Show Notes
Roland Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard University, the youngest black academic ever to receive tenure there, and a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal for his research on racial inequality, education, and policing. His findings have often put him at odds with progressive orthodoxy, and he’s paid a real price for it over the years, including death threats and a shot-out window over a program that simply paid kids to do well in school.
Fryer returns to the show to talk with Coleman Hughes about the Jason Arday scandal, which he sees as a symptom of the same institutional cowardice he’s trying to fix. That’s the thinking behind his and Bill Ackman’s new venture, the Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage, a $1 million prize designed to reward scholars willing to publish research academia is too afraid to touch. They also get into why elite universities avoid academic risk, what Fryer’s own research actually shows about race and intelligence, and how a stint doing stand-up comedy shaped the way he thinks about persuasion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Conversations with Coleman
France is burning, and Konstantin Kisin thinks the violence roiling the country is just the tip of the iceberg. Kisin, co-host of the Triggernometry podcast and author of An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, argues the current unrest is the predictable outcome of decades of mass immigration, without any systemic process for integration. Leaders’ dogged embrace of multiculturalism—even as their own citizens increasingly questioned it—ultimately cost the nation its shared identity, the very thing that holds a society together. And when tensions spill over into neighboring countries, as they inevitably will, it may well prove the continent’s undoing.
Did any single man change the course of the 20th century? Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, says the biographies can’t answer that, but the data can. He walks us through Winston Churchill’s dayslong fight to keep Britain in the war, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, John F. Kennedy’s brinkmanship in Cuba, and Joseph Stalin’s response to Adolf Hitler’s invasion. Then he explains why basketball coaches are the best laboratory we have for measuring what a leader really changes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Megan Phelps-Roper grew up as the public face of the Westboro Baptist Church, the hate group founded by her grandfather, known for picketing veterans’ funerals with signs condemning gay people and Jews. She left the church in 2012 after a series of Twitter conversations exposed cracks in its theology she could no longer ignore.
Elliot Kaufman’s new book, In the War Room, is an inside account of how Israel actually fought the war that followed October 7, 2023. A Wall Street Journal editorial writer, Kaufman spent the last two years reporting on the conflict and drew on documents recovered from Hamas, along with behind-the-scenes access to Israel’s top political, military, and intelligence leaders, to reconstruct decisions most of the public never saw. Kaufman explains why Hamas sincerely believed it could destroy Israel, why Hezbollah never launched the full-scale invasion Israel feared most, and why the bitter, often personal rivalry between Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, and Benny Gantz shaped nearly every major decision of the war. He also walks through what he considers Israel’s biggest unforced error—the two-month aid stoppage that fueled a global famine narrative—and how the war ultimately reshaped Hezbollah, Iran’s nuclear program, and the future of the Abraham Accords. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Delano Squires spent 15 years working in D.C. government, including a stint in the city’s office of gun violence prevention, where he noticed the same story on repeat: Young black men were both victims and perpetrators of some of the worst crimes in the city. In his new book, The Vanishing Black Family, he argues that family structure, not policing, incarceration, or education policy, is the most consequential and least discussed driver of racial inequality in America today. Squires makes the case that slavery deformed the black family but didn’t destroy it, and that the real collapse came later, driven by the expansion of the welfare state and the rise of second-wave feminism. He joins Coleman Hughes to talk through the data, the history, and why he thinks black institutions, from churches to civil rights organizations, have avoided the issue entirely. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices