Overcoming the Odds with Roland Fryer (S3 Ep.18)

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Conversations with Coleman
Episode: Overcoming the Odds with Roland Fryer (S3 Ep.18)
Host: Coleman Hughes
Guest: Roland Fryer, Professor of Economics at Harvard
Date: June 5, 2022

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Main Theme

This episode features a candid, in-depth conversation between Coleman Hughes and Harvard economist Roland Fryer, focusing on Fryer’s extraordinary personal journey, his nuanced takes on race, identity, and progress in America, and his rigorous research on issues like education and police use of force. The discussion blends memoir with sharp social commentary and empirical analysis, touching on overcoming disadvantages, redefining racial conversations, and searching for data-driven solutions to complex social issues.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Roland Fryer's Upbringing and Family Dynamics

• Background: Born in Daytona Beach, Florida, Fryer was raised between his father in Texas and his grandmother in Florida after his mother left when he was young.
• Family Influence:
  • His grandmother, a strong and steady presence, shaped his worldview and taught him life lessons about race and resilience ([03:26], [05:13]).
  • Fryer grew up around family members involved in crime but never saw himself as disadvantaged.
  • He had little contact with his mother until his 20s, and his father was often absent—“He didn't want to have kids, man...I went days, weeks without seeing him even when I was 10 or 12 years old” ([03:26]).
• Education: Disengaged from high school due to lack of challenge and life distractions, including his father’s legal troubles ([20:17]). Later found inspiration and clarity in college economics classes:
  • “I walked into my first economics class and it was like someone had turned the light on...it was such clarity to me that I don't really know how to describe it” ([23:22]).

2. Navigating Identity and Overcoming the Odds

• Community Perceptions:
  • Fryer never felt “less than” as a Black person, echoing Hughes’ own upbringing.
  • “I never thought of myself as lesser than anyone...I never in my entire childhood did I say, we're poor...I just grew up because of success in the football field feeling like I could do anything” ([10:02], [13:48]).
• Resilience Factors:
  • Sports provided him discipline, anger management, and a sense of achievement.
  • Having “air cover” from tough relatives protected him socially, allowing freedom to pursue different interests without judgment about his “Blackness” ([10:02]).
  • A competitive nature and his grandmother’s high expectations contributed to his eventual drive ([09:38]).

3. Generational Perspectives on Race and Discrimination

• Grandmother’s Experience:
  • Having lived through Jim Crow and integrated schools, she was quick to interpret ambiguous social interactions as discrimination ([14:35]).
  • Fryer recalls their debates: “We see the same thing and infer very different things from it…how she interpreted that signal was very different than I interpreted…the same exact pieces of information because we did so through our experience” ([15:54]).
• Value of Lived Experience:
  • Both speakers discuss how lived experience shapes perceptions but can also perpetuate outdated attitudes or blind spots ([16:49]).
• On Focus and Effort:
  • “If you and I want to sit around and have a drink and talk about how much discrimination there is in the world and then get up at 5 a.m. to get our ass to work...I don't see anything wrong” ([18:49]).

4. Educational Innovation: The Reconstruction Project

• Concept:
  • Fryer co-founded Reconstruction, a supplemental education platform emphasizing Black culture, academic rigor, and community pride.
  • Analogy to Chinese and Jewish Sunday schools—an environment of achievement and cultural connection beyond traditional classrooms ([24:42]).
• Purpose:
  • To fill the gap in educational and cultural enrichment that used to be provided by more cohesive communities, extended families, and churches ([26:55]).

5. Empirical Research on Policing and Racial Bias

• Findings in “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” (2016):
  • Lower-level Use of Force: Significant racial bias—Black people are 53% more likely to experience force in police stops; even when fully compliant, still 25% more likely ([29:29]).
  • Lethal Force (Shootings): No evidence of racial bias in police shootings. “When it comes to lethal use of force...we found no racial differences whatsoever” ([29:29]).
• Public Perception and Media:
  • Results on non-lethal force are under-discussed; the media and activists often focus only on shootings.
  • Anger about shootings is often “a kind of redirection of anger” from everyday humiliations ([33:35]).
• Courage in Academia:
  • Fryer criticizes researchers who bury inconvenient findings: “Some of those other papers...find the same result on shootings. It's just they're cowards...they put it in appendix table 74” ([35:08]).
• Obama White House Meeting:
  • Obama engaged as a “skeptical scholar” but ultimately, “nothing got done” at the policy level despite good discussion ([37:02]).

6. Immersing Himself with Police: Humanizing the Job

• Learnings from Ride-Alongs:
  • Policing is far more complex and emotionally demanding than it appears from the outside ([40:18]).
  • “Riding around in a police car for 10 hours looking for bad guys, turns out after a few hours, you start to see people who look like bad guys. I mean, that's just...that’s what happens” ([40:18]).
  • Contrasts between cities—e.g., disconnected car patrols in Houston vs. community walking beats in Camden.
  • Trauma is routine: “Someone dies within five feet…I'm done for the day...the police get started getting back in their vehicles” ([42:22]).

7. School Reform and Charter Schools

• Empirical Findings:
  • The average charter school is no better than the average public school; however, a few charters profoundly outperform, and others underperform drastically ([45:39]).
  • Harlem Children’s Zone, in particular, yields major life effects: “Boys that attend his school are 100% less likely to be incarcerated…girls are 75% less likely to be pregnant in their teens” ([45:39]).
  • Overall, charter schools have “zero” effect on income at age 30 (mixed long-term evidence, [45:39]).
• High-Performing School Practices:
  • Extended time in school
  • Use of data to drive instruction and adapt
  • Intensive teacher evaluation and hiring
  • High-dosage tutoring in small groups
  • Consequential, high-expectation school culture ([49:10])
• Lesson:
  • “Kids will live up or down to our expectations...high expectations...were really key” ([50:41]).

8. Evidence-Driven DEI: Sigma Squared

• Motivation:

  • Fryer founded Sigma Squared in response to performative corporate diversity statements after George Floyd’s murder, seeking to apply empirical rigor to workplace talent and bias ([52:30]).

• How It Works:

  • Software analyzes company HR data for statistical evidence of bias, providing detailed diagnostics and recommendations ([54:45]).
  • Focuses on bias as “market failure”—“If you have bias, you can't possibly be [at the talent frontier]...I'm helping companies get there. I think of it as DEI for those who are serious” ([55:58]).

• Limitations and Pushback:

  • Addresses “classic” interpersonal/decision bias, not vague notions of “structural bias” unless empirically observable ([58:00]).
  • “The second camp you mentioned thinks every disparity is bias, but that's just statistically wrong. We can't take that seriously” ([59:54]).

9. Final Reflections

• Roland’s Core Philosophy:
  • Progress happens by combining honest, rigorous analysis, confronting hard truths, and optimizing for real talent and opportunity—not by repeating platitudes or hiding from data.
• Advice to Listeners:
  • Fryer invites listeners to contact him via his Harvard Economics webpage ([62:51]).

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Not Feeling Disadvantaged:

  “I never thought of myself as lesser than anyone...I never in my entire childhood did I say, we're poor...” – Roland Fryer ([10:02])

• On Experiences Shaping Perception:

  “We see the same thing and infer very different things from it. Right. And so how she interpreted that signal...was very different than I interpreted the same exact pieces of information because we did so through our experience.” – Roland Fryer ([15:54])

• On Anger Over Police Shootings:

  “It's a kind of redirection of that anger, that very understandable anger that people feel about being roughed up and being treated in disrespectful ways.” – Coleman Hughes ([33:35])

• On Academic Cowardice:

  “Some of those other papers...find the same result on shootings. It's just they're cowards and so they put it in appendix table 74.” – Roland Fryer ([35:08])

• On Policing’s Challenges:

  “The job is complicated...riding around in a police car for 10 hours looking for bad guys...after a few hours, you start to see people who look like bad guys.” – Roland Fryer ([40:18])

• On Educational Potential:

  “Kids will live up or down to our expectations...high expectations...were really key when it came to schools that were able to drive achievement.” – Roland Fryer ([50:41])

• On Systemic/Structural Racism:

  "The second camp you mentioned thinks every disparity is bias, but that's just statistically wrong. We can't take that seriously." – Roland Fryer ([59:54])

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Timestamps for Key Moments

• Roland’s Early Life and Family: [03:26]–[07:13]
• Sports, Resilience & Identity: [09:38]–[13:48]
• Debates with Grandmother on Race: [14:35]–[16:49]
• Disengagement from High School: [20:17]
• Epiphany in Economics: [23:22]
• The Reconstruction Education Project: [24:42]–[28:54]
• Police Use of Force Study: [29:29]–[33:35]
• Obama White House Meeting: [37:02]
• Lessons from Police Ride-Alongs: [40:18]–[44:43]
• Charter School Data: [45:39]–[50:41]
• DEI and Sigma Squared: [52:30]–[61:26]
• Final Reflections: [61:26]–[62:59]

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Overall Tone

The episode maintains an intellectual but warm, sometimes playful atmosphere, blending hard data with personal narrative. Fryer is unapologetically candid, skeptical of academic groupthink, and committed to letting evidence guide both policy and personal behavior. Coleman Hughes provides thoughtful, open-ended prompts and draws productive parallels to his own experiences.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a rare combination of street-level perspective, academic rigor, and actionable insight. Fryer’s story is one of overcoming without bitterness, focusing on real solutions—whether in policing, education, or workplace diversity. The conversation delivers both challenge and hope: “You can both optimize talent and increase diversity. If there is bias, bias is a market failure. We got to get that out.” ([55:58])

Transcript

[Roland Fryer]

SA.

[Coleman Hughes]

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can get access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHughes.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q and A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Roland Fryer. Roland is an economics professor at Harvard University. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant and the Bates Medal. Roland is probably among the top five most frequent guest requests that I get, so it was really exciting to finally have him on the show. In this episode, we discuss Roland's childhood and the many obstacles he had to overcome in order to become a top notch economist. We discuss his relationship with his grandmother and his father. We both discuss our relationships to our own racial identities. We discuss the progress that America has made in fighting racism. We talk about whether race consciousness can ever be a good thing. We talk about why high school is boring for so many people and what can be done about it. We talk about stand up comedy and the power of humor. We discuss Roland's famous empirical work on the prevalence of racial bias in police shootings and arrests and the implications of this research for the Black Lives Matter movement. We talk about Roland's meeting with President Obama. We discuss what Roland learned by doing ride alongs with police officers. We talk about data driven ways to improve K12 education. We discuss the nebulous concept of systemic racism. We discuss Roland's alternative diversity, equity and inclusion company and much more. If you're watching this on YouTube, you might notice the video is not quite as crisp as it usually is. The SD card slot in my camera decided to break right before this interview, so I had to use the backup zoom video. Sorry about that. All right, so without further ado, Roland Fryer. Okay, Roland Fryer, thanks so much for coming on my show.

[Roland Fryer]

Thanks for having me.

[Coleman Hughes]

So I first encountered you around 2016 when your famous paper called An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force came out. And this was around a the time of a big flare up of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and so forth. And I think that's probably around the time some or many listeners of the podcast first encountered your name. I want to table all of that right now and just ask questions about you and your life from the beginning. So we'll get to all of that, but first things first. Where are you from? Where were you born? What were the circumstances of your childhood like?

[Roland Fryer]

Oh, man, that's. Well, it's a complicated question. Not really, but it could take a while. But I'll be short. I was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, Volusia County Hospital. And my grandmother brought me home from the hospital, or at least that's the story she tells. Obviously, I have no memory of that. I spent the first five years or so in Florida, in Daytona beach. And then my father got a job as a copy salesman. And by that time my mother had already left and my father and I moved to North Texas, right outside of Dallas. And I spent as much time with my grandmother as I could. So literally every break from school, every holiday, I was back in Daytona Beach. So whatever the percentages are, I spent a third of my time or more in Daytona in my grandmother's neighborhood, and 2/3 of my time with my father. As I, as I grew older, my father and I grew distant. And my grandmother was really all I had. She raised me from afar. Right. We didn't have Skype and Zoom back then, so we would talk on the phone every single night for hours and hours. And so I grew up in this weird way where I didn't know my mother until I was in my 20s. And I grew up with a father who, you know, he just was not. He didn't want to have kids, man, you know, I'm very grateful that, that we had a roof over our heads, but in terms of enrichment or anything, that was not base level, that wasn't his thing. I mean, I went days, weeks without seeing him even when I was 10 or 12 years old. But my grandmother was a steady force in my life and we disagreed a whole lot. And in my opinion, she had too many rules because in Texas there was no rules and in Florida there was way too many of them. But I'm so incredibly grateful that she was in my life. And everything I know about race in America, how to live and be in the world, comes from conversations with my grandmother.

[Coleman Hughes]

So as a teenager, what were your interests? Was there any sign that you would later become interested in economics and become a top notch economist, or did you stumble into that somehow? So what was that? What's the story there?

[Roland Fryer]

Both. Right. Like, as I've gotten older, I realized there were signs, but that may be just looking backwards and rationalizing. Right. For example, I used to tease my grandmother, this is the kind of stuff that would, you know, that would drive her nuts. My grandmother was always like a bargain conscious shopper. Of course she was at her max. She earned 30 something thousand dollars a year as a school teacher. And so my grandmother would drive around town looking for the best gas price. And it just made no sense to me that she didn't calculate any of her own opportunity costs or the literal gas she was burning, looking around for something that might be 1 or 2 cents less a gallon. And so I would ask my grandmother those questions. And you know, it's a southern black neighborhood. Children were to be seen and not heard. But so it would annoy her that I would ask her those types of questions, which for an economist are quite natural. So my grandmother didn't say, wow, you're a budding economist. She says, wow, you're annoying as shit. Right. So I wouldn't say there were any. Back then. I didn't think there were any early signs whatsoever as an adult. And now having kids, I can look back and see those kind of precocious moments and wonder whether those were early flickers of economic reasoning. But look, my cousins, my grandmother's sister had four or five children and they were responsible for distributing a large share, I don't know what the share was, but a large share of the crack that was distributed in Daytona Beach, Florida. Right. So that was another part of my family. And I love those folks. I hung out with them all the time. And that was also a part of my childhood and understanding just how addictive and the drug trade can be for young black folks who live in these types of neighborhoods. So I don't know if there were any early flickers, Coleman, but there certain were. I learned how to count, counting money for my cousin Doopie. Right? Like literally I would learn I just.

[Coleman Hughes]

Counting money from him selling crack.

[Roland Fryer]

Yeah. And so I grew up in a really weird way. Actually, let me take that back. I grew up in what I would consider weird now, but unfortunately, I think it's too damn common, folks who look like you. And I grew up in these ways that are not really conducive to economic mobility. On the other hand, you know, I was looking around my house the other day and I found my first grade report card which had my California Achievement test in them. It turns out I was 99th percentile on the math scores, which, you know, does. Which my grandmother never Told me so maybe there was some early flickers. They weren't celebrated in a way that I would do, you know, for my own daughters. I mean, my own daughters get a smiley face like, you know, we bake them cakes around here, like it's a big deal. We all focus on achievement. It just wasn't that way in the 80s in the south, at least in the networks that I inhabited.

[Coleman Hughes]

So I grew up in a two parent home. And you, you actually know my father and I grew up in the kind of environment where I was expected to go to college, to do drugs or to sell drugs, or to be a drug addict, was an anomaly, was an exception to the norm. I grew up with all, you know, my mother, who was from the hood, she was from the South Bronx and had gotten out of it through education and was. Had a really extreme stance towards all of the sort of pathology she had grown up around. She brought that attitude to me and she was, you know, over my shoulder before I was in kindergarten, teaching me how to do times tables and so forth, having very high expectations. So on one level, when someone sees that a person like me ended up going to Columbia and doing very well and having a podcast, having a career as a writer, intellectual, it is less surprising coming from the kind of nurturing, safe and privileged environment that I came from. When somebody looks at the environment you came from and sees everything you've accomplished, there's more of a sense of surprise and a sense of what was it about you that you were able to negotiate having cousins that were dealing crack, whom you were presumably pretty close to, but yet to not get so fully sucked into that world that you were able to have this career as like a Bates medal winning. I think that's what it's called, right? Top notch economist. So how are you able to negotiate that environment which so many people get sucked into and come out of it with this illustrious career?

[Roland Fryer]

I don't know, Coleman. By not reading sociology books that say stuff like disadvantaged. I don't know, we never thought of ourselves as disadvantaged. I mean, I never thought of myself as lesser than anyone. And in terms of the navigation, it turns out that having cousins who cook up a lot of rocks and distribute them gives you some air cover when it comes to other things.

[Coleman Hughes]

And, you know, what do you mean by that?

[Roland Fryer]

Yeah, I mean, there was no, no matter what choices I made, there was very little questioning of my black right, you know what I mean? And so I wasn't interested in Shakespeare whatsoever. But if I had been right, like, my sense is People would have been like, oh, you know, he ain't black. He likes Shakespeare. I mean, it's kind of hard not to say that, given the conditions I was being raised in. And so I. For me, like, as I look back, I don't know. I get this question a lot. And the answer, the true answer, is, I don't know. But, you know, if I want to pontificate about it a little bit, I would say first, sports is really important to me. I played football from five years old all the way up through high school, and that was really very important for me on a number of dimensions. One, there were times of life I was really angry, and that allowed my anger to get out. Number two, it taught me grit and resilience like nobody's business, right? Like, there's just something about laying it all out on the line and losing that will humble you and make you strive for more. No one who plays sports, if they want to win, asks the other team to take it light on them. They just try to get better. So it is the relentless pursuit of trying to get better. So I was really competitive as a kid, and sports was my outlet for that. And then I think also, like, my grandmother was a great role model for me. And again, we disagreed. Our relationship was complicated. All relationships are complicated. But I love that woman. Every part about our relationship, the ups and the downs, all of it, I love. And, you know, there was some singular person that I could call no matter how hard it got. She might not give me the answer I wanted, but I could call on her, and I felt like she had my back. And the third thing I alluded to before, which is I never felt any rumors or felt any sense of inferiority, any other racial group, right? Like, my grandmother used to do this crazy thing that whenever she saw a white person doing something that wasn't perfect, it could be that they stumbled off of a curb. It could be that they danced, but she didn't like the way they were dancing. It could be they got a simple question wrong, but in an innocent way. It didn't matter what mistake it was. She would look at me and she would roll her eyes, and she was like, that's that superior race. So I grew up, like, feeling. Not feeling sorry for white people, but, you know, like, just thinking that they weren't quite fast enough on the football field. They couldn't really dance that well. They weren't that interesting. They weren't funny. Even though we grew up in a very kind of blue collar. You said your mom's from the hood in Brooklyn. There's not really hoods like that in the South. It's not really the way it works. But in a blue collar, black neighborhood where my grandmother lived, there was just no sense that I thought we could do anything. Right. I never in my entire childhood did I say, we're poor, right? Like, I just grew up because of success in the football field feeling like I could do anything. And yes, I sucked in class and didn't really take school very seriously. You know, maybe I had a 2.2 in high school or something, but that was because I didn't try in my own head. It was because I didn't try, not because I was inferior and couldn't do it. Does that make sense?

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, it does. I mean, I feel the same way in that I never remember a moment at any point as a kid where I felt less than because I was black. I always felt I could be as smart or as good as anyone, you know, so much so that it felt like the rhetoric of black is beautiful and black excellence and all of that. It all felt actually unnecessary to me because I took it so much for granted, which is ultimately where. And I saw when people would say those things, a little part of me thought maybe they're saying it because at some level they're afraid it's not true. They don't always believe it. They're saying it. It's an aspirational truth. But for me, it was a lived truth my whole childhood.

[Roland Fryer]

Yeah, I feel the same way you do. I would say that I didn't quite get to that last piece of the aspirational. You know, you're a deeper brother than me, I guess. But I didn't get to that piece. But I just always felt like it was unnecessary. But lots of things people said that were unnecessary. Right. Like, so I just felt like, whatever, it's just clutter in the world. But I never. It's why I have such deep love for black people, because I just grew up in this area where, you know, I went to a black church, hung out in my grandmother's neighborhood. It was just this deep love for folks and their potential and obviously their outcome. People who grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, don't look good, right? The data don't look good. But at that area, at that time of life, I wasn't looking at the data. I was just interacting with people in my network.

[Coleman Hughes]

What were the disagreements with your grandmother that you're mentioning?

[Roland Fryer]

Oh, my gosh, my grandmother. Let me just give a little bit of context. To be fair to her, you know, my grandmother was born in 1925, so she must have been in her formidable, you know, early and late 20s and early 30s during Jim Crow. She also integrated schools in Florida in 1969. And so she was brought from Turretti Mall school in Daytona near her house to an all white school in Port Orange, Florida. And so that experience was very jarring to her the way she described it. And so that's all to say. There would be lots of interactions that we would have in life where she would say that's discrimination. And I, being the wannabe economist of age 8, would just question that assumption. How can you be so sure? How do you know it's not this? How do you know it's not that? One specific example, we go to McDonald's, my favorite thing to do as a kid. And we're going to get whatever I'm going to show my age now, two Big Macs for $2, something maybe. And my grandmother, we get a couple Big Macs of peas, we bought out a fries, put them in the bag. My grandmother gives the woman her money and the woman takes the change and puts it on the counter, but doesn't give it to my grandmother. I think to myself and my 8 year old brain, she's just trying not to spread germs. That's pretty clever. And my grandmother's like that white woman, don't want to touch me. She just goes off in the parking lot.

Right.

And we, in fact this inspired some economic models. I wrote Life. We see the same thing and infer very different things from it. Right. And so how she interpreted that signal, we call it in economics, was very different than I interpreted the same exact pieces of information because we did so through our experience. And so my grandmother and I would debate a lot about how important discrimination was to the outcomes of black people. And it wasn't or any social issues. We literally on her couch with her plastic slip covers, we would sit there for hours and debate what I now know as labor markets, police, education, crime, everything you can imagine. My grandmother, of course, had real views on and through her experience. And I mostly listened, but would debate back whenever I had something halfway interesting to say.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, that's interesting. That's very similar to my experience talking to my paternal grandmother about these issues. She was born in the 30s and grew up in the D.C. area, which was segregated. And like your grandmother, I've always found she is really quick to jump to the discrimination interpretation of any interaction with a white person. And I also would want to issue the caveat, like, I love this woman deeply. I love her so much and I'm so happy to like talk to her, be around her. And I've always found it kind of like funny and endearing that she does this and also something that makes perfect sense given her life experience. But so for example, like anytime I'll come to her with a story of something that happened to me, I was dealing with some person and they didn't treat me or whatever, they were mean to me. First questions he asked, were they white? First questions he asked. And I don't even, you know, me, born in the 90s in a sunny suburb, racially diverse, like suburb, well off suburb in New Jersey. It takes me a long time before I start questioning actually, is this person treating me different because I'm black? And it's happened a few times in my life. I think that's past my threshold for evidence of discrimination against me a couple times in my life. But her threshold is way down here. And this interesting, this point about lived experience, because people talk about lived experience a lot today as a, like, you can't talk about this issue unless you have the lived experience. You can't know about this issue unless you have the lived experience. And on the one hand, there are things you can only learn by living it, but on the other hand, I think lived experience can blind you as much as it can help you see. So like my friend Noam uses example of people who grew up during the Great Depression, learned to just put all their money in their mattress, which made sense at that time. And they may, they kept that attitude on into the 50s and 60s when it no longer made sense. And this seems to me like an example of that.

[Roland Fryer]

I totally agree. And look, there's. I have no doubt that there's bias in the world. I have no doubt that there's discrimination in the world. I just don't know what the hell we're supposed to do about it, right? So, you know, my grandmother and I, and it's a pastime, we'd sit in the garage, we sit out in on our carport and talk about these things and joke about them and laugh about them. But you know, my grandmother eventually, maybe in her 60s or 70s, probably 60s, got a master's degree from FAMU. It wasn't like these things were holding her back from doing what she wants. And so look, if you and I want to sit around and have a drink and talk about how much discrimination there is in the world and then get up at 5 o' clock in the morning to get our ass to work. I don't see anything wrong. Whatever. Right. As long as it doesn't affect effort that one puts in towards their goals, I don't have an issue with it. And so I hear you and I had a similar experience, and I probably have more events that pass my threshold than you're describing, but it doesn't matter. I still work as hard as I can to accomplish the things that I want to accomplish.

[Coleman Hughes]

Okay, so let's rewind to you having a 2.2 GPA in high school or something like that. I've had several people on the podcast that are very intelligent, very accomplished. Ezra Klein was one. Another one was Scott Kaufman, who did horribly in high school and then later went on to become these brilliant people at some level that they always were. But what was it that made you feel so disengaged from high school? And then what changed to make you feel engaged with academic work?

[Roland Fryer]

I had just a lot of distractions. Part of it was distraction, right? Like I was coming of age. My father was on his way or on the time he was part of high school, but was on his way to prison. I didn't know my mother, and so I was angry at the world, right? And thinking that the only thing I needed to do was survive, right? And so it wasn't like we had some family nest egg that was going to help out a little rolling here. I had to figure it out. And I didn't understand how learning about American history was going to help that. And so there was a point in my life where literally all I thought I knew how to do was survive. And high school was one of those points, right? And I remember when it became very clear that my father was going to prison. And I had my brain trust come over to my house and sit in my room and we figure out how I was going to survive here. And so someone was like, you got to sell drugs? I was like, no, I have. You know, my cousin, they all went to, went to a federal pin on that. I'm not doing that. Okay, well, you got to steal stuff. I don't know if I'm that great at stealing. So, like, it was this whole thing, none of which was focus on education and get a scholarship and go off and do and be a great economist, right? It was all like, how can you figure it out today? And so I just didn't. I said, the part of it was the distractions in life. The other part of it was high school. Dumb. I mean, I don't mean that in a bad way. The high school I went to was not challenging, right? Like, I used to do things like the first week got graded in six weeks. And so the first six weeks I'd like, pay attention to make sure I could. And you get a grade and I get an a in algebra 1 or whatever. And then after that, I just paid no attention and didn't care because I didn't think that it was useful for anything. And I'm not proud of that. But, like, it just is. It was not engaging, it wasn't challenging. The problems weren't interesting to me. It was a bunch of regurgitation, right? When did Christopher Columbus discover America? Okay, thanks. Three weeks later. You know, a multiple choice. When did we just say, you just told me this three weeks ago. Like, this is silly, right? It felt like a waste of time. In college, however, it was just something different, right? Like I walked into my first economics class and it was like someone had turned the light on. Like, this was everything that I. All my internal dialogue from eight years old on up felt like it could be captured in this simple utility maximization framework. Truly, it was like, wow. And I remember looking around the room. So, okay, before I took economics, I took sociology, right? And so I walk into a sociology class and they're using really big work that I don't get, right? And I'm looking around and everyone's just nodding and I'm like, how do these. It's like a bunch of concatenated words. How do they. What does this even mean? Right? Overlap, you know, what do they call it? Overlapping chains, Low pressure? What does that even mean? Everyone's just nodding along. And I got into the economics class and basically the first words out of this professor's mouth were, people are individual, selfish acting individuals who maximize their own happiness. And everyone's like, huh, What? And I'm like, wow, my life has such clarity right now.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Roland Fryer]

And it was the first time where I was like, so thrilled. My professor had all the classes at 8am he put office hours at 7am now that I'm a professor, I realize what he was doing. And every office hour, I was there at 7am and me and this professor would debate poverty, welfare, all sorts of microeconomic topics. And it was just like. It was such clarity to me that I don't really know how to describe it. I'm not doing well. I wanted to do whatever I needed to do to study that, okay? And he said to me, wow, I think you have a thing for this economics you should, you know, I was at that point at a satellite campus in the University of Texas, at the University of Texas at Arlington. He said, you should go somewhere else. You should go to Yale or University of Virginia or whatever, and I will help you get into this. I didn't do that. I got accepted as a transfer student to a couple of them, but I didn't do it. I just kept going back. And so I asked him what do I need to do to do economics, you know, in graduate school or wherever else you do it after you leave here. And there was a set of classes you needed to learn. A lot of them were math. And so I just went and started that one class, architected my entire undergraduate education. And I got so turned on by it all that I graduated with from my undergraduate two and a half years because I just was in a big hurry to learn more about economics.

[Coleman Hughes]

Wow, that's amazing. Your comments about high school and feeling disengaged lead into your reconstruction project, which is this idea of unapologetically black education for kids, kind of like a Sunday school for black kids. And this is an interesting idea to me for a few reasons. One is because I went to a Chinese Sunday school when I was a kid because like I told you earlier, my parents were very focused on education and wanted me to be doing something on the weekends that was sort of. I mean, this. I'm talking young though, you know, rigorous, healthy, engaging the mind in a community of people. But the options available were probably Jewish, Torah classes, Sunday school, both of which had religious overtones that wouldn't have melded with my family. And Chinese school, which was learning the language of the world. And they were thinking, coming out of the 90s, the world is coming together. Chinese is. Mandarin is the language of the future. So it was just a sea of little Chinese kids and two little black gumdrops. Me and my sister in this class learning all these Chinese songs. And it just seemed like an amazingly healthy environment. The kids come from these tightly knit families and the parents know each other and they emphasize education. They have this culture of high achievement. And that is something that doesn't exist quite in the same. It exists within a lot of religious traditions as well. Like I mentioned, Jewish schools and Sunday schools and so forth. So on that level, it all makes sense to me. On another level, the whole. The idea of unapologetically black and blackness that usually most uses of race I see in our culture, in American culture, widely, I mean, blackness, whiteness, etc. A lot of it seems toxic and Taking away from, focuses on the individual and all that. So on the one hand I see many uses, maybe most uses of race that I can see are harmful, but I think some uses of race could be very healthy and I don't see enough of those. So how do you negotiate that between the point of emphasizing racial identity, which can be used in a toxic way, but using that in a healthy way?

[Roland Fryer]

Yeah, it's a great question. Let me go back to the Mandarin stuff. There's hope for my daughters there because I put my daughters in the Mandarin preschool, they're going to turn out like Colby here. I put my daughters in the Mandarin preschool. But you've got to mix that with like, you know, you know, people say, well, you know, I present myself as, right, like I'm like a 40 year old black ex athlete, but on the inside I'm a 65 year old black woman because I was raised by my mama. And so I have those tendencies about me all the time. So my daughter is in Mandarin, singing the songs, doing the thing. The teachers are telling us she's doing great in Mandarin. And you're right, close knit families, all that stuff. And New Year's Eve we decided to go have dim sum as a family. So my daughter's now 5 or something. And I have this Southern black grandmother deeply embedded in my DNA. So I show off my character Southern black grandmother's doing. So I said, baby, tell the waiting, why don't you order something in Mandarin? You know, trying to get my daughter to showcase what she knows, right? And then she goes at it. To me, it sounds perfect, purely authentic, wonderful. And I look at the waiter and I say, we'll take that. And he says, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not sure those songs are really legit, at least here in terms of Reconstruction. One of the things I'm most proud of, I mean, really, the CEO of Reconstruction is Kai Henderson. She's the former chancellor of D.C. public Schools and an amazing, amazing human being. An American hero, in my opinion. And we came together on this for a couple reasons. One, Kaya really embraces the idea that years ago, culture, cultural traditions and the things that we teach at Reconstruction. Because Reconstruction isn't just academic. I mean, they also got courses on how to play spades. And so there are a bunch of cultural courses. These things were taught in the family, they were taught in churches, they were taught in communities. But the black communities are very different now than they were 40 or 50 years ago.

[Coleman Hughes]

All right, so I want to go Back where we started and dive into the question and the topic that most people will be familiar with you from, which is the use of force by police, the racial disparities in use of force, and basically the topic that has inspired Black Lives Matter and divided the country. You published a paper in 2016 on this topic that got lots of coverage. Can you summarize what the finding from that paper was and why it was so controversial?

[Roland Fryer]

Sure. Well, first part I'm confident I can do, but why it was so controversial, I don't know. You're probably better at that than I am. So the paper I was really interested in police use of force in part because how can you not be if you're a black man in America? I mean, it's just, you know, know if you have an experience that you've heard about. And at the time the protests were going on in St. Louis when I started this in Ferguson, and colleagues of mine like Cornel west were out in the front on the picket lines. And I just thought, damn, I got to do something. But, like, flying to St. Louis to picket my thing, I'm a data nerd, so what can I do? And I was so convinced that I was going to find abhorrent and rampant discrimination, the police, it's never even thought. I never even dawned on me that I wouldn't. And so I tried to gather some data, talk to some colleagues, my usual process. And then one of my colleagues said to me, I know this is a roundabout way of getting there, but I want to give everyone the context of this. One of my colleagues said to me, you know, Roland, what's always been cool about your other research is that you really understood context way better than most of us about how, you know, schools in the inner city works, that kind of stuff. But when it comes to police, it just sounds like you're pretty biased against him. I said, that's fair. So the next morning I scheduled, took advantage of some context I knew and embedded myself in police departments like Houston, Texas and Camden, New Jersey. And I'll say that hanging out for weeks with police officers on the beat is probably the best education I've gotten since I got my PhD. It was so informative. It was so eye opening. And more than that, it was a window in to get, getting millions and millions of data points. And so we collected a lot of data on not only shootings, which the country was focused on, but lower level uses of force when police put their hands on you, when they throw you up against a car, things like that. Now the latter part is really hard to get data on because in the process of an arrest, if a police officer puts their hands on you or whatever puts you in the back of the car, I mean, that's not notable. That's like Tuesday. And they don't even record that kind of data. But we were able to find data sources with millions and millions of data points, both from the police's perspective and importantly from civilians themselves about their interactions with police. What we found was two parts. One, on lower level uses of force, there are large racial differences in the use of force in the aggregate of the data. If you don't do anything to it, you don't touch it. Black people are 53% more likely to have force used on them at a given stop. Okay? If you control for a bunch of stuff, that number reduces, but it never goes away. And the most striking finding to me is that when the folks are pulled over by the police and the police themselves report that they are fully compliant, they're not arrested, there's no contraband, nothing went wrong. According to the police, black people are still 25% more likely to have force used on them. So that was half of the paper. And we put the data through some really serious statistical tests. We really believe that's biased. These aren't just disparities. This is real bias. On the other hand, when it comes to lethal use of force, where we collected data from 18 cities, we found no racial differences whatsoever on lethal force. That is the part that everyone focuses on. They don't focus on the thousands and thousands of use of force incidents that happen in lower level uses of force. And you know, of course, black lives matter. Duh, right. But you know, I believe black dignity matters as well. And the lower level uses of force happening thousands of times per day, the shootings, thank God, do not. And both of them are important. And so part of the thing that, that the paper was trying to grapple with was, hey, what's going on with lower level uses of force? And why don't police departments have huge disincentives to do that? And B, isn't that potentially a very important thing to solve because it happens so often? And it goes to the very core of trust and relationships between minorities and police departments and the cities that need them the most?

[Coleman Hughes]

One thing is, I've, for a long time I've thought that. Let me back up. I've looked at your paper, I've looked at other papers on the same topic, and I'm aware of the, the fact downplayed in the media that shootings. That there is very little evidence of racial bias in shootings. That's a fact that is taboo to say among, certainly among supporters of Black Lives Matter. But on the left in general, I would say, and I've been aware of that fact for many years. But I've also been aware of the fact that there is lots of data attesting to racial bias in lower levels, uses of force, and as well as, you know, lots of anecdotal data from many black people. And one thing I've thought is. Is part of the enormous level of anger that erupts around these shootings is a kind of redirection of anger. People thinking about the bad experiences they've had with the cops, from being put up against a car to being talked to disrespectfully. And it's. That rage gets redirected when we have a shooting of an unarmed black person. All of that kind of comes out and becomes symbolic, even though the actual shooting may have been justified or may have been unjustified. But there's another example of it happening to a white guy the same year that no one talks about. It's a kind of redirection of that anger, that very understandable anger that people feel about being roughed up and being treated in disrespectful ways.

[Roland Fryer]

For sure. It's how any rational person should behave. And by the way, some of those other papers that I think you read also find the same result on shootings. It's just they're cowards. And so they put it in appendix table 74.

Right?

Okay. Let's be clear about that. And I'm old now, and I've been black a long time. So I'm just gonna call people out. It's just cowardly. It's just BS to put to bury results. Cause you wanna win a popularity contest. Newsflash, Economists and social scientists, you're nerds. Ain't nobody like you anyway, so just tell the work straight up. But yes, man, it's rational, right? Like, if myself and my network feel like we've been discriminated against, we didn't do anything wrong, we didn't get arrested, but we got thrown up against a car. And then we hear about a shooting that happens two blocks over and the details are murky. It's almost. It's Bayesian to believe that that is discrimination. Right? Like that's. I understand that. And in fact, one of the only things I think in life that Al Sharpton and I can agree on is this point, we were both meeting with President Obama in 2016 about police use of force. And, you know, Al was classic Al. He was like, I agree with the good doctor.

Right.

That's the only time he's ever said that, I promise you. But he said, look, if we could stop the everyday harassment and those lower level uses of force, then we could at least have conversations around the controversial shootings because we would have built trust. And I think that is, you know, the two are really linked. And that's why, despite warnings from some of my colleagues, I put both in the same paper, because I think you can't talk about one without the other.

[Coleman Hughes]

So say more about your meeting with Obama, because I know Obama had you to the White House to discuss this paper. Right. So I guess my questions are, what was that meeting like? What did he want to know? How did he receive the results of your paper? And how ready was he to implement policy as a reaction to your paper and your findings?

[Roland Fryer]

Yeah. So the meeting was with police chiefs, community folks like Al Sharpton is where I met Deray McKeeson for the first time. And, you know, I will admit I went in skeptical, but came out really respecting at least what conceptually what he was trying to accomplish. And the President did what he does so best, which is he made all of us sit there and listen to each other. So we had to stop. We had to actually listen to everyone's arguments, and we had to behave because he was the adult in the group. The conversation was great. He treated the research like, I would say, a skeptical scholar. We engaged about it, and he said he knew footnotes. Man, he really read it. He said to me, okay, Roland, but the best data you have is on Houston. And it could be that Houston's an enlightened city. And I just start smiling. I said, Mr. President, I had asked you before you saw the results, whether or not we'd find racial bias in places like Houston or Dallas, Texas. I'm pretty sure you'd say yes. Right. Like, okay, so he was grappling with it, but I think hard to know, but I think in an honest and real way, and I appreciated that. But my big frustration, Coleman, was that nothing got done.

Right.

Like, we had all these grand ideas about how we were going to link police departments funding to collecting the type of data you need on the lower level uses of force, et cetera. And none of it got done. And, you know, I don't know many of the 18,000 police departments across the country that have changed as a result of this work. And it is deeply, deeply frustrating because there is real work to be done to improve the relationship between police and communities. And saying stuff like defund the police or any reform that you do to police instead of with police, I'm very skeptical of.

[Coleman Hughes]

So on that point, one thing I've noticed as I've grown older is there is always an enormous amount to learn about a profession from the people doing it that you usually can cannot find easily on the Internet or in books. If you want to know what goes on in a hospital, having a conversation with 10 different nurses, you will come away having learned a lot more than almost anything you could get in an article or a Google search. That's what I found. And one thing I found disturbing about the whole conversation about policing and racism in the past 10 years is how rarely I get perspectives from police officers, because like any profession, I think there's probably much to learn simply having heard that side of it.

[Roland Fryer]

Right.

[Coleman Hughes]

What is it like to be a police officer in a high crime inner city, let's say, where you're pulling over people? What is. If we don't understand that experience, our solutions are likely to be ignorant. And so I've had two different police officers on my podcast, one of whom was the former Deputy Police Commissioner of Baltimore, Anthony Barksdale. There's an incredible guy that tried to train the department in jiu jitsu, which he himself is a black belt in, so that cops had more comfort not having to go to their gun when they felt their life was threatened. Right. They can bring a suspect to the ground without hurting the suspect or themselves. He's just like a super cop. And so when you said you learned more, you learned as much from hanging out with police for two weeks or whatever it was, as in your PhD. I'm curious, what is it that you learned there that you didn't know going.

[Roland Fryer]

Into it how complicated the job is? I'd only seen the job from one dimension, which was, why are these people harassing me? The job is complicated. The people, sometimes the people who do the job are complicated. And there are ways of making it better. Let me be more clear and embarrassed to admit that riding around in a police car for 10 hours looking for bad guys, turns out after a few hours, you start to see people who look like bad guys. I mean, that's just. That's what happens. And it's not a good job, not a way to engage with communities. You know, when I was in Houston, we did a double shift and, you know, the police officer who picked me up from the station. I mean, looks like he's outfitted to go defend Ukraine, man. I mean, he's got vest here, the door, the car is outfitted with weapons. I mean, he's. He's armed to the teeth. And, you know, we get out on the beat, and when every time he pulls the car over, he's very nervous. And I ask him, at some point, you seem to get really nervous when you get out of the car. He said, man, this is Houston. Everybody else got a gun, right? And so part of the issue, one realizes very quickly is because of the number of perceived guns in the street, police react accordingly. And that plays into their. How they strategically use force. In Houston, they had no sense of community because all they do is drive around and look for bad guys. On the other hand, in Camden, it was quite different. Police officers walked the beat, and there we could see somebody wilding out, having a bad day or whatever. And I'm like, yo, shouldn't you arrest that person? And they're like, oh, that's just Johnny. He just being Johnny, right? But the only way to know that is to have repeated interactions with that person where you understand, right? You can't know that riding around in the car, just observing the behavior. A third point, because I could go on all day about this, a third point is just how difficult the job is, right? The end of my first day on the beat in Camden, we got a call911 call for service to a row house that someone was overdosing. We go in, police bust open this makeshift door. We get into the real house, and someone dies within five feet, okay?

[Coleman Hughes]

And because they were shot or because.

[Roland Fryer]

They overdosed and it wasn't peaceful, the body doesn't go peacefully in those situations. I'll just put it that way. I. Maybe I'm a chicken or something, but I looked at the. Yo, I'm. I'm done for the day, right? Like, I'm going to go, I'm going to have a steak or something. I'm done. I see all tomorrow, and the police get started getting back in their vehicles. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? And they said, we don't get off for a few more hours. I said, you can't have 20 minutes off after you see somebody die. And they looked. The commissioner looked at me like I was crazy. Coleman, he Sundays, I gave 20 minutes off to everybody who saw somebody die. I wouldn't have anybody on the streets, like, really. And so the job, as I understand from police officers, changes you, man. How can it not is a hard job. And so that doesn't excuse some of the behavior, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not some police officer apologist. I'm just saying, right. Like, be informed. This is a tough job. And some of the things that the officers have to deal with and just go back to work are very difficult, and it has to change them. And so that's just three examples of things one learns. But there are many more. It's a really complicated.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, I've thought of the analogy to doctors, surgeons, and nurses sometimes too. Those professions where you, er, doctor, for example, it's like you just have to see people die constantly and wake up the next day and do the same thing. And there's no way. It's actually, on one level, you want your doctor to be really empathetic when you're sick. But on another level, in order to be a good doctor or surgeon especially, you actually have to detach from your emotions and be highly analytical and not feel that you have a unique life almost, because if you felt the gravity of what you were doing every second, you probably wouldn't be able to do the job for very long at all.

[Roland Fryer]

And there's an in between, because I've got folks who I know who are cancer docs who, after a few years just hanging out because they say, I can't. I've just seen enough death. And the big difference is those people are going. When they go to the next patient, they're not worried the next patient's got a gun and gonna shoot. And so I love the analogy. The police stuff is even more complicated because given the emotional state you're in, then you still have to go and try to figure out bad guys versus good guys in the next 10 minutes. And I just can't imagine.

[Coleman Hughes]

So I see a lot of your work as applying rigorous mathematics to problems of race. And I mean, from what I can tell, that's a common thread in your work. And another area where you've done this that I'm very interested in is charter schools. So can you. Again, this is another contentious topic because the teachers union and many Democrats don't like charter schools. Either feel that they take away funding that should go to public schools or that they are. I guess that's the main argument I see used against them. And then people on the right tend to like charter schools. They're an alternative to public schools, which are perceived as being more controlled by Democrats than Republicans. And they can sometimes emphasize a more conservative style of education, a stricter style of education. So can you summarize the empirical research you've done about charter schools and what you've found?

[Roland Fryer]

So the average charter school is no better than the average public school. It's a hard fact to deal with, but it is what it is. But what's interesting is that there's a distribution. So there's some charter schools that are phenomenal and increase test scores in a phenomenal way. And there are others that should be shut down this afternoon. Right? And you've heard, you know, the ones that are on the right tail of that distribution, the good ones regulating the after school specialist about them, like Harlem Children's Zone's amazing. I love Jeff Cant. He is a not just a dear friend, he's like an uncle, you know, Success Academy has had tremendous success on many dimensions. The question though is do those test scores translate into other meaningful change? Right. Because we're not just trying to educate kids to have good test scores. The only reason we care about that is an interim measure to the things we actually do care about like reducing teen pregnancy, increasing economic mobility and the like. So we have mixed evidence on that. Jeff Cannon, the Harlem Children Zone, tremendous results in his medium, I would call it medium term impact. So on measures of IQ and related things like Woodcock Johnson, he has a big effect, so big effect on test scores outside the state test score, the boys that attend his school are literally 100% less likely to be incarcerated by the time they are in their 20s. The girls are 75% less likely to be pregnant in their teens. Right. So let's just pause for a second. Could you imagine having to go to a gym with a fifth grade child for a lottery for a sixth grade charter? And if you lose, their probability of being pregnant as a team goes up 75%. That's unthinkable. It's crazy. Okay, so that's amazing and good for good for Jeff. On the other hand, we did the first study analyzing the impact of charter schools generally on income later in life, like 30 years old. And the answer there is zero, that charter schools don't affect income. And so for me, the data is two things. One, the data is still out on whether or not overall, or even among some of the better ones, charter schools will impact the longer term outcomes. Right? Because yes, the test scores are good, but if you get the test scores in this test tube, that is not translatable to the real world. Right? You talked about discipline, structure, all those kinds of things that would relate to that. If that doesn't translate to the real world. And their income doesn't go up. We need to restate that. But second, the work I'm the most proud of is taking practices from that right tail, the high achieving charter school. So when we learned about that distribution, right, you could look at the average and say, oh my gosh, charter schools.

On average aren't that good.

Or you could do what we did, which go, wow, look at this variance. And they all are making all these choices. And you're right, they are kind of independent. And so those independent choices have consequences, not to borrow a phrase from Milton Friedman. But. And so what we did was we analyzed that and we came up with five factors that explain 50% of the variance of charter school success. That's not important. What's important is we took those five factors, we implemented them in 20 schools in Houston, 10 schools in Denver, other places around the country. And what we found is that you can get the effects of the best charters in the country in regular old public schools by just adhering to these five practices. Now, again, I don't know if those test scores will translate into income later, but we're going to track down the kids.

[Coleman Hughes]

And this was a random treatment. You randomized the schools that you applied these principles to, right?

[Roland Fryer]

Yes.

[Coleman Hughes]

And what were the five principles?

[Roland Fryer]

So number one was you had to spend more time in school. So I used to call it the basic physics of education. If you're behind, then either you got to spend more time with the kids who are in front of you need to take the Thursday, Friday off. So time was one of them. Another was how schools use data to drive instruction. Right. So everyone in schools has data now, but the question is, can, what do they do when they see bad pieces of data? Right. So, and the schools that were effective changed their pedagogy, their pacing, their focus based on real data in real time, almost like compstat for schools. And it was phenomenal to see the ones that weren't successful, just collected data, saw most of the kids failed, and went about their day. Third was how they treated human capital, how they hired, what they did with bad performers, how they evaluated teachers, that kind of stuff. Four was tutoring. So schools who tutored kids and groups of six or fewer, four more days per week, were much more successful than others. It's a term called high dosage tutoring. You can give high dosage of tutoring to kids in small groups. It really is probably the single biggest driver of test scores out there. The final one is something really near and dear to my Heart, which is culture. So when we talk to schools, all of them were dealing with kids who were, or Most were deposited. 88% were female headed households.

Right.

That was all a given. The question was going to be, what is this school going to do about. And some schools, and you know, as my grandmother would say, bless their hearts.

[Coleman Hughes]

Right?

[Roland Fryer]

Some schools would say, look, little Coleman here, I mean, he's got, it's rough, right? Like he's here at school. That is a win, okay? We should embrace little Coleman and show him we love him and that this is a supporting school and that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. Who can be against that? Okay. On the other hand, the schools that were successful increasing death score, said Coleman, we understand that's what's going on at home. This is school. You're safe here. And we're going to hold you to the highest expectations. Okay? So when I was in 10th grade, I tried to drop out or went to drop out of high school. My father just, it was clear to everyone, it was in the newspapers that he was likely to go to prison. And I figured I had to make money and I just. Whatever. And so I had a counselor come up to me without me asking and said, hey, Roland, we saw what happened in the papers. And I said, look, I'm good. I just want to get to class and get to football practice and bust somebody up, then I'm going to be fine. And he says, oh, that's a brave face. That's so great. But look, we have a special program that you can go to school for two hours and get out and get full credit. And I was like, you know, Mr. Dickey, it was bad what they wrote in the papers. Tell me about that two hour program, right? I don't begrudge the man. And I'm not trying to hate on him here or call him out or whatever. I'm just saying I didn't ask for that. Right. And I just worry that, and I know that kids will live up or down to our expectations, okay? And so high expectations. What we found was that those things were really key when it came to schools that were able to drive achievement amongst the populations that I've been focused on in my career. It may sound crass, it may sound harsh. I'm not saying anyone was either of those things. I'm saying that kids can do remarkable things and we ought to allow them to reach their full potential.

[Coleman Hughes]

All right, so final question. You have a business called Sigma Squared, right? Can you describe the purpose of that business?

[Roland Fryer]

Sure. We took a lot of social science. And let me back up. Here's the premise of it. After George Floyd, we had all these corporations making all these commitments and saying we stand by black people, that kind of stuff. And that was all fine. But then one as one got to realize that many of these activities were more like box checking than digging in deep and figuring out how to actually maximize talent in their organization. I got frustrated and I said, look, I remember asking a friend, I said, why aren't anybody. Why isn't anyone using all the tools that we know work right? There are linear programming problems that, you know, I've worked on, people like Lynn Lowry that kind of solve these diversity issues while maximizing quality. There are all these other papers out there that people have worked on. Why aren't we using the best practices when it comes to understanding whether a company has bias and if so, how to actually fix it? Like really try to understand how Companies can get 2% better per day instead of checking a box. Did their DEI strategy of the month.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, let me pause you right there before you keep going. There is the. I talked about this on the Joe Rogan podcast a couple months ago, but there was my favorite example of this, of the hypocrisy and the empty signaling around this was the president of Princeton University released a statement in 2020 saying the university was systemically racist and this racism was materially harming its black students. Which on the face of it, as a black person that went to an Ivy League similar to Princeton, it was quite literally the least racist place I've ever been in my life in terms of how progressive everyone was. But then Trump, in order to troll the president of Princeton University, said, okay, well, if you just confessed, I'm going to have the Department of Education investigate you for violating the civil rights of your black students. And then Princeton says, wait, hold on a minute. We weren't really. We didn't really mean that whole thing. We were just saying the thing that everyone says. It was like the bad faith around those. I mean, people felt they had to make those statements, obviously, because in some sense they did, but they didn't really mean them for the most part.

[Roland Fryer]

Yeah. And so the question is, do they not care or do they not have the tools? And I decided to test whether or not it was because they didn't have the tools. And so a team of engineers, myself, some data visualization people, some economists, we all built this software called Sigma Squared. And what that software does is it can link into your HR data and it Literally runs hundreds of tests on your data in the background to tell you, hey, here's some areas of concern. And not only that, like, here's the type of bias it might be because social scientists have kind of grouped bias into different categories. Because once you know the category, then you can actually treat it. Okay. And so it is very much a scientific data obsessed way of dealing with the ei.

Right.

Because we all know training doesn't work. Let's just be honest. There have been literally a thousand studies that have shown that training doesn't work. And so we got to get beyond that. And I actually fundamentally believe that you can both optimize talent and increase diversity.

Right.

Because if there is bias, Coleman, then bias is a market failure. We got to get that out.

Right.

So if really, if there's bias in the labor market, then getting the bias out will actually increase representation. And so this is really about, are you actually at the frontier when it comes to maximizing talent? And if you have bias, you can't possibly be. And so we're helping companies get there and it's been an incredible amount of fun. I think of it as DEI for those who are serious. If you're not serious, put out the next statement. But if you are serious, then we have built some tools to really, really be helpful. They're very powerful tools because they've taken 50 years of math and social science and compressed them into software.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. So one thing this I think will rub up against is that people have different concepts of what bias is. So my concept of bias and many people's concept of bias is you are treating me differently than you would if I were the same person, but white. Right. Like. And that's the kind of bias that your algorithm would measure, I assume, Right?

[Roland Fryer]

Absolutely. What's the other one? I'm curious. You got me on the seat.

[Coleman Hughes]

I agree. I mean, I agree. I don't know what, how the other one is defined, but it's this sort of vaguer structural bias where it's not, I'm not, it's not that I'm as an individual necessarily being mistreated by any specific person. And again, as I say these words, I've never truly known exactly what they mean, but this is a, you know, there's a 50 year history of people finding this definition of bias compelling. You know, back in the black power movement coined the concept of institutional racism. And a whole literature that's grown up around structural racism which says there doesn't have to be any particular individual that discriminates against you in that old common sense definition of the word discriminate, there can still be a vague, abstract, yet important structural bias in the system that your algorithm might not find. That's a criticism that someone might give. What would you say to that?

[Roland Fryer]

I don't know, because I wanted to find it first. But let me try to take the side of that which I'm trying to interpret in my world, in my language and analytics, how that might play out. So if a company only hired the networks, and their networks were only white people, Right. And so therefore no one was discriminated against. Anyone. If you happen to be in that network and you were black, you got hired too. But the fact is there were no black people in that network. And so it is something that is race blind, but not race neutral. Okay, that I understand. But we can test that because that means you're not getting the best candidate. That means you're not optimizing talent. In fact, we could do a lot for companies who were doing that. When it comes to things like when it comes to the incendiary language that some people use, like the new Jim Crow or institutional this or that, I just, I don't know what it is. And so it's really hard to respond. And I just, I say to folks, look, here's what we can do. And it's grounded in literally decades and decades of social science. And it captures what the leading economists and sociologists and psychologists view as bias. And that bias is a market failure. And that's why companies should care about it. This is not about being nice. This is about saying, hey, if I'm discriminating against folks from. Against people like Coleman, then I am missing out on talent that could help drive my business forward. And that's what it's about. If it's more than that, that's a very different product. We really are about using data to understand and put companies at their frontier by offering up sensible solutions that can, if they have bias, get rid of it. Last thing I'll say, and I'll be quiet, I promise. The second camp you mentioned thinks every disparity is biased, but that's just statistically wrong. We can't take that seriously. Right. I don't know what to do with that.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. So I can imagine two kinds of CEOs or executive directors that hear this product and it's like, basically gives you a statistically sound hygiene report on the level and types of bias in your own company. And one kind of person is going to say, well, that's amazing, right? Like, I really do not want to have any bias at my company any more than an NFL coach or an NBA coach wants to be missing out on the best players because of his own blind spots, right? But another, another type of person is going to say, if you could administer truth serum to them, is going to say, I'm terrified of this product. This product is going to prove that my equity statements and diversity statements are nothing more than empty words that I say so that people won't cancel me, that people think, feel that I'm on the right side of history. And if I ever got an actual readout on the directions of biases mathematically accurate in my own organization, I would shred it and make anyone who saw it sign a fucking NDA. Because what the results, whatever the results found, it could be really problematic for me. Like, what if it finds a bias in the wrong direction? So anyway, I mean, I think hopefully there are a lot of people listening to this podcast that some people will either have companies of their own that may or may not be interested in this product, other may be investors that are interested in this. And so I reiterate, it's called sigma squared.

[Roland Fryer]

And well, let me just be super clear, Cole. Maybe this is the academic in me and this is not pragmatic. I don't want to work with the second people anyway until they're ready, right? And so, and I've had those, you know, I don't have truth serum. But, you know, a month ago I had a lot of sake with someone and it was like truth serum because they told me, they told me the same brother. The guy said to me, look, the company's going, well, I just don't want to know. And that's just not like, we can finish dinner. But that's not something that I'm interested in. I actually think that when it comes to DEI and many issues, unfortunately, that we're going through as a country right now, the 1% either on both extremes is leading the discussion. And I built Sigma squared for the other 98% that want to use data in a sensible way. Like we use data in every other part of our companies marketing campaigns, product, like every other part of our companies do this exact same approach to make our products and services better. And all I'm saying is that talent optimization and relatedly, DEI is a core product. It's a really simple idea.

[Coleman Hughes]

All right, Roland Fryer, we've reached the end of our time. Thank you so much for doing this. You have sigma squared, you have reconstruction. Unapologetically black education Harvard professor. It's been great to talk to you. And if you want to direct my listeners who may want to follow up and see any more of your work, is there anywhere on the Internet you would prefer to send them to?

[Roland Fryer]

Wow.

I don't know. They're not in touch with you? My website's on my Harvard Economics page, my email, so they can get in touch with me.

[Coleman Hughes]

Okay. Well, it's been excellent, Rollerfire. Thank you so much for coming on my show.

[Roland Fryer]

Hey, brother. Appreciate it. Talk to you soon.

[Coleman Hughes]

If you appreciate the work I do, the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website, ColemanHughes.org and to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you'll never miss my new content. As always, thanks for your support.