get obsessed with.
You're like, you know what?
I want to find out if the CIA was involved in bringing hip-hop rap to the African-American community and writing a song called F the Police, you know, and that goes viral and we pin the African-American community against cops and words have a lot of power.
You and I can probably, I don't know, you, I can recite a lot of songs by Tupac.
I can recite a lot of songs by, you know, Bone Thugs and Harmony, by, you know, R.B. L. Posse, probably by a lot of those rappers from my time, right?
And when you say some of the words, you're like, oh, shoot, I just go ECE, you know?
And you're like, wow, what am I saying?
Mon murder, more murder, come again.
What are we talking about here, right?
Now, what if you all of a sudden are inspired to do that?
And you do the study and it comes out it's true.
Hip-hop used to be not gangster rap.
80s hip-hop is different than 90s hip-hop, right?
And today it's mumble hip-hop.
And you've seen Snoop say, mama, no, mama, no, mama, no.
It's a very different rap, right?
So what if you get inspired to want to investigate that?
And all of a sudden you find out, dude, these guys freaking try to do this to us to put in jail so our communities would be hurt with social economics.
That's dirty.
Would you feel safe doing that investigation and that research today?
Well, first, I'm going to answer that directly.
It's a great question.
First, if you take out the CIA angle, which I hadn't heard about, I'm doing exactly that study right now.
Oh, fantastic.
So we'll get to that.
Sick.
It's great.
So I'm fascinated with the impact of not just hip-hop generally on inequality, but the specific words and language, because I do believe that words matter.
And AI has now come out and allowed us to do this in a much more serious way and scalable way.
We can talk about that later.
Would I feel safe?
No, but I've never felt safe and I'm not going to.
But you got to buy Bri cheese.
You got to get Bri cheese.
You better get off.
You got to be careful with that cheese.
It's expensive.
You know, I'm stocking it up.
I'm the only black person with Brie in the freezer.
So I got Brie on layaway and shit.
So you're every week I put something on it.
So you're saying you're a prepper, right?
Oh my God.
You're getting prescription work.
Give me this come, Tion on layaway.
Oh my God.
Okay, so you're afraid, and I appreciate that, but so you're afraid, but you're like, you're still going to do it.
No, I didn't say I was afraid.
I said I don't feel safe.
They're different.
Don't feel safe.
No, I don't.
Right?
Like, and it's okay.
I don't remember the last time I felt safe.
I went to a friend of mine.
I only have a couple of them from school days.
And I went to him and I said, man, I just, there's so much uncertainty.
What do I do?
He lives right outside of Dallas.
And he said to me, but you love uncertainty.
I was like, no, I don't.
He said, well, it seems like you do, right?
Because you've lived in it for so long.
So yes, I don't feel safe.
I'm not going to feel safe after our back and forth between Harvard and I'm never going to feel safe.
That's just not an option.
But I'm going to keep going because I'm willing to die on this hill.
Now, why are you investigating this, though?
Link with hip-hop and it's the biggest cultural revolution that I've seen in my lifetime.
And we have no idea what the impacts of it are on economic mobility, inequality, teen pregnancy, all sorts of other social factors.
So I would ask you the question, how can I not?
Listen, I admire that you're doing it because respect you.
Because again, Rob, what was the first gangster rap song?
What was the first one?
Oh, man.
What's the first gangster rap song like the first?
Like a popular one?
I don't care if it's people.
Okay, so Ice T had been emceeing since the early 80s, but he first turned to gangster rap themes after being introduced to Schooly D's self-titled debut album and especially the song PSK, What Does It Mean?
Which is regarded to the first gangster rap song Schooly D had, Am I Black Enough For You in the album of 1989?
So that's the first one, right?
Rob, can you go to the lyrics of F the Police?
Can you go to, let me see this here.
If we go to lyrics and let's see if there's okay, right now it's NW in full picture.
Police straight from the underground young got a bat because I'm down in brown and not the other color since police.
So police think they have the authority to kill a minority.
The one for a punk mother with a badge and a gun to be beaten on, thrown in jail.
We can go toe-to-toe in the middle of a cell.
So this, when you read this, obviously, it was a hit.
I mean, the beat was great.
First of all, I played, I listened to it.
My mom would sing this.
My mom was like, she'd hear a siren.
She'd be like, the police.
I'm like, mom.
So I tell you, I'm 14 years old.
You should have asked this question to my dad.
I said, dad, can you stop by warehouse?
My parents are divorced.
I see him every other week.
I'm like, buy me a tape, 99 cents.
You go to warehouse, you pick something up.
He says, which one are you?
I said, it's just this new jazz song that came out by this guy named EZE.
It's a jazz song.
I said, yeah, it's called Real Mother.
You know, it's like, well, you know how.
Yeah, of course.
So he says, okay, let's go.
We go buy it and we get in the car.
I'm like, freaking awesome.
This great hip.
This is finally I can play something while I'm working out when I'm going for YMCA.
And he says, you know, I want to hear this jazz song.
So you don't want to hear it.
It's not your type.
Gabriel Gabriel.
I'm going to.
He's listening to it when I put it in.
And he says, yeah, no.
We went back for 99 cents.
I returned it back to warehouse.
He says, you're not going to listen to that.
I said, well, I listened to it anyways.
But back in the days, it was a different story.
So I admire you for wanting to pursue this to see, you know, what kind of an do you believe without even doing the research that it did have major impact in the community?
Yeah, but probably different than you imagine.
You think so?
My hypothesis is that it had different effects depending upon where you were living.
I don't know if this is true or not.
Now, I'm on record saying I'm completely wrong about it.
I was completely wrong about the police.
But my view is for inner city, for people who live in the inner cities, it's going to have very little effect.
I think, because I think it's already, this type of language is already already out there.
People are already having these discussions.
That's where the songs come from.
Now, the question is, for the kid in the suburb, who those discussions were not having, right?
So imagine you move your kids out to the suburb, right?
And then you're trying to get away from some of these things.
And then now they can just tune in on radio and get the same and log in and tap into that type of identity.
That might be dangerous.
So that's my hypothesis: is that yes, it's going to have big effects, but not where you imagine.
And music, I mean, if you think about it, music is so powerful.
We always talked about it, especially with like putting a trance on people.
Like if you listen to gangster rap, you like be honest, you feel like that.
When you listen to jazz, your mood changes.
You're happy.
And easy, like you said, you go, you take somebody out of the hood and now they're in the suburbs and stuff.
And then they hear the police.
When they get pulled over, what do you think their attitude is going to be?
Do you have a clip of what Ice Cube said about this?
He didn't say, do you have the other clip of the CIA guy or no?
Well, I don't.
I don't have the clipboard, but his name is John Holmes said.
He's a retired CIA agent.
He played the midflip.
He played midflip rap.
Okay, let's take rap music.
Let's take same people who own the labels on the prisons.
So literally the same people?
Literally the same people who own the labels on private prisons.
So, you know, it seems really kind of suspicious, if you want to say that word, that, you know, the records that come out are really geared to push people towards their prison industry.
But they didn't make you write those lyrics.
It's not about making, it's not about making somebody write the lyrics.
It's about Being there as guardrails to make sure certain songs make it through and certain songs don't certain flavors are exposed on the record.
You know, some records are made by committee.
Meaning record company guys sit around and tell the artists, this is hot.
Say that.
Do this.
We're going to have this guy write the lyrics.
We're going to have that.
So the narrative is really kind of, you know, structured and really made into what the record company want the record to be.
You know, a lot of artists are.
You should make a song called Hug the Police just to flip it around.
Hug the police.
Hug the police.
You remember that one reverent.
They better have a real good beat.
Like fantastic beat.
Yeah, yeah.
They have to get like Scott Scarcher, somebody really good to make a sick beat.
But by the way, if there's anybody that is qualified to speak on that, it's Ice Cube.
1,000%.
Is there anybody bigger than him?
I mean, I just right now we came up with the first, you know, Ice Cube's name is linked to it.
So he has the moral authority to talk about that.
Tom, you were talking about a man earlier, George, I think it's Wackenhutt or whatever his name was.
Can you unpack the story you were telling us before?
Yeah, so there's a bit of a rabbit hole here.
We love those, Tom.
But no, no, no, it's real.
So George Wackenhutt, you know, pioneered privatized prisons, where rather than governments building prisons, it's like, hey, you need a prison.
How about we build it for you?
And it'll be, you know, the state of California correctional facility, whatever it is.
And, you know, you just send your customers, your criminals here.
We'll take care of them.
And you just pay us by the person.
And then we'll take it.
That way you don't have to build it, you know, because you have to get these big bonds to build schools, water infrastructure, prisons.
They come up on ballots all the time.
And people say, need another prison?
They used to say, yes.
Oh, my goodness.
We need, we got, we want to do, we're going to reduce crime or build the prison.
Never mind if they do the real research on recidivation rates.
It's a fallacy.
Most prisons are crime college and they come back out and go back in, unfortunately.
And Wackenhut was then acquired by GS4 or G4, whatever it was.
And what's interesting is the privatization of American prisons was like turbocharged.
And I think it's, Rob, I think it's a prison now, GS4, G4, that bought Wackenhutt.
And it's a major international conglomerate now.
And what was interesting is they needed customers and the private prison industry in California lobbied for the three strikes law.
And the three strikes law that, you know, here comes Rabbit Hole, that Attorney General Kamala Harris in California, you know, she greenlit and modified the weight-based possession implies distribution, you know what I'm talking about?
That over a certain weight, like over an ounce of marijuana, oh, you're intending to distribute.
And now they can turn what was possession for my birthday party into a felony distribution charge.
And you get three strikes and now the customers are filling the prisons.
And there's a big cycle there.
But there it is, G4S.
And now they are a giant operator of privatized prisons.
And they needed customers.
And then the three strikes law, it's always good to be a politician running to be tough on crime.
And now you have this big cycle that comes around.
Have you, you're nodding a little bit.
Have you looking back into, you were looking into crime statistics and looking thing.
Have you dove into that and had thoughts on that?
I haven't at all.
I'm not an expert at all on private prisons and didn't know Wagon Hutt until you just mentioned it.
But obviously, I've heard of him and the viewpoints about the issues with private prisons I'm aware of, but I didn't look into it in terms of research, no.
And the three strikes laws, certainly California, had a very bad effect.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Because you took young men that probably should have been in and out for a minor charge and suddenly three strikes, they're in, and now they're in crime college.
Right.
And it's horrible.
What was interesting to me about all this, we were talking also about music and how there are these social triggers.
It'd be really interesting to see the depth of your research that comes out of that.
Tom was a big Rap and Forte guy back in the days.
Oh, Tom was a biggie, Tupac, NWA.
When I look at Tom, I say, I think fuck the police.
That's what I think.
That's what we're talking about.
That's what he was singing in the way here today.
He doesn't play games, bro.
He was coming to me.
I tell you.
Hey, not to be proud of, but in April of my senior year in college, I found myself in the back of a police car at 10.15 in the morning, six moving violations and two miles and attempting to evade pursuit.
That last one really gets them going, by the way.
And I was pulled over, and I'm wearing a tie and a white shirt.
I was late for work, driving like a complete idiot.
And when I had my hands on the back of my car, and I'm answering questions, and they then emptied out my car.
They were looking for a seat or a rolling paper, anything.
There was nothing in my car.
But they, in the back of my head, he gave me a push and he bounced my chin and my nose on the back of my car.
Oh, my God.
I didn't get bloodied.
No, I didn't get bloodied up.
I didn't get bloodied up.
But the point is, there's a different world out there.
And if you want to cross over into the world of law enforcement, it's a different world.
And that's when you drove away and you played.
No, it's loud.
You were like, yeah, bitch.
I know what I got to go to ride.
I got to ride in a police car.
I got to, yeah.
But Roland, you don't talk the talk.
You walk the walk.
When you said you were doing your research, you went with cops on the ride-alongs, and you said your attitude kind of changed because you were like, yo, this is not an easy job.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, what?
I remember the story that you said, Roland, about showing up as somebody OD'd, and you were like, yo, let's go get drinks on me.
And they're like, what are you talking about, bro?
We still got to finish a job.
Out of all the ride-alongs, what was like the craziest thing that you saw that you were like, oh, my God, because you went through simulation too.
Right?
Yeah, it was the busting in the row house and watching someone die.
OD.
Yeah, man.
That was, you know.
It's not every day you see that up in Cambridge.
Thank goodness.
So, yeah, that was crazy.
But it did.
I think because given what's happened in the relationship with police, we're not really, people aren't talking enough about their own, the police mental health.
That's something I'm very, very interested in.
We have all this data out there from body cam footage and other data.
We should be developing predictive models that say, hey, this thing's going to escalate.
Because in the past, this is what it looked like before someone did something that was against policy.
So can we have predictive models to figure that stuff out?
I mean, I think it's a really, really hard job.
And it's hard not to, I'm embarrassed, but it's hard not to see everyone.
I mean, you're as a criminal.
You're out there like an Uber driver and just chasing around going, what are you doing?
What is that person doing?
And on the other side, when you roll down the street, people just stop and start scattering, right?
So it's two sides to it.
And that was probably the best education I've gotten since my grandmother taught me how to read was going around with the police and understanding what they see relative to what I thought was going on.
Long term, what are you solving for?
Long term?
Like, are you aspirational?
Is it, you know, hey, man, just leave me alone.
Let me teach.
Let me write some papers.
Let me do my thing.
Let me be a father.
Let me be a husband.
Let me do my thing.
And I'm enjoying my life.
I have no aspiration for anything else outside for being a professor and getting to bottom of certain articles and, you know, issues that I'm interested in.
What's long term?
What are you solving for long term?
No, I'm bad at all those things you mentioned because of my real aspiration, which is to fundamentally change the trajectory for minorities in America.
Maybe that's too aspirational, but that's it.
It is, my grandmother used to say, why do you work so hard?
You're killing yourself, you know, et cetera.
And I said, when we believe that the market for talent is perfect, I'll stop.
I don't take days off.
I haven't had a vacation in more than a decade.
I work Christmas Day because I am absolutely on a mission to ensure that everyone's got a fair shot at this thing.
What are your thoughts with affirmative action?
You know, it really, the details matter when it comes to affirmative action, right?
So I'm sure I benefited from it and I needed it.
I was a hot mess when I showed up on a college campus.
And there was more potential than my test scores would have shown because of what it took to get those test scores.
Now, my daughters, if my daughters need affirmative action, it's not because they face systemic bias.
It's because they suck.
Like we put everything into them.
I'm sitting this morning getting ready to come here.
My wife texts me a link to a video with my seven-year-old playing the piano.
It was awful.
And I thought to myself, see, every passion is explored.
Club soccer, piano, horseback riding.
They're banning them all.
But she could eat breed cheese like a chance.
But she's like, trust me.
Trust me.
But we do everything we can to make sure that whatever passion they have is watered, is nurtured.
And they go to the best schools that we can afford.
And so if they get to the end of that journey and they need lower standards, that is not okay.
Now, on the other hand, if you take a kid from the inner cities or from Iran or wherever in the world, and they have slightly lower test scores but went through the shit to get them, that person's got more talent.
And if you put them in a university and free them up from those constraints of their community and maybe their neighborhood, maybe even their own parents, I believe they can flourish.
So for me, it is all about finding people with the highest latent talent.
And that doesn't always show up in test scores.
So having this blind, like I just take the person with the highest SAT, I think that's wrong too.
On the other hand, taking people who are from affluent families with low test scores who haven't had that kind of struggle, that's also wrong.
And so I think it is all about the details.
And the way we're doing it now is just lazy.
It's not correct.
Think, long term the, the current model of the educational system, is going to be disrupted so bad that these physical type of locations may one day no longer be around.
That's a big idea.
I don't know, because there's still a big effect from going to these places.
Maybe it's less than it was 10 years ago, I don't know but it is particularly for minorities, and so I think that of course it will be disrupted.
Of course it will.
The question is what it will look like in 25 years.
I don't know.
My guess is there still will be a substantial in-person presence in the in the same model we see now.
Have you seen the numbers that came about?
That shows who AI will be affecting the most negatively?
I haven't.
They put those numbers out like every day right now.
I remember it was going to be truck drivers five years ago.
Truck drivers look safe.
Maybe data scientists are not, software engineers might not be, but show me the list.
I'd love to see it.
Yeah, it was actually just just came out Rob, and I think Brandon has it.
The link between AI and who gets impacted the most.
By the way, impacted the most.
Do you have that?
It's literally a chart Rob, that shows.
It's an image that shows which people with what kind of degrees and higher education, lower education who gets affected by AI the most.
It's not that one.
Brandon has it.
If you want to have Brandon text you I don't know if Brandon's listening or not, he can send it to you but the people that were affected the most by AI.
There it is.
I just found it.
Here we go, let me send this to you, Rob.
Just pull this up right there, if you can pull that up.
Look what I just sent you.
Just pull that up and you'll see it.
Numbers are surprising.
It breaks down, ethnicity men women, sex.
Do you see it, Rob?
And this is for the future Pat, like this is what's going on.
This is coming from pure research.
Okay, what shares of workers are most expected to AI?
Are most exposed to AI in their jobs?
Okay, zoom in a little bit more Rob, I know it's going to be.
Zoom in a little bit more.
So, men, 17.
Women are more.
Women get more degrees than men do.
Whites, high Blacks, 15 Hispanic, lowest Asians the highest.
They're going to be affected by the most less than a high school diploma.
They're not going to be affected because they're working.
High schoolers and stuff.
High school grad, 12.
Some college, 19.
Look at bachelor's, plus 20.
So the people that are going to college are going to have the biggest risk to AI than those who don't, because those jobs will be replaced by AI and somebody doing it.
So I wonder what's going to happen with college and the reason why I asked that question.
What does that have to do with affirmative action?
Because is the idea of all those things you talked about okay, allowing kids to go to school?
You know the, the lady that paid six hundred thousand dollars or whatever it was, for her daughter to go to school and then she got exposed and you know daughter's embarrassed, she's She's embarrassed.
I don't have sex in the city.
It was one of the girls.
I don't know what her name is.
And then, boom, we all know about it, right?
And we all read about it.
Imagine that kid, every job she ever gets.
Aren't you?
You're the one, right?
Yeah.
Okay, of course, those people shouldn't get in with, you know, I'm a Hollywood celebrity.
I'm a billionaire.
Let my kid in.
She's not that smart, but let her in, anyways.
I get it.
But also, you know, some of these guys that have come in whose parents are more disciplined with education, Asians who are more about, they spend more of their money investing into their kids for education than the average person does.
When you look at the data in some of these places, some 25% of their income is invested back into their kids' education from K through 12, not even like just in college, what the data is, right?
So you're thinking affirmative action, the concept of capitalism doesn't apply to affirmative action all across the board.
No, no, no.
I didn't say that at all.
In fact, what I described is much more market-based.
The thing is, the market is connecting with not just an SAT score, but an innate ability, right, that's harder to measure.
And so to get that innate ability, yes, of course, SAT scores are part of that.
But the life journey it took to get those SAT scores is also important.
For sure.
Because a person who's lived a harder life that they overcame, I would much rather hire that person because that person is going to be able to handle tough times and be mentally or emotionally tougher than the other person is.
That's exactly it.
Got it.
So, but I don't think that's affirmative action, though, right?
Affirmative action isn't necessarily that.
Affirmative action is more having to do.
Well, let me transition to the next one.
What do you think about DEI?
See, I think of these things all the same.
For me, it is about talent optimization.
That's it.
It is putting the best people in the best job.
And now we have to figure out what it means to be the best person.
But, you know, when it comes to DEI being a training to have me be more sensitive here on the podcast, I don't think that has much effect at all.
If DEI is, you know what, we should have better technology to find talent in hidden places in America that we don't already have.
That I'm all for, right?
So for example, there was a medical school that the typical way they were admitting students was that they would have 75 people they thought were interesting.
They'd fly them up to campus and they would interview all of them and they'd pick 40 out of that 75.
I'm just making up numbers here.
During COVID, they couldn't do that because people weren't flying up to campus.
And so what they did was just they zoomed with three or four hundred people.
And that was the most diverse class on many dimensions, not just race and gender, that they'd ever had.
Why?
Because many of those people never got a shot to even get in the applicant pool.
And so that's what I'm talking about.
When I went to my third year of graduate school, I went to the University of Chicago.
And they were known for, like Harvard at the time would have 25 graduate students and they would, you know, they'd finish 25 graduate students.
Chicago was known, some people thought it was bad.
I thought it was amazing, to have 50 graduate students in year one, and then they would, and the cream would rise to the top and they would take 25 in years two, three, and four, et cetera.
That is the kind of thing I'm talking about, opportunity.
And that's how I think about affirmative action at its best is that.
DEI at its best is that.
Now, the terms have all sorts of baggage, et cetera.
I'm ignoring all that.
All I care about is that the kid, whoever they are, wherever they are, that has really good talent, We find a way to actually identify that talent, nurture it, so that they can flourish.
Should skin color matter when it comes down to who we choose to go into school?
Should we favor certain skin colors and give them a higher score of likelihood of getting to school than those who are white?
Not alone at all.
But should be one factor?
Well, no, no.
What I mean by that is, what else?
People are a lot more interesting than just skin color.
So what else?
If you're asking me the question, all else equal, should we favor a, you know, should skin color matter?
I don't think so.
But skin colors correlate with a lot of other stuff, like income of the parents, et cetera.
So it wouldn't surprise me that skin color would matter for admissions, but not on its own.
It has to come up with other stuff.
For example, if I'm not, I don't think anyone should admit a very, you know, Obama's kids, right?
They don't need affirmative action.
I don't know if they need it or not, but they shouldn't get it, right?
My kids shouldn't get it.
And so therefore, should race be a factor?
No, not for my kids at all.
But for, you know, man-man in the inner city, who grew up across the street from me?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because that race is correlated with a lot of other things that are limiting his potential.
It's all about talent, right?
Like my daughters come home and ask me about race all the time now.
And they're getting older.
And I tell them it's, you know, one part of a person.
And there's, but why don't you try to get to know the other parts too?
And once you understand those other parts, then come back and tell me how important race actually was.
And that's what I'm saying here.
We need to focus on all the other stuff.
Yeah, I'm trying to see.
Okay, so why, though?
Maybe go a little bit deeper.
Why do you think that's important for us to consider that?
And let's just say we have across the board golf score, five categories.
Johnny has a better GPA than Bobby by slight, whatever, 4.5, 4.4.
SAT, 1490, 1440.
Okay.
Johnny on the golf score has done the same amount of community service as the other guy, a little bit more.
You know, when it comes down to math, scored on math slightly higher than the other, a little bit more.
But Bobby is a Hispanic from the inner city, and Johnny's as white as they can get.
You know what?
Let's take Bobby.
Is that fair?
Maybe.
Why is that?
Because if the obstacles he had to overcome, if you actually account for those, then maybe his score should be a perfect 1600.
Meaning, what did you have to go through to get them?
Right?
You can't, you can't.
Okay.
So let me ask this other question.
Okay.
We have Bobby and Johnny.
Okay.
Bobby is 6'8 ⁇ , 260 pounds with a 41-inch vertical leap, runs the 40 in 4-4, okay?
Hence, there's a guy named LeBron who I gave you the data on who he is.
It was easy, okay?
And he's black.
On the other side, Derek is 5'11, okay, vertical leap 29 inches, runs the 40 in 4'6, okay?
He busted his ass 24-7 training and he loves the game of basketball.
Should he be favored to go into the NBA over LeBron?
I mean, that's unfair because that guy worked a lot harder because he had to practice his shot more.
And I'm being serious.
No, okay, but combine scores are not great predictors of NFL success anyway.
So what you and that's what they're doing when they interview the players, right?
They're trying to figure out, do you, what is this person's work ethic?
But LeBron has the better vote.
I don't care what color LeBron is.
He's the better guy to take first draft pick.
But LeBron hasn't trained as hard as Derek has.
Well, in this case, actually, he did.
No, he didn't.
And he's got great work ethic.
They use a different guy.
Let's take a different guy, not a LeBron.
Go to a Kwame, you know, go to a, I don't know, take Dwight Howard.
Okay.
Let's go to Dwight Howard.
Sure.
6'11.
Jumps 40 inches.
Okay.
Incredible body.
Fast.
Benches two plates 25 times.
Okay.
But partied, hooked up with girls, never came to practice, didn't do his homework.
Everybody else did his homework.
Everybody did his stuff for him.
He's been paid for a long time.
Then we have Derek.
Should Derek be in the NBA instead of the white?
No, of course not, because it's not a factor that should overcome all.
No, the reason why I ask this is because this causes people to like, like Elizabeth Warren, to say she's a Native American, and then later on they find to be able to get into a school because on the application, it would benefit for me to say I'm a Native American and then I'm not white to be able to get in.
What you're describing are lazy practices that I don't like either.
No one should like.
The system is set up to be lazy practices.
Well, that's the system.
You're asking me what's ideal, right?
Like, and so you're asking me what my opinions are.
I mean, we can sit here and say this college does it wrong, so we should throw the whole thing out.
That's one approach.
I'm trying to talk to a guy who's smarter than me in this area, more experienced, who is, you're in it.
I'm not in it.
I'm simply questioning and wondering if there is a better way because my entire career has been in the world of business is what markers when I'm hiring somebody is the best instead of, oh, he's Hispanic.
He's probably going to be, he's this, he's probably, he's white, or let's say, but I can't do that in business.
You can't do that anywhere.
No one's asking for that.
But they're doing it in schools.
And they're wrong.
I've said that like three times.
They're wrong.
But in your sports example, right, if you say, well, here are two people who are extremely close.
One of them is in the gym every day and the other is doing the things you described.
And yeah, if they're extremely close, if their verticals were a millimeter off, then I'm going to go with the person who's in the gym because I think they're going to have a longer career.
But it's not like any of these factors outweigh all the other ones, right?
The only difference is how do you, okay, so help me understand.
How do you judge that?
Okay.
How do you judge capacity?
How do you judge a, you know, I do an event once you've the Vault Conference.
We'll have 10,000 people at the event this year on Palm Beach.
And one of the things I talk about is the underachiever, achiever, overachiever.
Nothing new.
Everybody's heard about the underachiever, achiever, overachiever.
But to me, the way I explain it, I explain it with the capacity of the individual.
Not necessarily, you may have more capacity than me, and I may be an overachiever, and you may end up being an underachiever, and you could still kick my ass.
Exactly.
I don't know if that made sense.
You could still beat me as an underachiever.
So we can't measure that.
We don't have the technology for that.
Well, I think that we don't measure it well.
There is no way to measure it, though.
I think the psychologists are trying to get really good at trying to understand stuff like grit, resilience, and these other factors that are really important beyond the more traditional measures like education or test scores.
For example, let me give you an example.
I think you'll, hopefully this will help.
One of the things I've been working on is trying to understand what actually predicts economic mobility.
It's the thing I care probably the most about, right?
And what we did was something really, really simple.
We went out and we took, we found a couple thousand people, all of which who had been born into poverty.
Let's imagine 30% got out and 70% didn't.
We spent hours and hours with all of these people trying to understand their lives, et cetera, so we could predict why is it that some people got out and other people didn't?
What we found was that education was the number one predictor.
Not too much of a surprise.
There's been lots of work on that.
But then what we found was like five out of the next seven were all psychological.
Locus of control, which we talked about earlier.
You know, do you internalize or do you externalize things that happen in life?
Grit, resilience, et cetera.
And so it's not perfect at all.
I agree with you.
It's really hard to measure capacity.
But the amount of effort that we're putting into trying to understand that, which all of us think is extraordinarily important, relative to trying to figure out exactly which thresholds for SATs, is way off.
The future of talent optimization has to be in thinking through those types of skills and those types of capacities.
Okay.
But to me, I'm with you.
So if I'm running a school and a person ends up coming up with a study that shows, yeah, cops are not worse on blacks than they are on whites.
And then you bring that study to me and I respond back to you and that this is bullshit.
And you say, wow, you're a pretty fast reader.
How'd you read it?
I didn't have to read it.
I just saw that it's 150 pages.
You said how many pages was it?
I don't know.
160 pages?
You said something.
100 pages long.
So then I come back and you're like, yeah, no, you're full of shit.
I thought you were a scholar and an educator and a professor who can entertain opposing ideas.
Got it.
Then that goes against what I'm trying to pitch to the African American community, to the Democratic Party, to the political side, which is what the school uses many times.
And it goes against me, then I can come back and find a way to find something to fire you and get rid of you, although you may be one of the best professors we have on campus.
So then it risks a guy like that because you're no longer part of that, you know, hey, you got in here because of affirmative action.
You better be loyal to us.
What are you doing?
You got in here because of that.
You know, you owe us this.
You better stay like this or else, you know, what are you doing?
You're playing with fire.
Don't forget you owe it to us.
We did this favor for you.
And then you're like, wait, this reminds me of what happened 400 years ago.
So let me get this straight.
So now you're using affirmative action against me because you felt sorry for me?
Dude, don't don't, I go there, me.
I'm not saying you, maybe you didn't go there, but I went there for myself.
I've never liked that.
I never liked, hey, we want to drop off some turkey for you guys on Thanksgiving because you guys are poor.
I didn't like that.
It bothered me.
Stephen A. said something about his mother where he said, well, my mom was on welfare for a couple months.
She was disgusted by it.
She couldn't wait to get off of it.
She couldn't wait to get off of it, right?
There's a lot of people that are using the system to get on it.
So all I'm saying is if you create the guidelines for me to be accepted based on low standards, no problem.
I'll take advantage of it.
And that'll be a guideline that I'll be looking for no matter where I go and work at a job in corporate world, no matter what it is.
That's all I'm saying.
Yeah, no, I understand the incentives, but nowhere in what I said, I talked about low standards.
None.
None.
I'll move my flight back.
We can speak of six all day.
Let me tell you.
I'm sorry all day.
So, Rono, if we go with your guidelines, I say you pick a basketball team, I'll pick mine.
You probably would pick Muggsy Bogs.
You probably would have Spugweb.
You would probably have some gangster rap.
Put on some gangster rap and probably.
Who else do you want me to go to?
You would probably have these guys that made it in in the NBA that should have never made it.
And then I'll go and say, forget about it.
I'll take the guys.
I don't care who it is.
I'll bring Shaq.
I'll bring all these guys in the middle of the morning.
I didn't know you were against working.
I didn't know you were against workouts.
Bingo.
I am.
But that's the point.
But for me, when it comes down to that, I think at the end of the day, unfortunately, no matter how much I love baseball, and I love baseball, right?
No matter how much I love sports, guess what, man?
You shouldn't put me on your team because you need to meet a requirement of a Middle Eastern.
But that's not a good requirement.
I'm just giving you that.
No, I am.
If you all of a sudden start getting into buying a team, and I'll call you and I'll say, hey, Roland, do me one favor, bro.
Let me play running back one day.
You shouldn't do that.
No, I'm not going to do it.
I'm telling you, Roland.
I'm not a Middle Eastern.
I came from a divorced family.
I was poor, bro.
Give me a freaking break.
I'm going to give you a break by letting you watch.
But you don't become Kobe without both.
You don't become LeBron without both.
I'm okay with that.
Right?
And so that's what I'm saying.
That's why you have to measure both.
You don't become great.
Like I study these guys.
Muhammad Ali, I teach a class on black geniuses.
I study these guys, and all of them have the and.
They have both.
So that's why the whole debate, and I think it's fun to have here and stuff, but I do worry that people in the world who are making these decisions are sitting here treating it like ore.
It's got to be and, and you got to be looking at everything.
And you're right.
Universities are doing it in a lazy way.
The universities don't have the data sets.
They don't actually know what the grit and resilience of the applicants are.
That's the problem.
And so they have to rely on these silly metrics that they're using.
I'm saying, let's change the whole system.
I'm not paying attention to what they're doing now because it's wrong.
You and I agree on that.
Let's change the whole system.
Let's actually collect much better data on these applicants.
Let's have them do very different things.
And then we can make the right decision for the most talented people, not just the people who work hardest, not the people who have higher scores and refuse to go to class.
Because we've met those people, those geniuses who refuse to do anything.
It's the combo.
It's the and.
It's the Kobe's.
It's the Mamba mentality.
I'm heartbroken knowing the fact that if you ever became the owner of the bank, I wouldn't be a running back.
You broke my heart.
No, no, there's bias.
It's a field discrimination.
You should.
Because it was applied.
And I'm okay with it.
And I'm okay with it.
That's my point.
I love you, but I don't care if you're okay or not.
It happened, brother.
I'm going to go home and cry to my mom.
This is not the situation I'm in.
So let me go into another one since we're already on this topic, and this is the world you're studying, because you are given a different perspective.
Systemic racism.
Have you ever gone down that rabbit hole to see how it started, who it started with, and the cause of it or no?
I haven't.
I think of a lot of that stuff is viewed by me at least as buzzwords.
I need to get to the details of what exactly they mean.
If you're asking myself the question, if you ask me the question, have you studied whether or not labor markets have discrimination in them?
Yes, I've studied that.
Whether or not police interactions have discrimination in them?
Yes, I've studied that.
I don't know what the discussion is.
What does systemic racism mean to you?
You're at Harvard.
I'm sure they talk about it.
No one invites me to anything.
Haven't you taken out?
So I'm hanging out with you.
Yeah, my new running back.
I don't damn.
We got no shot, fellas.
Fantasy team broke.
New number 34 running back, Patrick Bed David.
Wide receiver, Tom.
Yeah.
BizDuck.
When you say systemic, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead, Tom.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
So when you say systemic, I see a lot of systemic things.
I have a daughter that just went through the whole college application process.
She carefully selected a school for what she dearly wants to study, did the early decision, and did that.
My eyes got open to a systemic thing and early decision.
And what I saw was it was very interesting.
And in the admissions process, this is how broken it is in some other ways.
At her school, there are three students that got early decision at Duke.
The admissions counselor told the other students that didn't get in, you should not in your heart be ranking Duke as your number one school because Duke will never take more than three or four from an individual high school.
Pat, I don't know if you know about this.
I just got my eyes open to this.
And I'm like, wait a minute.
So there's worthy kids that just didn't get in ED or maybe didn't choose to put an early decision application in.
Or they put an early decision application at Princeton and Duke was their number two choice.
But now they're going to submit to Duke, but Duke's going to say no simply because of the count.
And so I see the systemic issues in that.
I'm also married to a school teacher who will tell you what you said, that if you erase everything else and you look at the quality of the high school and then look at the GPA and then look at the SAT, there's got to be, is what you say, the and.
Where's the and to discover the correlation effect?
Because the SAT may not have been good because it was a noble person in a horrible school that never had the quality of the math instruction to even approach a reasonable score despite that.
So I agree with that.
And I was just, when you look at it, it was just a comment of agreement with you.
Not really a question, but it was just a comment of agreement.
All of that for just an agreement.
No, no, no, but I want to.
You're not waiting for a receiver anymore.
But it's also a question of, you know, I'd love to find the AI that could measure grit because I think that is.
We're like teasing, teasing.
I'm like, he's about to tee off.
Yeah.
It was poor play and then it just all went down.
Hey, don't talk to my new running back.
He may be a better one, by the way.
Yeah, he might be a better one.
I'm going to wear my dog collar like work done.
I'm going to be undersized, but I'm going to make it.
You got better calves.
Okay, going back to systemic racism.
Does the idea, does the idea that you hear, I mean, you said you don't even look through it.
You don't even, you know, the topic.
Is there a definition that you would think what systemic racism stands for?
Or no, you don't even have a.
Let's read it.
Maybe pull up the Wikipedia that you had, Rob, where we were at, until Tom's phenomenal question.
Well, Rob's going to be the center of this team.
Rob's going to be the center.
I know he's a little short, but Rob got powerful.
Institutional racism also knows that systemic racism is defined as policies and practices that exist through whole society or organization that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of other based on race or ethnic group.
It manifests as discrimination in areas such as criminal justice, employment, housing, healthcare, education, and political representation.
The term institutional racism was first coined in 67 by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power, the Politics of Liberation.
Carmichael and Hamilton wrote in 1967 that individual racism is often in the and I can't see that word.
What does it say?
Identifiable because of its overt nature.
Institutionalism racism is less perceptible because of its less overt, far more subtle nature.
So have you ever read that book, Black Power, The Politics of Liberation or no?
I have not read that book, no.
Are you familiar with Stokely Carmichael?
Yeah, of course.
Okay.
And Charles Hamilton.
I haven't read that book.
And, you know, it's, I think part of the myth here is that I'm an economist.
That's not how economists really think about the world in terms of whole societies.
I guess macroeconomists would, but they're not studying racism.
And so we're looking at things that are much more micro, which is what I described earlier.
Is there specific discrimination going on in the labor market?
How would we actually measure that?
Those types of things.
Yes, I have studied those and continue to do so.
And what you see in those situations is that if you take the wage gap between blacks and whites in America, for example, or Hispanics, and you say let's imagine that is one.
The real question is, how much of that wage gap is happening because people come to the labor market with different skills versus people come to the labor market with the same skills and they're priced differently.
The second one is discrimination.
The first is not discrimination, per se, in labor markets, but bad schooling, whatever else you want to call it.
And I'd say that the vast majority of the work out there at a high-level summary would say two-thirds, maybe 70% of it, maybe even 75% of it, is of the differences in labor market outcomes is because people are coming to the market with different skills, not because the market is pricing the same skills differently.
Are you a fan of Thomas Sowell?
I wouldn't call myself a fan.
Can you be a fan of him?
I mean, I know his work.
You know his work.
Do you respect his work?
I think it's interesting.
I think there's a lot of interesting hypotheses out there, and I have never met him and don't know him personally.
I like, I think the difference between some of the stuff that Soule has done and what's being done now is what's being done now has a lot more rigor to it.
And we're really interested in causality and really interested in specifically pinpointing what's going on.
What Thomas Sowell has done, which is really interesting, in my opinion, is generated a lot of hypotheses that we can test.
And he's got a lot of ideas and there's a lot of things out there, but it's not the level of rigor I would want it.
Who were some of the economists you admire?
Because for somebody to become an economist, you almost have to have a few economists you look at and say, you know, because you start off reading other people's...
Yeah.
Right?
So who were some of the economists you studied?
Well, that's not how I became an economist, but there are economists I admire.
So which one do you want?
Give me the second one.
All right.
Glenn Lauer is an economist I admire.
Steve Levitt's an economist I admire.
Gary Becker is an economist I admire.
Milton Friedman's an economist I admire.
Samuelson, there's plenty that are phenomenal, phenomenal thinkers.
Ken Arrow is another one.
Matt Jackson, who really brought networks to economics, is another one.
So why Milton Friedman, but not Soule?
Because Milton was dealing with, I mean, he's fundamental issues of price theory.
I mean, these were field-changing.
Soul, again, zero disrespect.
It was a different time when he was studying these things, right?
You know, looking at the outcomes of immigrants versus the outcomes of black Americans born here.
An interesting hypothesis, but there's a lot more that can potentially explain those differences than just immigration status alone.
And so I just want to take those hypotheses, dig deeper, be more rigorous.
That's all.
Milton, I have a painting in my house, and the painting in my house has eight people in it.
Okay.
And Rob, if you can get that video ready, maybe show the painting first.
Zoom in a little bit into the painting.
It's called Dead Mentors.
Okay.
It's a pretty bad name, but I'm not trying to resell it.
So zoom in.
It's actually, what is that?
What the hell made that?
Is that Cristiano Ronaldo?
Look at your picture on the left.
That'll mafia.
I'm going to take that and change it.
No, somebody took that and changed it to something else and they're selling it.
Rob, can you just go to the original one?
Don't worry.
Zoom in.
So you got Einstein, Kennedy, Lincoln, Tupac, myself, in a middle blue suit.
Right, JFK, Ayrton Senna, the Shah of Iran, MLK, and Milton Friedman, right, in an empty chair.
And they're debating in the vault two books, Communist Manifesto and Atlas Schrugg, is what they're debating.
That's what's in my brain.
This is why I'm naturally high.
I have issues.
You don't even know why I have it here.
You played this quote by Milton Friedman.
Have you ever seen a Milton Friedman interview with Phil Donahue?
I don't think so.
By the way, if you haven't, this is the era of Nader, Ralph Nader, and all this stuff.
And this was one of the sickest interviews.
Vinny, have you ever seen this whole thing?
No, I saw a clip I think you showed me a while ago, but I've never seen it.
They must watch the entire thing.
I'm just giving you the two-minute clip.
So here, you know, Phil, obviously a left socialist, you know, Democrat, is how he would portray himself.
And he's talking about the greed of the wealth.
Go ahead.
When you see around the globe the maldistribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries, when you see so few haves and so many have-nots, when you see the greed and the concentration of power within, aren't you ever, did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed's a good idea to run on?
Well, first of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed?
You think Russia doesn't run on greed?
You think China doesn't run on greed?
What is greed?
Of course, none of us are greedy.
It's only the other fellow who's greedy.
Yeah, good point.
The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.
The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat.
Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.
In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history where they have had capitalism and largely free trade.
If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that.
So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by free enterprise systems.
So it seems to reward not virtue as much as ability to manipulate the system.
And what does reward virtue?
You think the communist commissar rewards virtue?
You think a Hitler rewards virtue?
You think, excuse me, if you'll pardon me, do you think American presidents reward virtue?
Wow.
Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?
Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?
You know, I think you're taking a lot of things for granted.
Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are trying to organize society for us.
Well, I don't even trust you to do that.
It's one of the best.
How long is the whole interview?
43 minutes.
I'm going to watch it.
I'm telling you, it's a clinic on.
By the time you're done, you're going to get as close as being as good of an economist as Roland is.
Like Bidenomics type of company?
No, no, no.
Not that economy counts.
And if you work hard, we'll let you in.
Thank you.
Okay, cool.
But this is the kind of reasoning of why I, five years ago, started a venture capital company.
Because I was worried about the impact that academics can have in the world.
And we didn't talk about it as part of the police work.
But, you know, after that work, had meetings with Obama and other people in the White House, and we got nothing done.
Meaning, not, you know, we did research.
It was, people talked about it a while, but we got nothing done.
And on the other hand, a really good friend of mine was an investor in early stage ventures, and he was partnering with people who were truly changing the world through effort.
And I thought, how would Milton Friedman approach this?
Would he start going out and fundraising with philanthropy and trying to put things out and hoping the government would adopt it?
No way.
So we started this little venture capital company to do exactly this, to invest in people and ideas that accelerate things that research has showed will increase social mobility.
So I'm all about using the market to accelerate the changes we've been talking about around this table.
I mean, when I was a kid, I was taught capitalism was the problem.
As an adult, I think it's the answer.
Wow.
Did you ever read Capitalism and Slavery?
No.
No.
I had a guy in my life.
I feel like I'm getting a lot of homework.
I'm the professor.
I know.
You're going to lay up this.
No, no, no.
I'm the uneducated economist.
I'm just very curious about this entire space.
And a lot of it is because of my upbringing, who was my parents, communist, imperialist, benefits of communism, benefits of socialism.
And then you're like, wait a minute, what benefits of communism?
This book writer, Capitalism and Slavery, was given to me years ago by Eric Williams.
And it talked about how capitalists did all bad to blacks and slaves and all this stuff.
But what benefits do you see in socialism?
I have not thought about that.
Benefits.
Why do you think it's so trendy and attractive to so many people on the left?
Perhaps because they think there's, you know, that individuals maximizing their own utilities in the way that Milton just described, without guardrails will somehow catapult us into a place that's much worse.
Right.
Right.
But other than that, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that approach.
What I spend my time doing is thinking about how we can use capitalism and the power of the market to solve a lot of the problems that people who like socialism are talking about.
So for me, the issue is not about the amount of inequality in the country.
It's about the amount of opportunity.
There's always going to be inequality.
In fact, there's an optimal level of inequality that people have studied a lot.
Some people think we're far over optimum.
Some people think it is what it is.
But I'm much more interested in thinking through how do we use the power of the market and entrepreneurial zeal to solve the social problems that many of the socialists you're mentioning say that they're interested in solving.
Why do they seem so certain?
And why is it that most kids that come out of college, you know, they're more coming from the mindset of socialism than capitalism is rich.
Capitalism is bad.
You know, that they're bad people.
These people, all they care about is money.
I don't see that, I got to say.
I mean, if you come to the day that the students at Harvard sign up for clubs, the longest line is for the finance club.
And so I don't know what they're saying to virtue signal to people, but there is a huge desire for finance and capitalism at college campuses.
That's been my experience.
I mean, I teach a class called Using Markets to Solve Social Problems.
And in any given semester, I mean, there's a couple hundred students in that class, and they're all there because they want to do well.
There's no doubt about that.
But the question is, should they do it through investment banking or starting a company that helps people, you know, makes it possible for people to apply for affordable housing online or take your pick, right?
But I am noticing that, yes, there are all sorts of issues on college campus, for sure.
I live in that environment.
But one of the stories that's not being told is that I'd say the modal thing I hear from my students in that class I just described is, professor, there's no doubt my parents want me to do well.
Financially, I got to do well.
But if I'm going to get up at 4.30 or 5 in the morning to do well, I want to do it by doing something that's good.
And that actually is very, very encouraging to me.
To me as well.
Yeah.
To me as well.
Final thoughts here.
Any last words?
I'm going to give it to you to finish it up.
Your level of optimism with the craziness that we have going on in America today with how weird it is.
Every time you turn on the television, you know, fights, arguing, the challenges we're facing economically today.
Some say the market's killing it.
We're doing great.
Some who are actually going to shopping, they're saying they're feeling it.
What level of optimism do you have?
And what feedback do you have to people?
Final thoughts.
I actually am tremendously optimistic.
Really am.
I couldn't do what I'd do if I didn't get up every morning feeling like today's the day.
And, you know, I'm not a great man with big thoughts, but I will say that what I've been trying to do over the last 21 years now is demonstrate to people that the study of racial inequality in America is a scientific pursuit.
It's not something that's done armchair from my feelings, et cetera.
It is about the causal effect of race on outcomes and opportunities.
And if we can have an honest conversation about it, rather than trying to signal to each other that we're not biased or that we are on the right team or whatever, we can really make progress.
And so it's the only part that I'm not optimistic about is the inability for us to have real conversations about these topics.
I go into my undergraduates and I say, in this big class I described, I go in 30 minutes early and just chat with the students before class.
And I asked them, where do you all have your deep conversations these days about religion and race?
food and whatever it is.
And they looked at me like I was crazy.
I said, we don't.
And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa.
When I was in college, I know this sounds, I'm old, but when I was in college, man, it did it get heated over religion and about personal responsibility and et cetera.
And I said, no, no, we don't.
We don't.
We have anonymous chat rooms where you can do that, but we don't actually have conversations about it.
People across the hall chatting on anonymous things about their ideas.
That I'm worried about.
I'm worried about the lack of free exchange of ideas.
I'm worried that if someone says, hey, maybe part of the problem is that the government hasn't figured out a way to help poor people, or maybe part of the problem is that poor people haven't figured out better how to help themselves.
That that is a no-no.
That's what I'm worried about.
But look, these topics are so incredibly important.
And they're too important to lie about it.
If we really care, if black lives truly do matter, then let's tell them the truth.
Amen.
I love it.
I'm so glad we invited you.
I'm so glad you accepted the invite.
It's going to be a tough weekend for me.
I'm not going to lie.
I'm going to have a hard time this time recovering from it.
I think I'm going to need to go to church both days.
Well, I mean, listen, one of my dreams was just shot by this guy right here.
I'm going to have to go talk to my wife.
It's all right.
It's all right.
Okay.
Don't get emotional at the end of the show.
Rob, get better help ready for anyone's listening.
Don't make him feel better.
He's not good.
You can always be a kicker.
And I can't even do that, Bob.
There's plenty of better options for you.
How to blast.
Is there anything you want the audience to go read or drive to?
Is there a website, article, paper, anything, book, anything you want them to go visit?
My articles are on my Harvard Economics website.
And some of the things that we're doing in terms of our investing in people and ideas is at eoventures.com.
EOventures.com.
Equal Opportunity Ventures.
EqualOpportunityVentures.com.
So let's drive to that.
Rob, if we can put the link below in the chat as well as the description, that would be great.
