The Ricochet Podcast - Glenn Loury's Late Admissions

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

In writing his memoir, Glenn Loury recognized the game that would go on between author and reader. To get his audience to trust him as a person, he'd confess his past misdeed and defects in character; to gain your confidence in his integrity as a thinker, he'd have to acknowledge the many times he's changed his mind on the stances he's taken. Today he joins to James, Rob and Steve Hayward to explain himself.The hosts also consider the broken pier in Gaza, compare this administration's incompetence with past calamities, plus last weekend's IDF strike in Rafah and the tent camp fire.- This week’s audio: Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh on whether or not the Gaza pier was a failure.

I try to look nice for you and I get no credit. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Stephen Aylward sitting in for Peter Robinson. I'm James Lileks and today we talk to Glenn Lowry about his new autobiography and more. So let's have ourselves a podcast. If you want to characterize it as a failure, I leave it to you.

What I can tell you is that we don't control the weather. You better believe that U.S. Central Command forces are going to do everything in their power to make sure that this is back and operational as soon as possible. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was going to put him, excuse me. Well, hello, welcome. I'm James Lilex. This is podcast number 694, moving inexorably to number 700. Stephen Hayward is sitting here for Peter. Rob is with us as well. We're going to go to our guest in just a second, but I got to say, we're at a hard point here because the verdict isn't in, so we don't know. And when the verdict does come in, we'll be back next week, after which it will have been chewed,

digested, and will be extremely old news. It'll be the beef jerky as opposed to the about-to-be-served filet mignon that it is now. I have no idea what's going to happen. Andrew McCarthy says he's going to be found guilty. The instructions to the jury seem to indicate that they can find him guilty of maybe showing up one day and scratching his left earlobe and there we go, he goes to jail. I don't know. Very briefly, like 20 seconds. Predictions, gentlemen, which time may or may not bear out. I don't know anything about any of this stuff. so I base it only on Annie McCarthy and then the few smart lawyers I follow on Twitter, which looks like the jury came back with questions that seem to indicate they are looking for a way to convict. And Stephen, you're in Europe where I'm sure the capitals are abuzz with this. Oh, yes, and I'm trying to watch it from afar. I mean, the first day with all the questions and asking for the judge's instructions to be read back, that sounds to

me like this is going to go on a while, and I went for Rob. I think that indicates they do want to convict him, but they're going to have to take their time to do it. I was once on a jury for a five-week, very difficult trial for 28 felony counts. And the guy's guilt was not in question. Very strong case, but it was very strange. But it still took us a couple of days to work through all the charges one by one and come up with guilty verdicts on every one of them. And this one will be much harder, I think. It'll be studied for an awful long time, and eventually, scientists,

I think, will be able to discern the likelihood of conviction based on the number of veins popping in Robert De Niro's forehead. It's a metric we haven't looked at before, but it's one that we should. All right, well, you know, we'll get to that. There's a whole bunch of podcasts in Ricochet that are smart and legally and lorally and all those other great smart stuff. So you will go to them to get up-to-the-minute comments and observations about what has happened. What we are going to do today is give you the long view with a great man. And now we welcome back to the podcast Glenn Lowry, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown

University. He's the host of The Glenn Show, a podcast you can find, you know, on his sub stack and that Ricochet.com place you might have heard something about. Glenn is also the author of the newly published Late Admissions, Confessions of a Black Conservative. Glenn, welcome back to the show. Thanks very much, James. Introduction. You say something that I'm sure raises eyebrows and makes people lean in wanting to hear more. You say, I'm going to tell you things about myself that no one would want anybody to think was true of them well let's start you want me to tell you something about myself that no one would want anyone to think I think so I mean you can leave some for the book but you know having said that we are curious I mean kid killed a man some for the book, but, you know, having said that, we are curious.

I mean, killed a man in Reno just to watch him die. I mean, that's, you know, that's pretty. Well, not quite. I was a cocaine addict and had to be hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital for two months in my effort to stop using, which was fitful, and went on over the course of a year. I did eventually free myself from dependency on that substance, but it was a real struggle. How did that change your attitude towards addiction? Because that's one of those things that's fraught in the discourse today because of, you know, what we've seen on the streets, the plague of difficult drugs like fentanyl and the rest of it. People ascribe a moral responsibility to them. Some don't. I mean, how has that shifted

and altered your perspective on that problem that we have? Well, I do have a wealth of personal experience with how hard it is to actually get clean and stay clean a day at a time and all of that. This is the school of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. It's a personal struggle. It's a question of self-command. I don't have a big philosophical position on the basis of that experience. I have sympathy for people who struggle with this problem, but I'm also aware of the dangers of enabling and the fact that actually nobody can do it for you. You have to

do it for yourself at the end of the day. But these are nostrums or platitudes. I don't have any real wisdom for you on this, James. Well, you know, Glenn, if I can jump in, I think you're understating your achievement here. And I mean, the literary style of this, of your memoir, I think is really quite extraordinary because you not only combine some intellectual content, there's poetry. I mean, you go from poetry to quadratic equations in the space of five pages. But, you know, telling your personal story, you know, confronting failure, fear, redemption, doubts, professional success. Oh, I mean, there are several parts that brought me literally to tears. You know, your reunion with your son Alden, for example.

I mean, in fact, I'll tell listeners that if you're not grabbed by the preface, then the page and a half, Glenn, about your father in the first chapter will make people not be able to put the book down. And I'm reading all this sort of political and philosophical and other stuff. So, I mean, you weave together an extraordinary narrative that has this tremendous myth. All right, there's my dust jacket blurb. I'll stop about all that. Well, let me comment, Steve. Let me comment. I mean, first of all, about the preface, and thanks, James, for mentioning it.

I say I'm playing a game with the reader in that I'm the author of my own account. This is my life. I'm telling you the story. I am telling you the story of my life. You, if you're wise as a reader, should be on the lookout for me manipulating my control over the narrative on behalf of my own objectives. This is a game theoretic insight that, you know, if you're an economist, comes readily to mind. And therefore, I have a problem. How do I persuade you to trust what it is that I'm telling you about myself? And I make the observation that, you know, I'm going to tell you stuff that is not really pretty and that's not all that crediting to me at one level.

But the fact that I'm willing to tell it to you should win over your trust in me as a reliable narrator. And I can use that. I can use that confidence that you have. This guy, this scumbag, this miscreant, this complete failure of a human being isn't the same guy who's telling me about his failures and his triumphs over his failures and so forth. And that's my effort to both be truthful to the narrative of my life, but at the same time, not to leave myself completely discredited in the eye of the reader. And the preface of the book where I make this observation about the game is meant to foreshadow for the reader the fact that as you go forward, there's a lot of stuff about Glenn Lowry's life that's not pretty and that he's going to be telling you about. Well, sure, I get all that. And I've always known you're a great writer.

I've been reading you for years. But this cannot have been an easy book to have written, can it? What made you decide to really lay it all out there? It was not an easy book to have written, can it? What made you decide to really lay it all out there? It was not an easy book to write. And I came to the conclusion that, you know, I needed to come clean. Some of the stuff, the discrediting stuff, residency in a psychiatric hospital for drug addiction, having to withdraw from a high-level appointment in the government, the federal government, because of a scandal with a mistress and an accusation of assault and a secret apartment

and all that. The abandonment of my son, Alden, at birth and not really developing a relationship with him until he was an adult, the failure to live up to what I and others thought was my intellectual and academic promise as a young, tenured professor of economics at Harvard, specializing in technical economics and microeconomic theory, applied theory, writing models and getting published in journals, and my embrace of another kind of professional life as a social critic and public intellectual and a pundit, right of center to be sure, but nevertheless not publishing in the American Economic Review for a decade kind of thing, what happened to me at Harvard in the early 1980s, all of these different things, I wanted to come to terms with these things for myself. I mean, there's a therapeutic dimension.

There's a kind of self-knowledge dimension. One of my dear friends and colleagues was the late great economist Thomas Schelling, who wrote about the problem of self-command, about the conflict of the game between two instantiations of the same individual, one of whom would want not to use cocaine and the other whom would spend his last dollar to get high, and how it is that one as an economic specialist or a game theorist can conceptualize that kind of internal struggle. And I was very much enamored of that, both because I respect and admire Tom as an economist, but also because I had struggled and come out the other side of a struggle with addiction. But self-command and self-knowledge, these are very closely related things, it seems to me, that if you're not willing to be honest with yourself about what's actually going on in your life, what has gone on, what your failures were, what your fears were, what your unrealized hopes were, what were the temptations to which you succumbed? Why did you do that stupid

thing that you did that cost you so much? Why did you not take more care of the nurturing of the relationship with your wife or with your children? These kinds of questions. These are questions I had in my mind when I began writing this book, to which I didn't really know the answers. I'm not sure I know them now. Ah, well, I have a whole bunch of political questions for you that I'm going to put off, but I have one last personal one that will be of interest to Rob, who is shortly to decamp to Divinity School. Part of your story in the middle, including, by the way, the wonderful anecdote of being chewed out by Richard John Newhouse, who I knew a bit, right? But part of it is, you know, the role of religious faith in helping to overcome addictions, but then your admission that some lingering doubts have crept

in. It wasn't quite clear to me where you landed. It sounded a little bit like the famous quote of the Latin, of the Tertullian, right, who said, what, I don't, Lord, help thou my unbelief. So say a little bit about that, and if you can, share with us where you've landed now. So in the late 80s, when I was struggling with addiction, I came under the influence of and allowed myself to be completely won over by the evangelical fervor of a Protestant congregation, somewhat charismatic and fundamentalist in its sensibility, led by two African-American physicians who had, in effect, abandoned their medical careers in order to stand up and nurture the development of a new church in inner-city Boston.

My late wife, Linda Lowry, Linda Datcher Lowry, the economist whom I met in graduate school and who passed away from breast cancer in 2011—we were married for 28 years— she and I became members of that congregation early in its development, the congregation's development. And I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. I accepted him as my Savior. I became a born-again Christian, and it was a very sincere and profoundly sustaining transformation in my life, not just with respect to drug addiction. And it involved embrace of the Christian worldview. And I talk in the book about how nurturing that was, how glorious it was,

how beautiful at many levels for me it was, how compelling it was. But I also talk about doubts. I talk about whether or not I really did believe that a man had been raised from the dead and lives on, whether I could as a modern person, as an intellectual, a PhD from MIT, a scientist, believe in the supernatural claims. And I came to have doubts, and those doubts gnawed at me. I relate in the book an incident. It was the funeral of a dear friend who had died in her early 40s from a tragic viral infection of her heart

that came out of nowhere and took her in the blink of an eye. And of my feelings about how it is that she was a member of our church and how it is that the congregation dealt with her death at that funeral, it was a moment for me which crystallized some of those doubts, and I let those doubts get the better of me. Now, I don't want to tell everything about the book, but there was another dimension to the reasons why I moved away from the church, which I talk about honestly in the book. But my theological doubts were genuine, and the sense of crisis that I felt, oh, can I believe? Do I really,

really, really believe? That drove me to seek counsel. And Fr. Richard John Newhouse, the late great theologian who happened to be a friend of mine, opened his doors to me to give me counsel, and I write about that in the book. You asked me, where am I now? And I tried to signal a little bit of my agnosticism. I wouldn't call myself an atheist, but I also can't call myself a believer. I'm a person who, based on my personal experience, but also based upon my general temper and my sense of where our civilization is, have great respect for the quest that people are on to ground their understanding of the meaning of life in transcendent commitment. But I can't say that I unreservedly embrace that commitment at this stage in my life.

I'm an agnostic if you've got to put a label on it. Well, Glenn, this is Rob. You just described yourself as an agnostic and not sure if you believe it. You sound like a perfect candidate to be an Episcopal bishop. That's what I'm going for here. You know, I mean, I got to say, it's an absolutely beautiful book, and it's a beautiful book, and it comes out kind of at the right time, I think, just culturally. I just think it's really important, and it's an important book for people to read. It's also sneaky political.

It is your least political, most political book. Is that a fair thing to say? I can see why you might say that, yeah. I mean, it's a personal story, but it's also kind of an intellectual journey. Is that a fair thing? I mean, it fits in a lot of categories of sort of American literature, and one of them is the way somebody grows and changes and gets ideas and throws ideas away and then gets new ideas and then sort of emerges is that is it am i is that fair or is that no that's very fair that's very fair rob i was going to call the book changing my mind yeah for a long time because i thought the book

was mainly about well i was a reagan uh uh conservative in the 80s, and then I kind of lost my faith, not only my Christian faith, but also my neoconservative slash conservative political faith for a while. But did I really lose my faith, or was there another thing that was going on with me? This is one of the stories that I'm working with in the book. Maybe I just wanted back in with what I call the Negro cognoscenti, with the public intellectuals on the left, Black prominence, who had ostracized me. And some of these people who ostracized me were members of my own family or lifelong friends who I'd grown up with, you know, and calling me a traitor to the race and all of that. And maybe I chafed a little bit at the ostracism that comes the loneliness of the Black conservative

kind of thing, and I succumbed to that. You know, so anyway, I interrogate the reasons for the shift, but I thought the thing was about the shifting politics. And I moved left in the 90s, broke with many of my conservative friends, reviewed some of their books caustically, wrote obituaries of people whom I knew were decent and wise and morally grounded people. I think of James Q. Wilson, the late great political scientist, whom I blasted in a review that I wish I could take back now after he died, saying he died with blood on his hands, because his view of the incarceration and policing problem and my view at that time of the incarceration and policing problem were at odds with one another. So I moved around. And you could make the book about, you know, those kinds of political shifts.

You lose friends. Are you certain of your views? Do you question your motives? You know, those kinds of political shifts, you lose friends. Are you certain of your views? Do you question your motives? You know, how do you process the struggle to ground your beliefs in an intellectually respectable way, but also to acknowledge the influence that social and cultural currents and pressures and conformity and whatnot might have on you? I thought that's what the book was about. But that's not what the book, that's not the main thing that the book is about. It's another theme that I can work with, and I do work with in the book, but I thought at the end of the day, the book had to be about telling myself the truth about my life in all its aspects. I guess I feel like, I guess when I said political said political i don't i guess i don't mean capital people i'm also culturally political because um i mean look i'm you're a fancy

professor at brown university you're a published academic you have been a public intellectual which is a phrase because i hate but it's the only way to describe what you've been for decades um you are not supposed to write a book about changing your mind. Because in America, the way we are today, we are not allowed to do that. We're supposed to wear the jersey, and that's the jersey we're going to wear and die with. How hard is it? I mean, I think I know the answer to this. So it's a silly quick, because I think I know you well enough. It probably wasn't as hard. But what advice would you give to other intellectuals that you know, fellow professors, authors, writers on both sides,

when they're thinking, hey, maybe I was wrong, but I don't want to say it. I mean, don't you think that's part of what the problem we have right now in the culture is that people, once they say something, I mean, on Twitter or wherever, they just dig in? Yeah, I think there are a lot of forces that militate in favor of doing so. You accumulate a kind of social capital and your political identity, and there's an investment there. I mean, what can I say that anything I say is going to sound self-aggrandizing. That's okay, go ahead. I had the courage to admit that I was wrong. Everybody should be as courageous as me. Come on, it's 2024. You're on a book tour. Let's do it. But I mean, did you

ever think to yourself, okay, well, I mean, here's the reason people don't do it, especially people who are sort of public thinking, public thinkers, is that well, you were wrong about that. You're wrong about this now. People say that all the time. I mean, I know a lot of people I know who are like free market economists who have now sort of come to a slightly more, I would say, industrial policy friendly position in economics that I have not.

And sometimes when I'm talking to them, I'm thinking, well, wait a minute, am I just being rigid and doctrinaire or are they just being, you know, squishy on hard economics. I don't know if you know this paper. I think it's Candace Pendergrass, the Chicago-based applied economist, labor economist, a theory of yes-men. Long story, it's a nice applied theory paper. We're economists around here. So let me just, you know, I mean, the idea is you're in an organization and you're giving advice and your advice is noisy. You know, you get a signal, but it's a noisy signal. You might be right. You might be wrong. If you're really a low variance, high information source of advice, your advice will be relatively

stable over time. This is Bayes, you know, stuff. I mean, basically the new observations won't cause you to change your estimate of the unobserved parameter very much. You'll be stable over time. Vacillation indirectly reveals high noise in your signal. If your advice is shifting a lot, you are ex post facto revealing yourself to be a relatively unreliable source of information. And so you're going to be discounted in the organization when you try to give advice. And that's, I think, a very nice economistic way of capturing the thing that you

just got through saying, Rob, that you don't want to be shifting around a lot because people discount everything you say when they hear you say one thing one day and another thing another day. And I think that's right. I'm reading the book. I'm reading the story. I'm reading your story. And I'm following along with you as you go on all these different little, you know, tributaries and journeys, right? One of them is intellectual and ideological and political.

It all makes sense to me. Because it's coming from you and because I think that's what I guess I'm trying to think that political part of this book Makes the political part or the intellectual part So much more Easily understood and celebrated and I just think that's, I don't think I've ever read a book that had quite, has been quite this, such a great example of that,

of a thinking person's trip through his life and his thinking. And so I just, I think it's, that's why I think it's an amazing book. And I think everyone should be encouraged to think about what book they would write. Just like this of themselves, because everybody's got a story. Everybody had a little journey and everybody's had a little trip through, you know, politics and culture.

So that'd be my next thing is I think you should run webinars for money and have people, you know, write, do a writing workshop for people, because it really is sort of an extraordinary exercise. When people go through an ideological pole shift, and a lot of us did, it's either for a couple of reasons, it would seem, either a new set of facts, new information that makes you reevaluate what you thought before, or a change in situation, maturation. People are more likely, perhaps, to find themselves moving towards the center and gasp towards the right when they find themselves married with a house paying property taxes all of a sudden. And once you start to re-examine your previous set of givens, in comes doubt about everything else that leeches away the foundation until now you are seeing what else is on the other side.

And it's always, it's exhilarating at first because you have a whole new set of people to discover, a whole new set of people to support you and welcome you into the fold and the rest of it. But then, as you've said, you look back on what you believed before and say, why did I believe that? Was I wrong? And you have to know where to stop and fix yourself. Is it the difficulty these days, do you think, is the difficulty in being of a mind about, say, the Constitution or basic facts about economics and finding that the discourse in which we live is constantly, constantly moving away from these

ideas and pushing us into, you know, where I feel like an extremist because I'm a First Amendment absolute. So how much of the shifting culture was responsible for your changes in what you came to believe? Why? I guess that's my question. Why did you switch from this set of beliefs to that? Was it new information? Was it personal situation? Combination of the two? Life? What? i'm going to say a combination of the two given the alternatives on offer um so in my specific case i moved from right to left in the 90s i became exasperated with my conservative colleagues on the race question i actually agreed with them uh about the bankruptcy of the civil rights vision, Thomas Sowell being a source here, but he's not the only one. I agreed with them that the discrimination mongering was really barking up the wrong tree

and that the real problems had to do with culture and structure of internal life within the community, the various social developments that were impeding people culture, structure of internal life within the community, the various social developments that were impeding people from taking advantage of opportunities that actually existed. I agreed about all of that. But, and this was a point in my life where I was maybe vulnerable. I had gone through my Christian conversion. I had gone through the public humiliation of the revelation of my drug

problem and the fact that I had to withdraw from the government job because a mistress that I was keeping in a secret apartment accused me of assaulting her, all of these various scandalous things, and I had endured them. I was vulnerable. My guard was down, and I was looking for succor. I was looking for comfort. I was looking for comradeship and collegiality and things of this kind. There were personal things that were going on. And I wanted back in to my community, which I defined, at least in part, in racial identitarian terms. And this was a factor that was weighing on me.

But I also was annoyed, disquieted a little bit by some of the attitude on the race question that I detected amongst my conservative colleagues who were, I describe in the book, in my reading, willing to basically settle for the fact that the liberals have their heads up their butts, they're completely wrong about this, all of their rhetoric and their demagoguery and whatnot is bad for the country and to hell with them, and not be committed as I had hoped they would be, as I thought of myself as being, to notwithstanding the liberals' error, remaining steadfast and trying to do something about the problems of these marginal communities and realizing that as wrong as the liberals were, it wasn't good enough simply to be right about them being wrong about the social policy questions.

We needed to keep at it, this kind of thing. You know, so I was going to ask about that very point, because, you know, you wrote about a lot of friends of mine and, you know, heroes of ours, and I agree with you, by the way, that they're quite wrong to abandon, by the way, hope is a primary Christian virtue, so even no matter how bad things are, you shouldn't give up hope that something can and should be done. But then there's an earlier episode in the book, in sort of reverse chronological order, you also have a passage where you talk about meeting in the mid-80s in the White House with President Reagan and Jack Kemp and Bob Woodson, and about, you know, an agenda to do something about, you know, the south side of Chicago where you grew up and, you know, the Bronx or wherever.

And the big idea then, as I recall, was enterprise zones, right? It was going to be, you know, low taxes, deregulation, and you never mentioned, I don't know that you mentioned the enterprise zone idea specifically, but I've been thinking, yeah, but I've been thinking for a while, that was the big idea, and it all sounded great. And then I don't think anything, I thought it was, by the way, the conservative version of the Great Societies Model Cities program, and maybe it has the same problems. I don't think it was ever tried, or if it was tried, it didn't work. And I'm not aware of any evaluation studies about why it never happened or why it didn't work if it did happen, and there doesn't seem to be any successor to it.

Do you have an opinion on either one of those? Or it seems to me that too many conservatives are still where you saw them and criticized them for being in the late 1990s. Well, that was Jack Kemp, who's the guy I think of as the most prominent political proponent of the enterprise zone idea. And it was, you know, low tax enclaves that would encourage capital to come and locate and generate jobs in inner cities. And I'm not a historian of this policy initiative. I don't know exactly, chapter and verse, how intensely it was tried, although I know it was tried at least in pilot versions in some places. And there must be papers out there that attempt to evaluate, but I can't tell you what they say. I've never heard of any either. So, yeah, it was still controversial ideologically. And it was met with opposition, of course, from the Democrats and from the black leadership in many of the cities who didn't want to see conservative market oriented ideas get a fair shot. So that's what I have to say about it. I mean, not all conservatives

threw their hands up and walked away and said, this patient is beyond saving. Let's move on to the next case. And Jack Kemp was one who did not do that. Bob Woodson is one who, to this day, God bless him. He's well into his 80s now. He's been doing this his whole life. Enterprise Zones is a part of his general vision. This is Robert Woodson of Neighborhood Enterprise, of people being able to grapple on the ground, in the communities, with the leadership that they have and the resources that might be supplemented by external, but that are also indigenous to their social and cultural lives, to do some things for themselves, this kind of idea. Well, my last question, and it involves two different ways to give Rob heartburn,

one is to talk about your academic work on the cake eating problem uh problem dear to rob and then the other one is uh you you discussed toward the end that you you actually kind of like trump and are fond of him and like the way he insults the media and you acknowledge his faults i don't want to go down the trump rabbit hole because we do that plenty here but uh the specific question now is we have all the survey data showing minority voters, especially Hispanics, but it appears a considerable number of Black voters who like Trump and are moving to the Republicans. And this is without having just said a moment ago that there's no real conservative program for the inner cities. What do you make of all that? Is this real? What's driving this? So quickly on the cake-eating problem, that was an academic paper about how to optimally, over time, use a resource that's limited in availability when you're uncertain about exactly when that limit will be reached.

Rob will flunk that exam, I can guarantee you. Well, at the time, which was the late 1970s, people were writing down little intertemporal optimization models of this sort of one kind or another. I was trained at MIT. Robert Solow was my advisor. This is the kind of work he did. And I produced this paper. It was published in 1978 in the Review of Economic Studies. And, you know, I'm proud of it. But, you know, the practical value of that kind of effort is, I think, a little questionable. On the Trump thing, I mean, what do I know? I'm not a political guru. I haven't got poll data at hand and, you know,

empirical basis for anything I'm about to say, so take it with a grain of salt. I think you have to consider the alternative. I think the reason that there are emanations of increased minority Black and Latino support for Trump is because people are, A, remembering what Trump's presidency was actually like for them on the economy and other things, and it wasn't that bad. The pandemic messed things up, but it wasn't that bad. And B, looking at the other side and Biden's pandering. I don't know who's advising him and what makes him think that this is something that black people want to hear. That speech at Morehouse where he says, in effect, the hooded Klansmen are coming to get you.

And I am the only thing that stands between you and them, why would you believe in this country? Why would you believe in democracy? Why would you believe in free enterprise? Why would you believe in the hope and the promise of the Constitution and whatnot when you're being gunned down in the street like the hero George Floyd, or when you have to be 10 times better than the next guy in order to get it? Has he ever heard of affirmative action? You know, I think that people, many people, I'm one of them, who are African American,

don't want to be talked down to like that. The other thing I think is that N-I-G-G-E-R-S for Trump. That was on a t-shirt of a rally in Atlanta some months ago that I couldn't help but see one black guy running around with this t-shirt on. lockup for this, you know, lawfare initiative that the Democrats have undertaken to try to keep him from being duly elected again president of the United States. I think there are a lot of people who are themselves skeptical about how the rules of the game can be so construed as to unfairly disadvantage them who feel some identification with the plight that Donald Trump has. That's speaking now out of my lack of expertise as a political commentator, I'll speak for myself. Reading the book, it was hard for me not to remember, not to think of you now. Because you seem like you're having a lot of fun. And I guess my question is, as an academic and as a writer and as a professor in in a big university um is it easier is it getting easier or is it harder to be glenn lowry you understand what i'm asking that it feels

to me like you know we when we say oh you know he teaches at brown university we think oh my god that must be just miserable but it kind of looks like you're having fun. I'm okay. I'm okay in part because I don't rely on dinner party invitations from my faculty colleagues here. I'm quite okay taking my wife out to the restaurant. I'm okay because even though this is Brown, and Brown is a hothouse of ultra-woke sensibility in the faculty and in the student body, it's not monolithically so, especially in the student body. There are kids here, and these kids are smart, as you will, of course, expect at a place like Brown, and they're hungry to be exposed to argument, and they're tired of being talked down to and told what to think. There are a minority, to be sure, but, you know, we got a few thousand undergraduates here, so 10%

is a pretty good number of kids. They fill up my classrooms. They come to my office hours. They write me emails. I have relationships with these kids. I didn't teach it last year, but the year before last and the year before that, I taught a seminar on free inquiry in the modern world, which I developed with the help of an undergraduate teaching assistant, a brilliant young man who's now at Stanford Law named David Sachs is his name. And, you know, we read Plato and we read John Stuart Mill and we read Milton and we read George Orwell and we read Alan Bloom. And, you know, I mean, we read a lot of stuff. We had 20 kids. There was a limit. There were 50 applicants for 20 seats in this seminar.

And it was just a scintillating experience from these youngsters who were hungry for, if you will, a heterodox take on some of the pressing issues of the day. So in other words, like Robbie George at Princeton, I've found a niche for myself here at Brown. I'm known as this particular kind of oddball guy, but that's attractive to some of the smartest kids on campus, and that's largely what keeps me going here. Hunger is the word that I hope to hear. And you said it hunger for something that is rooted, grounded, is not just another feather blowing around in the winds of the moment. And you're teaching kids who went through an extraordinary period in American history. They had the pandemic, the lockdowns, and they and they had the the the reaction to the George Floyd death. I live 14 blocks south of where George Floyd died, and my city is still struggling to get back. And I am in a largely empty office because the pandemic sent everybody home

and everybody is content to stay there. So these kids, well, not kids, they're going to be adults. How do you, as a whole, if you look at them, if you apprehend the totality of their zeitgeist, how are they doing? Are they coming out of this stronger? Are they coming out of this regarding America as actually a fragile place that can be sundered by riots and disease? And is it in all the more need of strengthening and bolstering?

How would you say that they've weathered this extraordinary four years? Well, again, I'm not an expert here. Go to somebody like Jonathan Haidt. He's got this book out now about mental stress on people in that generation. He attributes a lot of it to the effects of social media. I don't know. My general surmise, though, is that they're troubled and they're not doing so well. And I think maybe you can see a link between that condition of these kids battered by the forces that you were calling attention to and some of this upheaval on campuses, occasionally by protests against

the war in Gaza, where people are grasping onto something that they hope will be meaningful. They're trying to find something that they can believe in. I don't want to get us down into, at this late hour, a discussion about Gaza. I don't even have a point to make about it, except that we're talking about the kids and what's going on with them. And I don't think one can overlook these acting outs He's acting out or disconnected from our general assessment of the temper of emotional life in youngsters at the elite institutions. There's a lot to worry about there. Well, they're lucky to have you, is all I can say. Late Admissions, Confessions of a Black Conservative, an extraordinary story with lots of levels and details to make you think, make you pause, and make you eager for the next page. Glennon, it's been a pleasure, as ever.

And we look forward to the next book, whatever it is. You can go through two ideological pole shifts between the next time we talk to you. We're just happy to read you and happy to talk to you. Thanks very much, James. I'll be back. Yes. Thanks, Glenn. Thanks, guys. Well, I'm sure that you have lots of things that you would have liked to ask Glenn, you, the listener, and I'm sure there's ideas in there in the conversation and in his book you would like to discuss with other like-minded people. I mean, sure, you can find somebody on the street who doesn't know anything about it and grab their lapels and tell them the gospel of Glenn.

Or, oh, I don't know, it's too ridiculous to think that people could actually get together in person and discuss these things. Isn't it, Rob? Well, I mean, you can get together in person, of course. You can also join Ricochet at ricochet.com, and you can be part of the conversation there. And you can also, you know, get Glenn's podcast on our Superfeed if you just sign up for the Superfeed. But we do, as you know, as members of Ricochet,

we do like to get together and have meetups, especially in the summer. The summer seems to be the time when people want to do it, although there's some coming up in the autumn, too. So let me just run down where you, if you join Ricochet or if you're already a member, where you might find yourself this summer. In Cookville, Tennessee, it's National Bourbon Day on June 14th.

That's about two weeks away. Stop right there. What's everybody's favorite bourbon? Stephen? Laphroaig. Sorry. I'm a Scotch whiskey drinker. You're a non-American. Petey man,

then are you, Rob? Yes, I am. I'll tell you, I have a couple favorites. I am not a snob in that I love Makers. I'll drink Makers from the Rocks pretty much any time. Makers is fantastic. The Old Weller, I do like. It's affordable.

I mean, it's expensive, but it's affordable and findable. I am luckily, although not in the bourbon supply business, but only in the personal enhancement business, to be friends with the family that makes the Pappy Van Winkle, the Van Winkle family, Julian Van Winkle and his wife and his son are old friends of mine. And it does not, the first thing they'll tell you is they don't have any to sell you or to give you.

But it's been a fascinating, it's fascinating friendship because you learn a lot about this incredibly interesting American liquor. So National Bourbon Day is a good day. I have a bottle of Pappy and I'm telling you, that stuff and some Diet Coke, it's just a fantastic drink. He wouldn't mind that. I'm kidding.

Send no letters. Send no letters. So there's a National Review cruise coming. The National Review cruise is shipping off on June 16. So if you're on that cruise, make yourself known to the other Ricochet members because there's going to be a bunch of Ricochet meetups aboard.

And I think, I don't know for a fact, but if you've suddenly got this idea, like, I want to go on that cruise, I think if you go to the National Review website, there might still be some state rooms available.

I don't know that for a fact, so don't hold my feet to the fire on that. There is a 4th of July weekend meetup in Fargo, North Dakota. 4th of July in Fargo. You're basically in James Lylex's dream journal at that point.

I know, and I would love to be there, except I have a show in London. But everybody who is there, remember, before you go home, go to West Fargo, fill up your tank at RJ's Station, RJ's Tesoro. It's a gas station at the edge of town. That's my dad's joint, and you'll have good gas all the way. Let me put that a different way. You'll be filled up and ready to go. Get your gas here.

You, in fact, I remember early in your blog, early not in, I don't know if it was early in your blogging days, but certainly early in the days that you were writing a blog and I was reading it, you sort of explained, somebody was complaining, I think somebody said something like, well, you know, the gas prices go up, those gas station owners, they just, you know, they make bank. And you sort of like very dispassionately, although it was clear, your rage was clear, you explained as how that business works. And you said, here's what, here's what here's here's what here's we make the money you go into the little store and you buy us you buy a diet coke that's how you make

the money uh and uh so stop acting like we're rockefeller which i i loved um okay back on weekend of july 26th so if you need a little more extra time to sort of plan the german fest meetup in milwaukee um which uh if i could, which I can't think of another. I can only think of one, maybe one better place to have a German Fest, and that's Louisville. And if the summer doesn't work for you, you can mark your calendar for the weekend of October 3rd. There's a meetup in St. Louis, which is going to be great.

St. Louis is a great city. And if none of those dates work, I mean, we've given you five, but none of those dates work i mean we've given you five says one one's been well none of those dates work here's what you do join ricochet put up a post say hey how about a meeting how about a meet up here at this time and guess what people are gonna show up because ricochet members show up as they do so yes do that put it on your calendar show up or you know just join ricochet and announce that you'd like people to come to your place. And Ricochet members will suddenly appear as if by spontaneous generation.

They will just emerge from the from the miasma and be fully formed as human beings and wonderful boon companions and the rest of it. Before we go, we should probably note some things. The war in Gaza that Glenn referred to, the United States has made its efforts to solve the humanitarian crisis caused by Hamas doing what they did, and Israel then responding, by building a pier. And the pier ain't. The pier was breaking into pieces and falling apart and just didn't do very well. And I thought, is there an analog to this somehow in previous days? And I thought, you know what it made me think of? It made me think of the Jimmy Carter failed raid to get the hostages back, you know, the helicopters crashing in the desert, just the sort of basic technical know-how that we assume the government, the army,

the armed forces have, and then out that uh all of a sudden there seems to be some institutional rot that left us vulnerable and unable to do the things we used to do i mean i can't blame joe biden for this unless he personally approved the the the schematics and made changes but then again it is of a piece isn't it well i would just say as a political matter i think that's exactly the that that should be the fear that is running ice cold through everyone in the white house right now is that what you look what especially in a campaign year um it's not so much about who signed off on the pier and whether the way that's not the issue. The issue is it symbolizes, it crystallizes a kind of American impotence and incompetence, whether that's fair or not.

That's the key word, Rob, is competence. By the way, I'm convinced that this is just like the Afghanistan bug out. I'm convinced some people in the military surely told the White House, this is a bad idea, here's all the problems with it, they said we don't care we want to do it and there does seem to be a race on now between whether the government is largely more incompetent than it is deceitful that they don't tell us the truth about they lie to us right um you know i'm over here in europe where i was reminded once again that when the european commission uh wants to do a new power grab, they announced that today we're announcing two new competencies. That's the word to use, competencies, for fisheries regulation or sausage wrapping. Things we're good at. And, you know, I was

talking to a bunch of European friends that, you know, if our government ever came out one day and said we're announcing a new competency, three quarters of the country would burst out laughing. But that's where we are today. And, oh, I mean, you can look, I'll just give you one other example. Well, two. One is the Biden energy program has promised us thousands of electric charging stations coast to coast. And I think they've built seven. Seven. Seven. I think that's the number. Less than a dozen. And then second, going back to your discussion a moment ago, James, on gasoline prices in Fargo or anywhere, California has announced a new solution to its high gas prices, and you'll never guess what comes next. Price controls. Price controls. Really? Price controls. Price control on refiners. They're going to regulate the

refiner's margins, and boy, isn't that going to work great. There's only two in California, right? I mean, that's part of the work great. There's only two in California, right? I mean, that's part of the problem is that California has a special gas brew, and they only make it in two places. So can you imagine? It's very easy to regulate. You just got to set up two. My guess is eventually Gavin Newsom is going to say that the state of California should refine its own gas, which is going to mean the gas no longer has a price control it's 27 000 a gallon um yeah i but i think that's i think that is probably i mean the

two interesting things about the the armed services are in that history right is that um after the sort of disaster of vietnam um they a lot of the critics like se Seymour Hirsch, who wrote the Pentagon paper, a lot of the big critics ended up teaching classes at West Point and the War College. They were brought into the system, into the organization, to sort of help reform it. And it reformed it and that was an organization

that actually took itself and its failures very seriously. And after the Desert One, I think it was called Desert One, which is the Jimmy Carter failed and after the desert the desert one i think was called desert one which is the jimmy carter failed thing in the desert to liberate the hostages um they did the same thing um because it's there it got a serious job right so they gotta succeed um and then you saw really not much not much after that whether you agreed with these or not, you saw a very effective, I mean, a mini-invasion of Grenada under Reagan, which was useful. You saw that Reagan's bargaining position with the Soviets went up because they understood that the American armed forces were not incompetent and not disorganized.

You saw the Desert Storm, the first Gulf War, which was sort of a cakewalk for the American forces. So it is possible to turn the ship around. It isn't a foregone conclusion that American might, American competence, and American strategic power is on the decline. It just isn't working now. And I think if you're an American voter, your question is, is it not working now because this is the way it is? It's not working now because the Mediterranean seas are too rough? Or is it not working now because there's derelict leadership at the top? Or misplaced priorities. Yeah, well...

I mean, if you hang around Twitter and social media and the rest of it along enough, you will see rampant examples of the armed forces making us very aware of how socially correct that they are. And it seems to be that they are concerned with elements of social policy that ought to be utterly irrelevant to the job at hand, which is defending the United States and inventing a lot of things that go to other places and blow them up. But yet the push to assure everybody

that they are inclusive is the sort of thing that you know flows from having administrations of a democratic nature in power. That if you have Donald Trump or Ronald Reagan, they're not going to be particularly concerned about whether or not the rainbow flag is flying over the recruitment office. And that's a whole sort of attitudinal shift towards the military as a social program, as a jobs program, as a to one that says it is an instrument for projecting American power. And you have to have somebody that is confident about saying that as opposed. I mean, Joe Biden can say what he wants to say. The Democrats can say what they want to say. But we all know that they are part of a whole multilateral transnational idea

that we should all work together and the idea of sovereignty and projecting individual national power is kind of ooky you know then in this hand holding come by a world whereas you know that trump or reagan or the rest of the guys are going to say no we're going to go it alone because we're the best and we uh you know we got this uh we got this thing going here we're going to keep it up so the fact that these incompetencies happen under somebody who is himself gray at the edges and sometimes very, very gauzy at the center does not bolster the case that the Democrats are four square for national security. It doesn't. So, yeah, there's that. His opponent, whose biggest weakness is his own mouth, is kind of locked away in a courtroom and not able to remind us that he's probably not a very good answer either. Well, Stephen, you remember four years ago when World War III started with Iran because we wh, because we whacked Suleiman. I mean, that has been their mode

forever. Any assertion of America, any violent assertion in order to defend American interests is the sort of thing that destabilizes, that's going to destabilize the world. That Donald Trump in a second term would somehow destabilize the world more than it's done to itself in the last four. Last thing, maybe, if

we continue on the war in Gaza, we've seen another one of those stories comes out where it's appalling news. Israeli jets put barrel bombs into a nursery. And then a week later, the story is actually precision munitions hit a Hamas control center in a tunnel. We have another one of those with the refugee camp where they attacked, I think it was a jeep. They had some coordinates on it, and there were secondary explosions, and a lot of stuff cooked off, and a lot of people were killed. And is that narrative still holding yet, or are people just...

It never seems to... The end part of the story never seems to take root in the ongoing narrative. Yeah, so I actually spoke a couple days ago with a fairly senior member of the Knesset from Israel, and yeah, he told a story which has subsequently been reported that the civilian deaths were actually the collateral of having blown up some ammunition that was hiding in some of the buildings they targeted. So once again, we see Hamas using civilians as shields. But I think the bigger story right now about the Rafah business is Biden and everyone said, don't go in, don't go into Rafah, can't invade Rafah. And I think they had in mind there are going to be tanks and big urban warfare. Instead, what it looks to me

is that Israel has been very cleverly enveloping the place and using special operations and uncovering the tunnels. And they're slowly strangling off Hamas in Rafah in ways that don't look like the big cataclysmic battle. So, I mean, they're being very clever because they're enveloping Rafah without looking like they're doing so. And there we go. Well, we will see. That's it for us now. It's been fun. We appreciate you listening.

We appreciate Stephen sitting in for Peter. And Rob, of course, Brother Rob, is he still with us here? I'm here. You can't hear me? You are there. Okay. Oh, yeah. We advise everybody to go to Ricochet.com and sign up because the member feed is where it's at, as they used to say in the 60s and 70s.

And also to go to Apple Podcasts, Apple Music, Apple iTunes. Go to that Apple place, the Apple place. It is five stars so that more people can discover the podcast and discover Ricochet and ensure that we're here for years to come. We're only going to get better. We're only going to get bigger. And, you know, we've all been with this operation for a long time, and it's one of the great joys of my life,

and we hope one of the great joys of yours. If not, it can be. Ricochet.com. I'm James Lilacs here in Minneapolis. To Stephen, to Rob, elsewhere, we thank you guys for showing up and thank everybody for listening. And we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, fellas.