On this week’s episode of The Glenn Show, I welcome my old friend Stephanie Lepp, the Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology. I first met Stephanie through her husband, Nathaniel, who was a student of mine at Brown. Stephanie produced a podcast called Reckonings, which told the stories of how people transform their worldviews. I went on the show in 2015 and told the story of the evolution of my own political worldview (links below). Since then, we've been wanting to do another round. It's time! This time, Stephanie joins me on The Glenn Show, to once again help me wrestle with how my views have changed and with my responsibilities as a public intellectual.
Glenn, is this accurate? It's not your direct quote, but a label applied to a timestamp (presumably by an assistant):
"My raison d’être is to give voice to my contempt for the failures of my people."
It seemed to me your contempt was for the hypocrisy, lies, and excuses in the framing, rather than "for the failures of [your] people." I've seen the quote (falsely) attributed to you as evidence of your "anti-blackness" and in order to dismiss you, so you may want to correct it.
Stephanie Lepp didn't understand affirmative action well enough to apply integral theory to it. Glenn said that affirmative action on net is harming African Americans right now. Stephanie didn't appear to understand what Glenn was saying.
Stephanie also lacked the courage to apply integral theory to sexual/gender liberation in the islamic world as Glenn asked her to do.
For example many islamic countries use to have more lbgtq+ rights and diversity than the USA, Canada and Europe have today. In a very short period of time girls, woman and lbgtq+ have massively lost rights and freedom, including over the last generation. And she doesn't appear to know how to discuss the mass slaughter of lbgtq+ going on as we speak right now, including in Afghanistan, Gaza, Somalia and many other countries. When Gaza was ruled by the Ottoman Turkish empire until 1918 homosexuality was decriminalized and allowed. The massive recent regression of lgbtq+ rights and woman's rights in Gaza is in large part caused by the nonmuslim world, including not limited to the global nonmuslim woke, backing extreme sunni islamists against liberal muslims.
Afghanistan use to be far more liberal and progressive on girls and lbgtq+ than the USA and Europe are right now. What is happening in Afghanistan right now hasn't happened in 8 thousand years. Now for the first time girls cannot go to school. Many of the main Afghan thought leaders, scientistists, mathemeticians and artists use to be woman in the past. Now that is all gone. And Stephanie appears to be too scared to place this in an integral framework.
Stephanie confused me by implying that slavery was wrong. If she really believed this, wouldn't she say that slavery is widely practiced globally and expanding? Wouldn't Stephanie express concern about this and at the very least say she didn't know how to prevent to expansion of slavery via extreme islamism, Al Qaeda, Daesh etc.
In a future conversation, it might be useful for Stephanie to discuss ONE issue she understands in great depth and apply integral theory to it (maybe letting Glenn know this ONE topic in advance so that Glenn could research it enough to have a high resolution discussion.) It would probably take her an hour to discuss this ONE topic, if she is really applying integral theory to it.
I also didn't understand what Stephanie meant by saying 28 minutes 42 seconds in that "we can can actually be less empirical sometimes and just more strategic." Can Stephanie give a specific example?
In my view Glenn might be the best living economist at discursively and non quantitatively explaining concepts. Does anyone practice what Stephanie is suggesting better than Glenn?
I would love to see Glenn interview guests on integral theory, consciousness, science spirituality intersection and how to use these modalities to increase broadly defined physical health, broadly defined mental health, broadly defined intelligence, "relations before transactions" for the general population, which would sharply increase global total factor productivity, the marginal product of labor and the marginal product of capital.
I would say that integral theory can be used in a way that is very high resolution, precise and data driven. Or in a way that is very "empirical" to use Stephanie's language.
Try reading but more challenging is understanding what Integral Theory is as “explained” in Wikipedia. My background is healthcare and this gobbledegook reminded me of alternative philosophies such as craniosacral therapy. Impossible to prove its existence much less its effectiveness beyond placebo.
Yikes. I would have thought Glenn's listeners would be better able to handle ideas they disagree with without resorting to ad hominem attacks. I'm just a person -- a producer and conceptual artist, mom with two kids, full-time job, deep faith in humanity, maybe a little judgmental but something I can work on. Gotta say I'm disappointed by many of your comments. Le Sigh.
For the record....we realized after the episode aired that we didn't give proper context for our conversation. Glenn invited me onto his show to interview *him*, the way I'd done on the Reckonings podcast in 2015: https://www.reckonings.show/episodes/5-pt2
That context has now been added to the description of the episode.
Stephanie, I think many didn't understand what you were saying, versus disagreeing with what you were saying. I am glad you are tried to integrate integral theory into your discussion with Glenn.
I hope Glenn doesn’t listen to Lepp. I found her discussion of her Venn diagram approach to finding common ground frustrating. To find common ground,you jettison essentially any controversial views and what remains is worthless. Meaningless.
To show the failure of affirmative action Glenn could have raised the mismatch issue as described in a book by that title by Stuart Taylor. Very simply, students are being admitted to programs in which they can’t do the work and therefor don’t complete a degree. This happens to blacks most obviously but could happen to anyone whose social and cultural experience doesn’t prepare them for, say, an Ivy League environment. The argument is that rather than attending Princeton, a black student granted admission there with lower scores and grades would do better and be more successful in the long term attending his local state university where he would likely complete the degree and move on to grad school or a professional job. There are plenty of black students who could do the work at Princeton and we should seek them out but as Glenn points out, when the thumb is on the scale, genuine achievements are not respected.
I believe a black parent whose child was admitted to Thomas Jefferson high school in Virginia based on merit - his entrance exam scores - is a leader in the movement retain the test for admission rather than what people who push these ideas call “holistic” (wholistic?) criteria.
It’s clear that she does care for you and I appreciate her attempt to kindly confront you about something she disagrees with. That said, her argument was mostly incoherent in my view. The lack of direct criticism made her come across as mealy-mouthed.
1:06:21 “I think that the more that we fight, the harder, the more painful it will be to get there.”
Spoken by someone who assumes everyone shares the belief that we are all on the same shared journey, with the same goals in mind. Conflicting visions would seem to make fighting inevitable, and in some cases, zero sum. And how do you argue that something is important or necessary if you’re not willing to fight for it? Has she really so little self-awareness that in advocating her particular [mushy] vision, she can’t identity herself as a combatant?
I think this conversation was good in that it modeled one of those hard conversations that many of us say are necessary, but few of us are willing to engage in.
Yes, Stephanie did not come across well in this conversation. I’ll wager that she’s a better speaker than what we saw here, but she couldn’t find a nice way to plainly say “Glenn I love you but you’re wrong about all this stuff.” If she were speaking to someone she didn’t have a positive relationship with it probably would have been more succinct and less polite. But she likes Glenn, so we had to listen to her “...like...kinda...um...y’know...” around what she really wanted to say, which seems to have been the same tired, short sighted opinions we’ve heard Glenn (and John) poke holes in dozens of times.
But isn’t that how it goes when people leave their echo chamber? Isn’t that how it has to go for people to change their minds? We have to leave our comfort zones sometimes in order to have conversations that have any hope of changing minds, and sometimes those conversations are awkward as this one was. Which was one of the solid points that Stephanie had, that ranting and dunking is unlikely to persuade people who think differently from you; that if persuasion is your goal then you might need to rethink your strategy, or you might need to rethink your goal. If we expect that every The Glenn Show conversation has to leave us feeling entertained, it might mean we’re full of shit.
Anyway, thanks Glenn for this glimpse into the teacherly side of you that your students must get to enjoy regularly.
"But isn’t that how it goes when people leave their echo chamber? Isn’t that how it has to go for people to change their minds?" This is so important.
But while I believe Stephanie WAS trying, and failing, to change Glenn's mind, Glenn was looking more for truth. Implicitly wanting people to change their own minds as they see the truth from a different perspective.
Stephanie Lepp appears to be like a very intelligent, pragmatic person, and I hope she is on the Glenn Show again.
However, I find it counterproductive that she really insists that Glenn -- a person who's built a reputation as a careful, balanced thinker known for his tendency to steelman his intellectual opponents -- is the person who needs to reel it in. She must be aware that we live in a world where the slightest amount of dissent is career suicide in many institutions, and I don't see how she can seriously suggest to Glenn that "[his] pushback is just making things worse".
Consider this: a man points a gun at me and asks for my wallet, and he shoots me when I reply "no"... obviously I could be more pragmatic in that situation, and maybe I had a role to play in my demise. But does that absolve the gunman of any blame here?
And the argument that "evolution is messy" is unproductive for a number of reasons: (1) it assumes you know what evolution is intending, (2) it assumes we can't evolve backwards or that every change is positive simply because it's a change, and (3) it assumes that pushing back against any change is the cause of anything bad that results from that change. All 3 of those assumptions are pretty weak on their face, and responding "evolution is messy" is unfalsifiable and doesn't add value to the discussion.
Anyways, I found this discussion very interesting, and thought she was an awesome guest to the show. Thank you both for letting us listen in
After an initial cringe hearing Ms. Lepp say that she cares for Prof. Loury, and grateful that Prof. Loury didn't let that slip by engaging her with consistent good humor, I appreciated the conversation. In the end, a lovely modeling of interactive warmth and goodwill, from both parties. Ms. Lepp spoke of her interest in Prof. Loury's life journey, which I would label a 'to hell and back' journey. Deep lessons, real to the bone, often come from those journeys. A big reason I'm so interested in the GL Show is because of how real they seem. I find comfort hearing conversations that strike deep, without trying to provide answers.
How long will DEI and affirmative action go on? Can even a Supreme Court decision break through the log jam? As long as there are entrenched bureaucracies whose power and budgets with associated useless bureaucratic jobs exist, I fear we will be living with them forever.
Consider that over 20 years after 9/11 we all have to take off our shoes before going through security at an airport and we can't take more than 3 ozs of liquid in a container into the cabin of a plane all because some nut tried to ignite his shoe that may have contained a firecracker. And we all just do it meekly as though this were natural.
Someone needs to call bullshit on this craziness. Kudos to Glenn for doing so on affirmative action and DEI.
21:00 is a really important moment in this conversation. Stephanie attempts to articulate what I believe is THE fundamental difference in the philosophy of the large political groups that can't seem to agree on much of anything in modern America. The question is, do the ends justify the means? One side seems to believe that yes, and if we can just get to that end (e.g. racial equity across society) we will all be better off for it. The other side (Glenn's "side") believes that no, the means are far too important to do away with for "ends" that are often seen as arbitrary or utopian in nature. I see this dichotomy constantly in online discussions.
Maybe I'm old and cynical, but I've grown convinced there isn't a political end. Won't ambitious power-seekers always call the status quo oppressive? Life isn't a bowl of cherries, so it's effective to tell voters, "Vote for Pedro and all your wildest dreams will come true." It's the rare voter who smiles upon hearing, "Work your hardest, obey the rules, and hope for the best."
As for Stephanie's ends-justifies-the-means mindset, I'm reminded of an Asian speaking after the recent murder of a young Asian woman in NYC, stabbed to death by a stranger in her own apartment. "We don't care about your social experiment. We want our safety back."
Glenn - the honesty and vulnerability present in your more self-reflective responses are both refreshing and inspiring. The principles of recovery are evident in the manner in which you conduct yourself, and, as someone who can relate to the burdens of a troubled past, I am grateful for all that you provide. I wish you nothing but peace.
Glenn, is this accurate? It's not your direct quote, but a label applied to a timestamp (presumably by an assistant):
"My raison d’être is to give voice to my contempt for the failures of my people."
It seemed to me your contempt was for the hypocrisy, lies, and excuses in the framing, rather than "for the failures of [your] people." I've seen the quote (falsely) attributed to you as evidence of your "anti-blackness" and in order to dismiss you, so you may want to correct it.
Stephanie Lepp didn't understand affirmative action well enough to apply integral theory to it. Glenn said that affirmative action on net is harming African Americans right now. Stephanie didn't appear to understand what Glenn was saying.
Stephanie also lacked the courage to apply integral theory to sexual/gender liberation in the islamic world as Glenn asked her to do.
For example many islamic countries use to have more lbgtq+ rights and diversity than the USA, Canada and Europe have today. In a very short period of time girls, woman and lbgtq+ have massively lost rights and freedom, including over the last generation. And she doesn't appear to know how to discuss the mass slaughter of lbgtq+ going on as we speak right now, including in Afghanistan, Gaza, Somalia and many other countries. When Gaza was ruled by the Ottoman Turkish empire until 1918 homosexuality was decriminalized and allowed. The massive recent regression of lgbtq+ rights and woman's rights in Gaza is in large part caused by the nonmuslim world, including not limited to the global nonmuslim woke, backing extreme sunni islamists against liberal muslims.
Afghanistan use to be far more liberal and progressive on girls and lbgtq+ than the USA and Europe are right now. What is happening in Afghanistan right now hasn't happened in 8 thousand years. Now for the first time girls cannot go to school. Many of the main Afghan thought leaders, scientistists, mathemeticians and artists use to be woman in the past. Now that is all gone. And Stephanie appears to be too scared to place this in an integral framework.
Stephanie confused me by implying that slavery was wrong. If she really believed this, wouldn't she say that slavery is widely practiced globally and expanding? Wouldn't Stephanie express concern about this and at the very least say she didn't know how to prevent to expansion of slavery via extreme islamism, Al Qaeda, Daesh etc.
In a future conversation, it might be useful for Stephanie to discuss ONE issue she understands in great depth and apply integral theory to it (maybe letting Glenn know this ONE topic in advance so that Glenn could research it enough to have a high resolution discussion.) It would probably take her an hour to discuss this ONE topic, if she is really applying integral theory to it.
I also didn't understand what Stephanie meant by saying 28 minutes 42 seconds in that "we can can actually be less empirical sometimes and just more strategic." Can Stephanie give a specific example?
In my view Glenn might be the best living economist at discursively and non quantitatively explaining concepts. Does anyone practice what Stephanie is suggesting better than Glenn?
I would love to see Glenn interview guests on integral theory, consciousness, science spirituality intersection and how to use these modalities to increase broadly defined physical health, broadly defined mental health, broadly defined intelligence, "relations before transactions" for the general population, which would sharply increase global total factor productivity, the marginal product of labor and the marginal product of capital.
I would say that integral theory can be used in a way that is very high resolution, precise and data driven. Or in a way that is very "empirical" to use Stephanie's language.
Try reading but more challenging is understanding what Integral Theory is as “explained” in Wikipedia. My background is healthcare and this gobbledegook reminded me of alternative philosophies such as craniosacral therapy. Impossible to prove its existence much less its effectiveness beyond placebo.
Yikes. I would have thought Glenn's listeners would be better able to handle ideas they disagree with without resorting to ad hominem attacks. I'm just a person -- a producer and conceptual artist, mom with two kids, full-time job, deep faith in humanity, maybe a little judgmental but something I can work on. Gotta say I'm disappointed by many of your comments. Le Sigh.
For the record....we realized after the episode aired that we didn't give proper context for our conversation. Glenn invited me onto his show to interview *him*, the way I'd done on the Reckonings podcast in 2015: https://www.reckonings.show/episodes/5-pt2
That context has now been added to the description of the episode.
https://www.reckonings.show/episodes/5-pt2 This interview was extremely good. Strongly recommend everyone watch.
Left a comment for you:
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/stephanie-lepp-the-responsibilities/comment/6845316?s=r
Stephanie, I think many didn't understand what you were saying, versus disagreeing with what you were saying. I am glad you are tried to integrate integral theory into your discussion with Glenn.
You kept you temper admirably, far better than I could have done. Charlie Glenn
I hope Glenn doesn’t listen to Lepp. I found her discussion of her Venn diagram approach to finding common ground frustrating. To find common ground,you jettison essentially any controversial views and what remains is worthless. Meaningless.
To show the failure of affirmative action Glenn could have raised the mismatch issue as described in a book by that title by Stuart Taylor. Very simply, students are being admitted to programs in which they can’t do the work and therefor don’t complete a degree. This happens to blacks most obviously but could happen to anyone whose social and cultural experience doesn’t prepare them for, say, an Ivy League environment. The argument is that rather than attending Princeton, a black student granted admission there with lower scores and grades would do better and be more successful in the long term attending his local state university where he would likely complete the degree and move on to grad school or a professional job. There are plenty of black students who could do the work at Princeton and we should seek them out but as Glenn points out, when the thumb is on the scale, genuine achievements are not respected.
I believe a black parent whose child was admitted to Thomas Jefferson high school in Virginia based on merit - his entrance exam scores - is a leader in the movement retain the test for admission rather than what people who push these ideas call “holistic” (wholistic?) criteria.
It’s clear that she does care for you and I appreciate her attempt to kindly confront you about something she disagrees with. That said, her argument was mostly incoherent in my view. The lack of direct criticism made her come across as mealy-mouthed.
1:06:21 “I think that the more that we fight, the harder, the more painful it will be to get there.”
Spoken by someone who assumes everyone shares the belief that we are all on the same shared journey, with the same goals in mind. Conflicting visions would seem to make fighting inevitable, and in some cases, zero sum. And how do you argue that something is important or necessary if you’re not willing to fight for it? Has she really so little self-awareness that in advocating her particular [mushy] vision, she can’t identity herself as a combatant?
I think this conversation was good in that it modeled one of those hard conversations that many of us say are necessary, but few of us are willing to engage in.
Yes, Stephanie did not come across well in this conversation. I’ll wager that she’s a better speaker than what we saw here, but she couldn’t find a nice way to plainly say “Glenn I love you but you’re wrong about all this stuff.” If she were speaking to someone she didn’t have a positive relationship with it probably would have been more succinct and less polite. But she likes Glenn, so we had to listen to her “...like...kinda...um...y’know...” around what she really wanted to say, which seems to have been the same tired, short sighted opinions we’ve heard Glenn (and John) poke holes in dozens of times.
But isn’t that how it goes when people leave their echo chamber? Isn’t that how it has to go for people to change their minds? We have to leave our comfort zones sometimes in order to have conversations that have any hope of changing minds, and sometimes those conversations are awkward as this one was. Which was one of the solid points that Stephanie had, that ranting and dunking is unlikely to persuade people who think differently from you; that if persuasion is your goal then you might need to rethink your strategy, or you might need to rethink your goal. If we expect that every The Glenn Show conversation has to leave us feeling entertained, it might mean we’re full of shit.
Anyway, thanks Glenn for this glimpse into the teacherly side of you that your students must get to enjoy regularly.
"But isn’t that how it goes when people leave their echo chamber? Isn’t that how it has to go for people to change their minds?" This is so important.
But while I believe Stephanie WAS trying, and failing, to change Glenn's mind, Glenn was looking more for truth. Implicitly wanting people to change their own minds as they see the truth from a different perspective.
Stephanie Lepp appears to be like a very intelligent, pragmatic person, and I hope she is on the Glenn Show again.
However, I find it counterproductive that she really insists that Glenn -- a person who's built a reputation as a careful, balanced thinker known for his tendency to steelman his intellectual opponents -- is the person who needs to reel it in. She must be aware that we live in a world where the slightest amount of dissent is career suicide in many institutions, and I don't see how she can seriously suggest to Glenn that "[his] pushback is just making things worse".
Consider this: a man points a gun at me and asks for my wallet, and he shoots me when I reply "no"... obviously I could be more pragmatic in that situation, and maybe I had a role to play in my demise. But does that absolve the gunman of any blame here?
And the argument that "evolution is messy" is unproductive for a number of reasons: (1) it assumes you know what evolution is intending, (2) it assumes we can't evolve backwards or that every change is positive simply because it's a change, and (3) it assumes that pushing back against any change is the cause of anything bad that results from that change. All 3 of those assumptions are pretty weak on their face, and responding "evolution is messy" is unfalsifiable and doesn't add value to the discussion.
Anyways, I found this discussion very interesting, and thought she was an awesome guest to the show. Thank you both for letting us listen in
After an initial cringe hearing Ms. Lepp say that she cares for Prof. Loury, and grateful that Prof. Loury didn't let that slip by engaging her with consistent good humor, I appreciated the conversation. In the end, a lovely modeling of interactive warmth and goodwill, from both parties. Ms. Lepp spoke of her interest in Prof. Loury's life journey, which I would label a 'to hell and back' journey. Deep lessons, real to the bone, often come from those journeys. A big reason I'm so interested in the GL Show is because of how real they seem. I find comfort hearing conversations that strike deep, without trying to provide answers.
How long will DEI and affirmative action go on? Can even a Supreme Court decision break through the log jam? As long as there are entrenched bureaucracies whose power and budgets with associated useless bureaucratic jobs exist, I fear we will be living with them forever.
Consider that over 20 years after 9/11 we all have to take off our shoes before going through security at an airport and we can't take more than 3 ozs of liquid in a container into the cabin of a plane all because some nut tried to ignite his shoe that may have contained a firecracker. And we all just do it meekly as though this were natural.
Someone needs to call bullshit on this craziness. Kudos to Glenn for doing so on affirmative action and DEI.
"I think your pragmatic pluralism is incoherent."
Glenn, sir, you are the MAN! My girl and I had to pause this we were laughing so hard.
21:00 is a really important moment in this conversation. Stephanie attempts to articulate what I believe is THE fundamental difference in the philosophy of the large political groups that can't seem to agree on much of anything in modern America. The question is, do the ends justify the means? One side seems to believe that yes, and if we can just get to that end (e.g. racial equity across society) we will all be better off for it. The other side (Glenn's "side") believes that no, the means are far too important to do away with for "ends" that are often seen as arbitrary or utopian in nature. I see this dichotomy constantly in online discussions.
Maybe I'm old and cynical, but I've grown convinced there isn't a political end. Won't ambitious power-seekers always call the status quo oppressive? Life isn't a bowl of cherries, so it's effective to tell voters, "Vote for Pedro and all your wildest dreams will come true." It's the rare voter who smiles upon hearing, "Work your hardest, obey the rules, and hope for the best."
As for Stephanie's ends-justifies-the-means mindset, I'm reminded of an Asian speaking after the recent murder of a young Asian woman in NYC, stabbed to death by a stranger in her own apartment. "We don't care about your social experiment. We want our safety back."
She seems really kind and I like her higher level framework but I'd take none of her advice. Keep doing what you do Glenn.
Glenn - the honesty and vulnerability present in your more self-reflective responses are both refreshing and inspiring. The principles of recovery are evident in the manner in which you conduct yourself, and, as someone who can relate to the burdens of a troubled past, I am grateful for all that you provide. I wish you nothing but peace.