The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - A Raw Discussion on Drug Addiction, Family, Faith, and Conservatism ｜ Glenn Loury EP 205

00:00:00.000 I'm Glenn Lowry and I'm a professor, professor of economics at Brown University.

00:00:04.380 I'm in my 70s. I've had a long career as an academic economist.

00:00:08.140 So you talk about drugs in your memoir.

00:00:11.140 Was crack addictive enough that you did it once and that was it?

00:00:14.560 Wandering the streets of Boston at one o'clock in the morning looking for a thrill.

00:00:18.260 Happened upon a situation. I find myself in a room.

00:00:21.520 People are smoking crack cocaine. I try it. I like it. I really like it.

00:00:26.400 It takes me to another world.

00:00:28.100 It knocks the top of my head off.

00:00:30.220 It gives me a feeling of euphoria.

00:00:32.560 I want to do it again and again.

00:00:34.960 And through that porthole, I entered into an underworld.

00:00:39.800 I was at a halfway house.

00:00:41.000 I was the only professor in the place.

00:00:43.160 That's wild.

00:00:43.940 I don't expect a person to sympathize with the protagonist of this book necessarily.

00:00:49.200 But God, a life lived fully and reported candidly, I'm the better for knowing it.

00:00:55.700 do you have people that were angry with you for anything that you wrote in there yes my friend he

00:01:01.460 said to me i'm not sure i like that guy oh no and and i responded by saying i am not that guy

00:01:08.020 i'm not sure i like him either that guy could never have written this book

00:01:17.460 glenn lowry welcome to my podcast thank you good to be here yeah i'm really i'm really uh honored

00:01:23.460 to be talking with you. I've been following you for a while on social media, and you're brilliant,

00:01:29.260 so it's an honor to have you on. It's my pleasure. Thank you for that compliment.

00:01:32.960 For anyone who isn't familiar with you or your work, could you give a brief background about

00:01:38.000 who you are and what it is you do? And then we'll get into that more.

00:01:42.700 Okay, I'm Glenn Lowry, and I'm a professor, professor of economics at Brown University.

00:01:47.980 I'm in my 70s. I've had a long career as an academic economist.

00:01:52.640 I'm also a podcaster and social critic and a substack and am a pundit who comments on affairs of the day.

00:02:04.200 Race has been one of my beats as an economist, but also as a social critic.

00:02:10.060 I've talked about racial inequality and the issues of racism and so-called race relations in the United States for a long time.

00:02:18.800 I'm relatively conservative in my political orientation and somewhat heterodox and iconoclastic in my opinion.

00:02:27.480 So that's it. I like to think of myself as a well-rounded person.

00:02:31.780 I am a technical specialist in economics, but I'm also an intellectual and a person who's a citizen of the world.

00:02:41.680 And I don't know, does that get the job done?

00:02:44.260 That does. That was perfect.

00:02:45.780 so you recently published a memoir a memoir and uh so we're going to spend most of the time

00:02:53.360 talking about that and then we might talk about politics a little bit um but but your your memoir

00:02:58.280 is late admissions confessions of a black conservative and uh i thought it was brave

00:03:05.080 i think anyone who writes a memoir honestly is pretty brave because the human life is a

00:03:09.260 it's weird and it's awkward. And you got into a lot of details about your youth. So I think we

00:03:16.840 might as well start there. Can we talk about what it was like for you when you were like fairly

00:03:22.320 young growing up and then through your teenage years, some events that stood out?

00:03:27.440 I grew up in Chicago. I was born in 1948. It was an African-American family and community,

00:03:34.880 working middle class, lower middle class. I was a bright kid in school. I got double promotions

00:03:42.800 when I was in grade school and entered high school at age 12. I was younger than the other kids in

00:03:48.840 my cohort, and that chafed at me a little bit. I wasn't so effective in the dating game and

00:03:58.480 getting girls to like me and fulfilling my aspirations for romance. But I was bright.

00:04:05.820 I was precocious. I was the most talkative in my class. I, you know, I was good at math.

00:04:10.760 So forth. And did switching schools a number of times? I switched schools. I think I think I

00:04:16.200 switched schools four times, too, before before the age of grade four, like a lot. It was almost

00:04:20.340 every year. Did that do you think that negatively impacted you overall? It did, but I recovered from

00:04:26.360 it. I was getting poor grades in the second and third grade because I was switching schools so

00:04:32.520 much and the instability must have affected me because I was a bright kid. But when I finally

00:04:36.960 did settle down, when we moved in with my aunt, I started impressing my teachers and even was

00:04:42.840 recommended for a scholarship at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, the private academy

00:04:47.780 on the Hyde Park on the south side of Chicago, although my parents ended up deciding not to

00:04:52.120 send me there. But I'm sure moving around wasn't a good thing. That's the reason that my aunt

00:04:57.740 insisted that my mother move in with her and settle down. Okay, that's interesting. And just

00:05:06.400 out of curiosity, what was the difference? How come your aunt ended up like a stable person

00:05:13.740 with your mom being more fluid? Do you know? I don't know. That's a hard question. People

00:05:23.440 differ. My aunt was the matriarch. She was the oldest of the cohort of the four of them. My

00:05:30.120 mother, their two brothers, and my aunt constituted the Cartmans. My middle name is Cartman. That's

00:05:38.260 my mother's maiden name. And they lost their mother, my grandmother died in her 30s. And my

00:05:46.400 mother was 12 years old when my grandmother passed. And they were all farmed out to live with 1.00

00:05:52.720 different relatives, sisters of my mother's mother, who took in her children after my grandmother

00:06:02.100 their past. So they had different experiences. But I can just tell you that my auntie Lois was

00:06:10.600 solid as a rock. And I started the book with depicting a scene where on Sunday, she'd call

00:06:20.280 us in. We've been to church to report about what was in the sermon. And she was quite strict about

00:06:25.400 it. She wanted to hear you tell her what you got out of going to that service that day.

00:06:29.920 And I took it as quite a challenge, an intellectual challenge, but also kind of, you know, a performance challenge.

00:06:38.640 I wanted to impress her.

00:06:41.160 And I learned lessons from that experience, which I think were to my benefit later in life.

00:06:49.680 Yeah. Okay. Okay. Interesting.

00:06:51.440 um did you did you have faith for your entire life or is this something that you fell away from

00:06:59.040 and then returned to well the faith that I had when I was a kid coming up in Chicago

00:07:04.140 going to that church that my aunt was uh asking about was inherited faith I it was all I knew

00:07:11.520 you know the I was a kid I did what my parents directed me to do um and I fell away from that

00:07:21.200 But I found faith again later in my life.

00:07:23.440 I was baptized for a second time at the age of 40.

00:07:28.560 This time, not as an infant, but as a grown man embracing Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

00:07:36.500 And actually, as time has gone by, I've kind of fallen away from that as well.

00:07:41.680 And I talk about that in the book.

00:07:43.620 I'm happy to talk about it here if you want.

00:07:47.220 But so it's been a...

00:07:50.540 been a up and down encounter so what made you decide to write a mem like a few questions about

00:07:58.940 the memoir one what made you decide to write it and two you go into a lot of detail about

00:08:03.740 mistakes you've made throughout your life like everybody makes mistakes but it's hard to publish

00:08:09.820 that as really showing people who you are so what made you decide to write the memoir and what are

00:08:15.340 are you hoping people get from it? So this is a project that has evolved. It's gone through

00:08:23.420 stages. I think I first started talking about a memoir 10, 12 years ago. I was going to call it

00:08:30.240 Changing My Mind. And I was going to tell the story about my meandering political sensibilities

00:08:36.220 of being, you know, a Black kid from Chicago, working class kid. So naturally, perhaps a little

00:08:43.300 bit progressive in my orientation, to becoming a Reagan conservative in the 80s, to breaking

00:08:49.680 with the neoconservative and conservative intellectual community that I had embedded

00:08:56.400 myself in in the late 90s and in the aughts, to reverting in most recent time to the posture that

00:09:06.080 I announced in the title of the book, Confessions of a Black Conservative. So I was going to talk

00:09:10.460 about my politics. And I thought that was interesting. I thought it was challenging.

00:09:16.040 I thought I owed people, friends, former comrades, an account. But that's not the only thing that's

00:09:26.160 gone on in my life. And as I began to think about that initial conception of the project,

00:09:31.180 I realized that it was arid. It didn't have life. It wasn't true to life. It wasn't true to my life.

00:09:44.000 And I entered into a period of introspection. Now, this is going back a decade or so. I entered into a period of introspection and came out the other side of it thinking that the book was about the struggle with drug addiction.

00:09:59.340 I had a real problem with cocaine in the 1980s, the struggle with, you want to call it sex addiction, with being in our mode of cultivating extramarital sexual relationships with people of the opposite sex.

00:10:13.680 this was something that I had to struggle with that had profound consequences for my life that 0.75

00:10:22.060 was injurious to those who loved me and counted on me that was reflective of my character that

00:10:28.980 that was a betrayal in some sense of the highest no most noble possibilities that my life

00:10:36.840 bequeathed to me and this kind of thing and I and I needed to look at it and so

00:10:42.020 the title of the book became the enemy within it rather than changing my mind it was about

00:10:48.120 the struggle against the enemy within the struggle with the enemy within the tug of war

00:10:53.540 uh and that brought me into contact with the stuff that you made mention of the revelations

00:11:02.180 the confessions, the report. And you asked me, why did I elect to expose myself in that way?

00:11:16.920 And I think you're giving me a lot of time here, Michaela. I appreciate it. Thank you.

00:11:22.580 I assume there will be editing, but in any case,

00:11:25.240 I think this thing

00:11:29.300 just got out of hand

00:11:30.840 it kind of took on a life of its own

00:11:32.380 I didn't intend

00:11:33.620 I didn't start out intending

00:11:35.660 but

00:11:38.260 all kinds of different

00:11:41.020 depths

00:11:43.340 were plumbed as I

00:11:45.120 began to

00:11:47.020 immerse myself in the project of recounting

00:11:49.400 and I realized that in a way

00:11:53.060 I

00:11:54.880 was both the author and the audience for the project. In a way, I was trying to explain

00:12:01.760 myself to myself somehow. And I think perhaps justify myself to myself somehow. And to make

00:12:13.180 a long story short, you've asked me, how could I come to reveal so much about myself? I'm writing

00:12:17.820 to myself as well as about myself, and there's no point in lying to myself.

00:12:22.560 self-delusion self-aggrandizement you know that this this is the meta dimension to my

00:12:33.060 autobiography project the part of it when i reflect on the fact that i am reflecting on my

00:12:39.180 own life and when i have a cover story when i have a nice pretty uh cultivated account that is

00:12:49.480 presentable, that I can give of my life to the public. But I know that that's not the true

00:12:57.280 basis of how I behaved in that situation and what I was thinking and what I was about.

00:13:04.360 If I stick with the cover story, I'm the one who's the loser at the end of the day.

00:13:09.340 I don't know if that made any sense whatsoever.

00:13:11.300 Oh, no, that made total sense. I think the reason I asked that question, I've been,

00:13:18.140 i don't know if you know anything about me but i've been uh like incredibly unbelievably ill

00:13:22.640 for most of my life uh i'm out of it now which is why i can think well enough to talk to you

00:13:27.300 but i'm glad i'm glad yeah yeah uh but i uh kind of i kind of got through it by keeping notes and

00:13:35.200 just writing down the ridiculous things that were happening um hoping to eventually write

00:13:40.440 a memoir that i've like half started and it's hard to figure out you know life's not like

00:13:45.920 particularly pretty even even people who have prettier lives don't have that pretty of a life

00:13:51.480 so it's complicated did you did you have uh did you have people that were angry with you

00:13:57.580 for anything that you wrote in there yes and some of them are close relations of mine yeah

00:14:05.000 how did you children how did you deal with that well we're still dealing with it in a way oh man

00:14:11.580 You know, lovingly, I hope, and with patience and understanding and mutual respect, I had a dear friend, someone I've known for 50 years, practically begged me not to publish the book, thinking that it was an act of self-sabotage, that I would so besmirch my reputation.

00:14:34.920 And I tried to explain to him the gambit. It's a bet. I'm betting that people will see, and I shouldn't be the one to say this, but I'm going to go ahead and say it anyway.

00:14:51.140 the courage, the kind of integrity to the truth about a life, the candor, the spirit

00:15:01.460 that tells this tale about himself, who clearly is more than these particular incidents. He is

00:15:10.460 actually the means by which you come to know these things about himself, but he's removed a bit from

00:15:18.560 it as he recounts the tale. And his vulnerability and his humanity, his honesty, his courage,

00:15:26.760 I repeat myself, will win him something with the reader, will win him, I'm not going to say

00:15:32.700 sympathy because I don't expect a person to sympathize with the protagonist of this book

00:15:37.500 necessarily but but but a kind of respect a kind of appreciation god a life lived fully

00:15:48.640 and reported candidly i'm the better for knowing it kind of reaction from the reader this is what

00:15:55.600 this one go for and the guy by the way i said to my friend who said i i he said to me you know

00:16:02.180 He had read a draft of the book.

00:16:03.720 I'm not sure I like that guy.

00:16:06.020 Oh, no.

00:16:08.040 And I responded by saying, I am not that guy.

00:16:12.580 I'm not sure I like him either.

00:16:15.480 That guy could never have written this book.

00:16:18.460 That's intense.

00:16:19.760 It's scary.

00:16:20.900 I'm impressed anyway.

00:16:22.040 I think it was brave.

00:16:24.040 I don't think all memoirs are written in that way, right?

00:16:27.040 That actually show what people are like.

00:16:29.480 so i think it's impressive hello out there internet people something i don't talk about a ton is the

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00:16:55.900 bio-identical hormone therapy can be super life-changing, but you don't have to go that

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00:17:09.580 other blood work. A lot of the blood work you get tested at regular doctor's offices doesn't go in

00:17:14.220 depth properly, and if you're going to try to optimize hormones, you definitely want someone

00:17:18.260 treating you who knows what they're doing. The doctors that work with Merrick are very in the

00:17:22.460 know about lifestyle optimization, can prescribe hormones, peptides, high quality vitamins,

00:17:27.360 supplements, et cetera. I use them for blood work. My dad uses them. My brother uses them.

00:17:32.060 My husband uses them. They do your blood work and then thoroughly explain the markers and

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00:18:02.300 to give you a doctor that's going to treat you properly enjoy the rest of this episode what made

00:18:07.320 you decide to like aggressively pursue academia as as a as a job your career for your life yeah

00:18:17.780 And well, that happened when I decided to go to graduate school. So I graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, north of Chicago. In 1972, I was a transfer student there on a scholarship.

00:18:33.940 I was a full-time student, but also a full-time employee at a factory as a clerk. I had a young

00:18:42.760 family. I was married with two young children and going to college full-time and working full-time.

00:18:49.220 And I was discovering my gift, my gift for being able to do sophisticated mathematical analysis

00:18:57.580 with relative ease. And that was discovered when I was an undergraduate at Northwestern,

00:19:04.220 and I concentrated in economics. That was my major. I'm sorry, my major was in mathematics,

00:19:10.380 but my minor was in economics. And I decided to go to graduate school. They said, you know,

00:19:16.500 my teachers, you know, you're very gifted. You could do well. You know, you can be a professional

00:19:23.420 economists, they pointed me toward an academic career, and I found it to my liking.

00:19:29.500 And so when I got to MIT, a PhD program, and, you know, everybody in the program aspires to get a

00:19:36.420 job as a, most almost everybody, as a young scholar on a tenure track in a good economics

00:19:44.940 department to publish in the journals and to pursue their research interests. And I got on

00:19:52.300 that track in my early 20s. And I haven't looked back. And I found it to be very rewarding in the

00:20:01.200 sense that I set my own agenda of what it is that I work on and what it is that I do. My time,

00:20:08.180 I read books, I read people's papers and follow what's going on in the world. And then I write

00:20:15.280 and speak teach teaching is just such a wonderful thing i've found this way of living to be quite

00:20:22.820 compatible with my abilities and my interests so i've you know i've been a professor since 1976

00:20:31.160 wow do you think part of the reason you've got to where you've gotten to is because you had a more

00:20:38.340 difficult childhood do you think that pushed you to want to prove more and the reason i'm asking

00:20:44.640 you that is because like I have a couple of kids and I'm trying to figure out how to raise them in

00:20:48.960 a way that's like you don't want to give them too much I feel like part of the thing that makes

00:20:53.560 people successful is facing difficulty at a young age but I'm not sure if that's absolutely necessary

00:21:03.260 for people so do you think it was helpful to you or or do you think you would have ended up where

00:21:08.380 you are with with less to go through you you invite me to kind of pat myself on the back here

00:21:14.820 and i'm going to go ahead and accept the invitation no i think that coming up the hard way

00:21:20.760 and dealing struggle i think that struggle made me better and equipped me for further struggle

00:21:31.460 uh you know nothing was handed to me on a silver platter i mean my my father i had a good

00:21:38.080 relationship with my father. My father was successful as an accountant. He worked for

00:21:43.280 the Internal Revenue Service. He went to law school. At night, he advanced up the managerial

00:21:48.980 ranks. He closed out his career when he retired in his mid-60s as the director of the Kansas City

00:21:56.600 Service Center, which is a huge income tax return processing facility in Kansas City,

00:22:01.880 over which my father was the presiding officer so you know he was not rich he was a bureaucrat he

00:22:09.940 you know he lived on his salary uh but but he was quite a model of discipline and of accomplishment

00:22:16.520 he my mother divorced when i was young as i said but he was a constant presence in my life

00:22:21.220 and when i dropped out of college and my girlfriend got pregnant and you know i kind of was bouncing

00:22:27.020 around before I finally settled down at Northwestern University and started my

00:22:32.340 academic career. When I was kind of bouncing around, he was disappointed, and his disappointment

00:22:39.840 troubled me. But I had his example. You asked me about myself and my own struggles,

00:22:46.240 but I had his example of struggle and of discipline to inspire me. When I got to graduate

00:22:53.260 school, I had a briefcase I carried around. And on either side of it, I had pasted bumper stickers,

00:23:02.380 orange lettering on a black background that said, rise above it, exclamation point.

00:23:09.540 That's what I carried into the classroom when I sat down and put my briefcase down in the aisle

00:23:13.940 next to my chair, a briefcase that announced to the world that this guy here is going someplace.

00:23:21.660 He's on the move.

00:23:23.120 He's hungry.

00:23:25.080 He's hungry.

00:23:25.840 He's serious.

00:23:27.060 Because when I looked around, I saw a bunch of rich kids who didn't have to work a full-time job and didn't have a wife and two kids at home in his early 20s, et cetera, et cetera.

00:23:40.340 So it toughened me up.

00:23:42.320 It gave me determination.

00:23:44.240 It gave me a sense of confidence in my own abilities.

00:23:46.920 I think coming up and having to overcome obstacles was was helpful to me.

00:23:52.960 So then how did you as a parent? Did you I mean, obviously, as a parent, you try to shield your kids, right from from troublesome times.

00:24:04.000 Did you think about that while raising your kids?

00:24:06.900 But if you were presenting them with enough difficulties or did they experience enough difficulties as it was?

00:24:13.000 Oh, this is your question, but you put it to me, OK.

00:24:16.920 And I basically have two sets of kids, one that was born when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and the other that were born when I was in my early 40s.

00:24:26.820 I was less present in raising my older children because their mother and I split up when they were pretty young.

00:24:36.960 I didn't have the kind of relationship with them, and I talk about this in the book, that they deserved, and that in retrospect, I wish that I had found the time and had the focus to develop and to sustain.

00:24:49.960 So when you say raising them, well, their mother raised them.

00:24:55.940 I wasn't consciously in the meeting about how much structure, what are we going to do for our children?

00:25:04.920 You know, those conversations weren't really taking place with my older children. With my younger children, it was a very real part, the question of we're prosperous. My wife and I, both PhDs, my late wife, Linda, we're living in suburban Boston.

00:25:23.160 public schools or private schools is one of the kinds of decisions that we have to make and

00:25:29.020 there are many many other kinds of decisions I can remember one summer Glenn and Nehemiah we

00:25:35.660 were sending them to a summer camp and there was a bully bullying Glenn on the bus and it was a

00:25:41.100 black kid bullying Glenn and the question for us became do we change the program which we ended up

00:25:51.500 doing and sent them someplace else so he didn't have to encounter the bully? Or do we tell him 0.85

00:25:55.280 to stand up to the bully? So my wife prevailed. I wanted him to stand up to the bully. She prevailed

00:26:00.740 and said, you know, we'll just find another program where, you know, it's not so rough.

00:26:05.300 And then I realized that the real thing was we were upper middle class, but I was working class

00:26:13.800 coming up. And the working class kid fights the bully on the bus. This is the thing that you have

00:26:20.320 to do. What upper middle class parent sends their kid to a summer camp where he has to fight a bully

00:26:25.440 on the bus? I was imposing a nostalgia for my own rough upbringing on my son. I wasn't spoiling him

00:26:35.640 by removing him from the conflict situation and whatnot. It wasn't making him soft to do that.

00:26:43.940 That was a delusion to think that it seemed to me ultimately. Again, I don't know if I'm being

00:26:50.120 responsive to the question that you've asked me Michaela but that was that was pretty much what

00:26:54.820 I was looking for that was pretty much what I was looking for I I've just it's just been something

00:26:59.640 I've been thinking about over the years is whether or not experiencing I mean I've come to the same

00:27:06.160 conclusion as you so I I didn't have an upbringing like yours I had you know we were I would say we

00:27:13.040 were we were middle class in Toronto but I went to a whole bunch of different high schools and

00:27:17.700 elementary schools they were public and public schools in a downtown city are just they're not

00:27:23.740 the same as private schools in a downtown city like my art school as a teenager had a ravine

00:27:29.720 behind the subway station where people did tons of different drugs uh and you just like learn how

00:27:37.960 to navigate that and it's fine and it was interesting at the time um but i've but i've

00:27:44.380 come to the conclusion that it's probably better like having more money and just not encountering

00:27:50.640 those scenarios because I don't think you need to encounter those scenarios in your life as a person

00:27:54.940 but I don't know I don't know it's it's hard to decide how much how much you should experience

00:28:02.920 and how that pushes you to success but then is even success worth that I don't know so that's

00:28:09.260 That's the background of where I was coming from anyway.

00:28:12.460 Okay, let's see.

00:28:14.300 We could switch directions a little bit.

00:28:15.900 I would like to hear your comments on the recent debate,

00:28:20.980 if you have any thoughts on that, Trump and Biden.

00:28:24.900 Yeah.

00:28:26.280 I was watching that thing in real time with my wife,

00:28:29.820 my lovely wife, LaJuan, 1.00

00:28:32.300 who is a curse on both their houses. 1.00

00:28:36.320 She has contempt for the Democrats. 1.00

00:28:39.260 She calls them do-nothing Democrats and contempt for the Republicans. 1.00

00:28:43.240 I don't know if I can say this on your podcast, but her phrase is two cheeks of the same ass. 1.00

00:28:51.040 Yeah, that's pretty good. 0.99

00:28:52.200 Okay, so she's kind of a nihilist, and she watches all these ultra-radical podcasts and stuff.

00:28:58.160 I'm not going to name them because I don't want to get her into trouble or myself into trouble.

00:29:03.060 And she has all these kind of ideas, and so she's watching for entertainment's sake.

00:29:07.440 And I'm watching because, you know, I want to hear how Trump and Biden face off against each other.

00:29:13.800 And from the very opening gate, I was saying, I was saying to her, look at him.

00:29:20.100 I'm talking about Biden. Look at him. Look at his eyes. Look at his mouth. He won't close his mouth.

00:29:24.480 Look at him. He looks like he's lost. He's staring in the space. And then he started to speak.

00:29:29.360 and that thing about uh we beat we finally beat medicare or something like that comes out and he

00:29:36.920 has that senior moment where he loses himself in the middle of the thing and he doesn't know where

00:29:41.040 he is and i thought this cannot be happening oh my god i thought this is definitive

00:29:49.320 um and so you could take it from there uh i thought yeah two things i thought they have

00:30:00.120 been lying to us they have been gaslighting us i thought this is like in the wizard of oz when

00:30:09.340 the curtain gets pulled back by the dog and you see the guy with the white hair back there

00:30:13.740 pulling on all the levers and whatnot and you realize that that's the machine that's been

00:30:17.940 making all the sounds and there's no magic. This was like a revelatory moment. I thought

00:30:23.040 they'd been lying to us. And the second thing I thought, and I could not be the only person

00:30:27.700 thinking this, is who is running this country? Who's in charge here? If we are or are not

00:30:35.020 negotiating or encouraging the Ukrainians to negotiate with the Russians about this war

00:30:40.400 that could be World War III in the making.

00:30:43.420 Who's thinking that through?

00:30:45.820 Not that guy.

00:30:48.240 So, and I thought I can't be the only person thinking this.

00:30:51.780 You know, the leaders of important countries

00:30:54.300 throughout the world have got to be asking themselves

00:30:55.760 the same questions.

00:30:57.140 Yeah, I don't know if anyone has any real idea

00:30:59.480 what's going on.

00:31:00.620 Do you think given the negative feedback

00:31:03.160 from the debate that they'll pull Biden

00:31:06.200 and replace him with somebody else?

00:31:08.020 Or do you think they're just going to go ahead

00:31:09.220 and see what happens?

00:31:10.400 Well, we're all holding our breath and waiting to see what's going to happen on that front. I'm reading the newspaper just like you are, and there are a lot of different kinds of reports going on.

00:31:20.800 The calls for him to step down are echoing throughout the media. I mean, the New York Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and everybody in between.

00:31:35.680 uh this particular columnist and uh opinion uh makers uh and whatnot it's a moment such as i've

00:31:43.500 never seen i i'm i'm watching with great interest to see how it unfolds i'm told we're told that

00:31:50.320 he's not going to pull that uh jill biden and hunter biden

00:31:54.500 are tugging on his shirt tail and telling him to stay the course

00:32:02.220 uh i don't understand the inner workings of big league politics well enough to know about what

00:32:08.540 donors are going to do and who the king makers are it would appear that barack hussein obama is

00:32:14.100 one of them it would i heard i heard who knows and who knows what's floating around on x and

00:32:19.760 what's real on that platform but but i heard that obama was concerned as well at this point

00:32:25.940 to put it lightly yeah but like you say who knows because it's all smoke and mirrors yeah yeah yeah

00:32:34.520 exactly uh i i was watching a podcast you did with someone and they they went into detail about

00:32:41.260 what you were doing in the 80s and kind of the lessons you were teaching young black men in

00:32:47.460 particular uh so can we get into that a bit and and i guess so i guess my question is what were

00:32:54.140 the lessons you were trying to teach people or what are the lessons you were trying to teach

00:32:57.080 young black men in particular? Um, let's, let's start with that. Well, in the eighties, I had a

00:33:06.300 cover story in a real story. I had a public line and I had a private life

00:33:13.260 and the public line was, uh, pull up your socks, self-help, uh, the pathologies, the enemy within 1.00

00:33:23.080 the Black community, out of wedlock, births, violence, poor educational performance, family 0.91

00:33:28.240 instability, raise your kids, take advantage of the opportunities that exist, live decently. 1.00

00:33:37.080 Norms, values, rectitude. And the private life was sorted. It involved drugs, it involved sex,

00:33:47.560 It involved not living the way that I was preaching.

00:33:53.280 And the gap between those two is a tension that I try to develop in the book and in my self-examination of my own life.

00:34:00.920 So I'm not sure which one you're referring to when you ask me what was the lessons that I was teaching.

00:34:06.300 Was it the preaching or was it because this became or was it the example that I was setting?

00:34:11.840 Because this became an issue for me at one point when some of my peccadilloes and failings, moral failings became public. 0.94

00:34:23.900 I still thought that doesn't disprove the validity of my prescription for the community that, you know, out of wedlock births are not a good thing, even though I was party to one.

00:34:39.600 that uh you know hedonism is not a good thing discipline is a good thing even though i

00:34:48.220 allowed myself to indulge my hedonistic impulses on more than one occasion and so on

00:34:52.740 and and uh i thought the relationship between my private dealings with the enemy me within

00:35:02.460 glenn lawry and my public castigation of the enemy within black america that those kind of

00:35:08.040 went on in two separate spheres. But I came to believe in the fullness of time that that was a

00:35:16.000 serious error and that the quality of public leadership rests on a foundation that goes down

00:35:24.640 but leave the surface and you can't see it all the way down. It's not only what you can see,

00:35:29.500 it's it's what empowers and animates the the person who is the advocate and if i'm on a hollow

00:35:38.080 foundation how can i have a resonant robust voice of moral leadership this kind of thing again i

00:35:45.460 don't know if this this makes sense but uh or if it's responsive to what it is that you had in

00:35:51.380 mind michaela but that's what i think to say if you guys are not filtering your air it is the

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00:37:19.780 Enjoy the rest of this episode.

00:37:21.180 Maybe you knew the ideal that you were also aiming for, right?

00:37:24.920 I think a lot of people do that.

00:37:28.140 You know what the ideal is.

00:37:29.740 They're still trying to aim towards it as well.

00:37:32.300 That's a good cover story.

00:37:35.140 Does that sound like a cover story?

00:37:37.000 Maybe I'm too young.

00:37:37.980 It might not be, but it could be.

00:37:40.820 it could be the rationalization you know I mean it totally could be it totally could be it probably

00:37:47.760 is but you know I suppose if you know what the ideal is then you should change right rather

00:37:54.580 than reach for it so it possibly maybe that is a cover story so you you talk about drugs in your

00:38:02.540 memoir um how did you end up one why do you think you like went in that direction and then how did

00:38:09.340 you get out of it? Well, so drugs. So there's cannabis, which was illegal pretty much universally

00:38:19.600 when I was coming along. And then there's hard drugs like cocaine and heroin and methamphetamine.

00:38:25.220 Maybe that's a distinction without a difference in some people's minds. I had always been exposed

00:38:30.420 to people smoking cannabis when I was a kid in black working class Chicago. My uncle Mooney,

00:38:36.120 my Aunt Eloise's husband, the head of the house that I grew up in, routinely smoked it. He smoked

00:38:42.840 it around the house. He told us kids it was his asthma medicine. I doubt if smoking can help you

00:38:50.760 with asthma. But it was that sort of commonplace. At family gatherings, when the men would sometimes

00:39:01.940 take a drink to the room upstairs and close the door and talk politics and sports and whatnot,

00:39:06.500 and they'd pass around a little something, it would be a joint and people would be in smoking

00:39:12.280 marijuana. So I smoked marijuana coming out as a teenager, almost by osmosis, just as a part of

00:39:20.760 the culture that I was embedded in. But hard drugs, cocaine and crack cocaine, free basin cocaine,

00:39:29.420 smoking crystalline cocaine, almost destroyed me. And it came upon me all of a sudden.

00:39:36.020 I had endured a catastrophe in my life, my relationship with a younger woman when I was

00:39:43.680 a professor at Harvard, whom I was keeping in an apartment unknown to my wife while I was a

00:39:51.120 professor at Harvard and in line for a big job in the Reagan administration. And I got into a fight

00:39:57.200 with this young woman. And she accused me of assaulting her. And I was arrested 1.00

00:40:01.820 for assault. I was arrested for a criminal offense, and it was a public event.

00:40:08.600 That's stressful.

00:40:10.220 I can say she's not here to speak for herself, but I will say on my account, I didn't assault

00:40:14.980 her, although I did push her out of an apartment. I literally physically, and I treated her very

00:40:22.240 badly and dismissively. And she took the countermeasures that she took and the situation

00:40:29.140 where eventually she dropped the charges. She didn't come back to cooperate and testify in any

00:40:34.860 kind of trial. So the charges were dropped against me and I did not get convicted of that crime. But

00:40:39.880 I was accused of it publicly. And I had to withdraw from the government job. And it was a scandal on

00:40:46.420 the front of the newspapers. And I was a high-flying Black conservative with a publication record and

00:40:51.500 a profile in magazines and stuff as this guy coming along criticizing affirmative, you know,

00:40:57.280 kind of, this was the same time that Clarence Thomas was coming along. And I was a kind of

00:41:01.560 junior illustration of the same trend of Reaganite, friendly, Black, conservative, up and coming,

00:41:09.680 talented, roughly of the same age. Clarence and I are roughly the same age, Justice Thomas.

00:41:15.480 us. But in any case, so it was in the midst of that. And I'm now exposed as a fraud. I'm now

00:41:23.740 humiliated and scandalized. And in the depths of that depressed condition, I allowed myself to

00:41:34.080 begin experimenting. I tell the story of how it came about. It is sorted in detail. I don't want

00:41:40.380 to embarrass you or your audience by going into too much detail here, but I basically

00:41:46.780 wandering the streets of Boston at one o'clock in the morning, looking for a thrill, happen upon

00:41:51.520 a situation. I find myself in a room. People are smoking crack cocaine. I try it. I like it.

00:42:00.140 I really like it. It takes me to another world. It knocks the top of my head off. It gives me a

00:42:07.920 feeling of euphoria. I want to do it again and again. And through that porthole, I entered into

00:42:19.700 an underworld. And I was robbed twice at gunpoint. I was out searching until my ATM

00:42:30.140 credits ran out to buy more cocaine. I was hiding out in seedy motel rooms. I was

00:42:39.020 consorting with dangerous and despicable people. I was one of them, in a way. And

00:42:47.300 at the same time, I had my wife, Linda, the mother of Glenn II and Nehemiah,

00:42:52.700 neither of whom were yet born at this time, worried about where I was at two

00:42:58.820 o'clock in the morning. And that was my intro into this world of addiction. And I ended up at

00:43:14.220 McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts as an inpatient at the Appleton

00:43:19.420 Recovery Clinic, which was treating alcoholism and substance abuse and drug addiction at a high

00:43:28.480 level of medical sophistication at a renowned psychiatric hospital. And I spent 60 days

00:43:37.820 as an inpatient at that facility over the course of three months. I was in for five weeks. I came

00:43:44.840 out and relapsed and went back in for the remaining time that my insurance would cover 0.99

00:43:48.940 as an inpatient and moved from there to a halfway house where my roommates were people

00:43:55.760 had come from shelters who had just come out of a lockup and a detox. I was at a halfway house

00:44:03.840 with drunks, real drunks. I was the only professor in the place.

00:44:15.040 The guy who ran the house took my car keys away from me and told my wife she was not to have sex 0.96

00:44:19.600 with me again until further notice you know I and I lived like that for five months in that halfway

00:44:26.900 house before I finally came out and anyway I go on but that was my that was my entering into the

00:44:35.480 world of of addiction and my early efforts to free myself from it that's that's wild so did

00:44:42.740 was that like crack addictive enough that you did it once and that was it yeah I did it once and I

00:44:49.960 wanted to do it again was I quote unquote hooked did I have a irresistible physical urge to do it

00:44:57.360 I'm not sure that that is not something which didn't develop over time if I had been at a party

00:45:03.340 and somebody had offered me something and I had taken a hit would have been the same as me being

00:45:06.840 in this doldrums and in this kind of depressive state and looking for a way of taking myself out

00:45:14.160 of my real life into some fantasy. I don't know. I, I think we need a psychiatrist to figure that

00:45:21.440 out. Wow. That sounds, sounds extremely unpleasant. Just, just from hearing about it.

00:45:29.920 You, you mentioned at the beginning of the episode that you've, so you got baptized again

00:45:36.520 when you were 40. Was it after those events that kind of, you know, brought you to being baptized

00:45:43.320 again? Yeah, it was immediately after those events. Those events were 1987, 1988, early 1988.

00:45:52.040 And then I went into recovery at the McLean Hospital and then at the halfway house, which I

00:46:00.160 left in Thanksgiving of 1988. And our son, Glenn II, our first child, Linda, and my first child,

00:46:08.040 Glenn II, was born in January of 1989. So I was coming out into, you know, the open skies and

00:46:15.940 the new life of a recovered man. And I came out in part as a Christian because the religious

00:46:23.460 dimension of my recovery, there was Alcoholics Anonymous in the meetings and the 12 steps,

00:46:28.040 But there was also a spiritual component that I began to take more and more seriously.

00:46:34.220 I write about this in the book and came to become a member of a church congregation and to become a stalwart member of that congregation.

00:46:41.900 and a student of the Bible and a disciple of the pastor of the church who mentored me in my Christian walk

00:46:51.080 and who baptized me in April of 1989, just a few months after Glenn was born.

00:47:02.080 So it was after the encounter with cocaine and my efforts finally to free myself from it,

00:47:08.260 but not long after.

00:47:09.220 And it was definitely a part of this period in my life

00:47:11.840 when I was redefining my sense of self,

00:47:17.220 reconceiving my sense of self

00:47:20.040 and the rebirth of my relationship with my wife,

00:47:23.900 to whom I was now in these years,

00:47:25.580 absolutely faithful and dedicated.

00:47:28.140 The onset of our family, young Glenn,

00:47:30.360 and then three years later, young Nehemiah coming along.

00:47:34.300 And we were standing on our own two feet.

00:47:38.700 We were in a pretty healthy situation, I think.

00:47:41.900 And the church was certainly a part of that.

00:47:44.280 What's happened, I guess, since then?

00:47:46.980 You said that you've fallen away from it for whatever reason.

00:47:52.780 Can you describe why that is?

00:47:56.620 Well, I can try.

00:47:58.400 It's one of the themes in the book.

00:48:00.440 I know I keep saying that, but I really do want people to read the book.

00:48:04.300 because I grapple with these things. There was always trouble brewing. I tell two stories

00:48:13.900 that illustrate this. One of them is about my faith walk and about there always having been

00:48:21.700 some issues. One of them is our congregation was relatively charismatic and Pentecostal in its

00:48:29.740 orientation. And a member of the congregation fell ill with breast cancer, a beloved member

00:48:35.720 of the congregation with three beautiful children, a woman in her 30s.

00:48:42.320 And she declined and ultimately she died.

00:48:48.800 And there was a moment as she was near the end when she would be sharing, she would share in

00:48:55.800 the announcement period during the service where her things stood. And the scans were coming back

00:49:01.540 and they weren't encouraging. And she shared this and the pastor urged us to pray. And the

00:49:07.260 congregation began to pray and the prayer consumed a room of 100 people. And there was fervor and

00:49:12.820 there was passion and there was pleading and there was plaintive tone to it. And it became

00:49:19.300 powerful, and a rhythm to it, and it built, and it built to a crescendo of the petitioning

00:49:26.960 that the Lord would somehow make a miracle happen in the life of this woman, right here,

00:49:32.180 right now, in the name of Jesus, we pray.

00:49:39.600 And I realized that deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down,

00:49:44.740 i didn't believe it was going to make a difference

00:49:49.960 i thought it was like believing in magic

00:49:54.460 i thought no the doctors don't know everything of course that's true and yes presumably random

00:50:02.480 events can happen in life but beating that cancer by petitioning the invisible almighty to enact a

00:50:11.700 extra natural act of miraculous intervention. I didn't believe it. Now, please forgive me. I mean

00:50:21.360 no disrespect to anybody. I'm talking about Glenn Lowry, and I'm saying I realized I didn't believe

00:50:27.960 it. I prayed on. My wife and I discussed this. We discussed it at length. We, of course, were

00:50:35.680 heartbroken at what was happening to this woman. We, of course, like anybody, would have wanted

00:50:40.160 a miracle to be inactive, but we didn't believe we could bring it about through prayer.

00:50:45.820 In fact, we didn't believe in miracles.

00:50:50.880 Not really.

00:50:52.300 And there's another story like that that I tell, and this is, I know there are answers.

00:50:56.560 I know that there are answers to these questions that I'm raising.

00:51:02.020 I know that our reason is finite and bounded, and that there are things beyond our kin.

00:51:07.080 i know that but i'm just telling you you ask me and i'm telling you where this kind of blurring

00:51:14.680 of the line where i can't quite see god's face begins and that was one of the things

00:51:19.840 and there was another incident that i i talk about in the book which was

00:51:24.040 the a young woman who worked for me and who was a member of the church uh died of a certain

00:51:29.760 sudden heart disease that overtook her and i won't go into too much detail except to say that

00:51:35.680 she was at a critical point in her life where she's in her early 40s, and she'd always wanted

00:51:41.160 to go to law school. And she had worked for me very ably as an administrative assistant for years.

00:51:46.800 And ultimately, she got herself, she took the entrance exam, the LSAT. She got in,

00:51:52.240 she made law review in her first year. She was on a new trajectory in her life. And then suddenly,

00:51:57.160 within months, she was dead. And there was a funeral.

00:52:00.080 same congregation but now there's 300 people and they consume a sanctuary St. Paul African

00:52:10.560 Methodist Episcopal Church located in Central Square in Cambridge Massachusetts was where

00:52:15.480 this funeral took place her mother flew in from Louisiana for her daughter's funeral and I was

00:52:22.340 bereft at the loss the tragic loss of this young woman and of course everyone was grieving but

00:52:29.920 the tone that ultimately overtook the funeral worship service was a joyous celebration of her

00:52:35.100 everlasting life. She was with Jesus now. That's what her mother told me. We came not to mourn the

00:52:44.640 death, but to celebrate the everlasting life because we've been promised something.

00:52:52.240 And at that moment, I had to make some remarks. I had prepared something. I completely forgot what

00:52:58.620 I had prepared. I stood up, I mumbled through something, but I could not shake the feeling of,

00:53:03.700 well, I'm mad at God because this woman has been taken from us. And I'm mad at my fellow

00:53:08.760 congregants because credulously, almost naively childlike, they're in a celebratory mood.

00:53:17.120 I wanted to just be still for a moment, pause and look down into the abbess and recognize that it

00:53:22.100 goes all the way down. I wanted to be in awe of the frailty of our human condition. I wanted to be

00:53:30.200 anything but happy. And I found myself pulling down Friedrich Nietzsche when I got home from

00:53:46.340 that funeral, and, you know, lapsing into a kind of bitterness and despair and contempt.

00:54:02.040 Oh, God help me for my fellow Christians at that moment. I know this is horrible to say,

00:54:08.420 and I don't take any relish in it. You've asked me about my own struggle with faith,

00:54:13.760 And I was shaken. I was shaken. So those are at least part of the reason. I'm a rationalist. You know, I'm a scientist. I'm a person who believes in what you can prove.

00:54:33.240 You know, I always had these doubts, suspending disbelief or suspending my understanding or accepting things unfaithed, faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

00:54:47.660 Evidence of things not seen? How can I make sense of that?

00:54:55.820 And so I lapsed into a kind of agnosticism.

00:54:58.760 I kind of.

00:55:03.240 don't know yeah okay well that was understandable

00:55:11.940 that was completely understandable uh glenn i'm gonna let you go that was very interesting though

00:55:20.980 thank you very much for coming on and like i said i'll link the book below so anybody interested

00:55:25.800 in checking it out should check it out well great i mean michaela it's been good to talk with you

00:55:31.680 And I look forward, someone will send me a link

00:55:33.520 or something like that.

00:55:34.280 So I'll know how to access this content

00:55:36.760 once you put it up.

00:55:38.400 Yes, perfect.

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - July 09, 2024

A Raw Discussion on Drug Addiction, Family, Faith, and Conservatism ｜ Glenn Loury EP 205

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