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Smerconish
"How To Know A Person"; Do Humans Not Have Any Free Will?; Interview With Author Greg Lukianoff; Interview With The First Black Female Billionaire Sheila Johnson; Interview with Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Aired 9-10a ET
Aired December 30, 2023 - 09:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[09:00:00]
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SARAH SIMPKINS, 101-YEAR-OLD STUDENT: Something I had to do, they're very grateful that God has enabled me to do this.
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VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN ANCHOR: Ms. Simpkins finished her first semester with two A's, one B and a 3.5 GPA. And when she crosses that stage in May, she'll be 102 years old and a granddaughter will be there getting a degree of her own. Ms. Sarah Simpkins, I see you.
Thank you for joining me today. Smerconish is up next.
MICHAEL SMERCONISH, CNN ANCHOR: Finally, living the dream. I'm Michael Smerconish in New York City. My Saturday morning weekly program is approaching its 10th year here on CNN. By the way, thank you for that. I consider this a great privilege. I'm grateful for all the regular viewers.
Quick story, back in 2006, after I'd been appearing regularly on CNN, usually as a legal guest, the network told me they liked my work, but they didn't know what to do with me. Do you have any ideas I was asked. As a matter of fact, I do, I replied. I think the network bras were surprised when I then pitched my idea, hosting a weekly Book Club.
I envisioned an entertainment show featuring author interviews and discussion of the best in long form journalism. The network was intrigued they decided to go ahead and order a pilot. We filmed it beginning with me back at home on Market Street in Philadelphia. I remember being so nervous, and having to do many, many takes.
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SMERCONISH: It may sound like headlines have been plucked from Today's Newspaper. But when you add in pulse pounding drama, when you add in a wisecracking when, when you add in a sexy smart love interest, then you can gently transition from the hard news to the hardcover. I'm Michael Smerconish. Welcome to Book Club.
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SMERCONISH: There's something else that I remember the great bestselling novelist, Nelson DeMille, graciously agreed to be my test guest. Well, that show never made it to air. But today 17 years later, a holiday gift at least for me. Welcome to my Book Club, at least for one day. You know, despite having a daily radio program on SiriusXM and a weekly television program on CNN, I like to say that actually I read for a living. I have to know what to say. And books are my passion. The interviews I enjoy the most are those with authors whose books have enriched me.
I've accumulated many over the years dating back to my AM radio days. As a matter of fact, they're archived on my Book Club podcast, which now boasts more than 300 episodes. Go there. You'll hear my interviews with everybody from Hillary Clinton to Jeffrey Archer from Arnold Schwarzenegger to D. L. Hughley from John Gotti Jr. to Jimmy Carter.
2023 was a banner year for my reading. And today I decided I would speak with five authors of books that made an impact on me this year. David Brooks has been an opinion columnist for The New York Times for 20 years. His latest book explores the most important skill for people to possess and lead happy, healthy lives.
Free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff, co-wrote the bestseller, the coddling of the American mind. And with canceled culture wars tearing apart university campuses all across the country, he's now back with a well-timed follow up. It's "The Canceling of the American Mind."
Sheila Johnson was the nation's first female black billionaire. In her memoir, she recounts hardships she faced along the way including institutional racism, losing a child, emotional abuse and depression.
And Robert Rubin was the former Secretary of the Treasury co-chair of Goldman Sachs. His latest is about what he's learned on how to make the best decisions in an uncertain world.
And perhaps in complete contrast, Robert Sapolsky is a TED Talk phenom. He's a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. He argues in his latest book, that we really don't have any power to decide anything, that there's no such thing as free will.
So welcome to the Smerconish Book Club. Let's dive in. One of the biggest challenges in today's world is the loneliness epidemic and lack of deep friendships. But David Brooks may have an answer. In his New York Times bestselling book, "How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen." He writes these words, some days, it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life. And as a result, a lot of us are lonely and lack deep friendships. It's not because we don't want these things. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person to look into their face with loving respect and acceptance.
David Brooks joins me now before his post at The New York Times as a columnist. His journalism career included stints at The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic and Newsweek. He is of course a regular commentator on PBS NewsHour and frequent analyst on NPR. So great that you are here. I'd like to think that I'm an illuminator. Sometimes I think that I'm a diminisher. What's the difference between the two?
[09:05:06]
DAVID BROOKS, AUTHOR, "HOW TO KNOW A PERSON": Well, first, I know you're persistent because you pursued a 17-year-old dream and now we're --
SMERCONISH: Here it is.
BROOKS: I'm happy to be part of it. So diminishers are people who don't know how to see you. They're not curious about you. They stereotype. They ignore. They don't ask you a question. Sometimes I leave a party. And I think that whole time nobody asked me a question. I think like only 30 percent of humans are question askers. Illuminators on the other hand, are curious about you. They make you feel respected known, lit up. They can see the world from your point of view.
So the story I'd like to tell us about a woman named Jennie Jerome, who later became the mother of Winston Churchill. But in the 19th century, she's in England, and she seated at dinner next to William Gladstone, who's the prime minister. And she left that dinner thinking that Gladstone was the cleverest person in England.
Then later, she's seated at dinner next to Gladstone's great political rival, Benjamin Disraeli. And she leaves that dinner thinking she's the cleverest person in England. So if you can make other people feel clever, smart, funny, you've got something going on.
SMERCONISH: Is that the hand you're dealt? Is it innate? Or can people change? Can I go from being a diminisher to an illuminator?
BROOKS: Yes. And I do it every morning. So I'm going to diminish your late at night when I'm tired. And I get better in a day. Yes, I think it's like athletic ability. So we're all born with certain levels of social skills. But nobody's good without practice. And everybody can get better with training. So in the book, I just tried to walk people through the process from the first sector we lays eyes on each other, how should I act? And then how should we hang out casually?
And then, you know, the biggest thing is, how good are you at conversation? And most of us are not as good as we think we are. And so I just collect some tips on how to be a really good conversationalist. So one of them is be allowed listener. I got a buddy when you're talking to him, it's like talking to a Pentecostal church. He's like, yes, yes, I agree. I agree. And I love talking to that guy.
Another one is don't be a topper. If you tell me that you had this terrible flight. You were on the tarmac for two hours.
SMERCONISH: Oh, yes. Well, my flight --
BROOKS: Yes, exactly. So, oh, yes, you're that guy.
SMERCONISH: -- you're going through.
BROOKS: My flight is four hours. And what I'm really, it seems like I'm trying to relate what I'm really doing is let's not talk about you. Let's talk about me.
SMERCONISH: So I was drawn to this book, your book this year, because I put it on a list and I'm going to put on the screen. Other books with which I associated, I hope you'll agree with this. Robert Putnam's, "Bowling Alone," Bill Bishop's, "The Big Sort," Charles Murray, "Coming Apart," Jean Twenge, "iGen." You and I both like the grant study, which was written about in "The Good Life." The whole thread of these books is about diminished relationships and the impact on not only mental health, but our national fabric. Can we change all this?
BROOKS: Yes, I'm very proud to be in that company. Those are really good books that really informed me. And so, you know, there's just something crazy happened to our social fabric. So the, you know, rising depression, rising suicide, the step that sort of gets me is the number of people who say they have no close personal friends is up four times since 2000. The amount of time we spend with our friends is down 60 percent. The number of Americans who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category up 50 percent. So it's just like a social disaster, it's hard to have a strong democracy on top of a rotting social fabric.
And so I think we absolutely can change what's happened in the past. But we have to get good at these skills. We have to get good at knowing how to ask questions of each other, knowing how to disagree across difference, knowing how to sit with someone who's depressed. And so these are just basic.
SMERCONISH: But David, here's the problem. There's a whole page in "How to Know a Person" with absolutely alarming statistics on mental health. And some of it is probably known to the audience. And some of it probably is not. I want people to buy and read David Brooks' book, but how can we get to know one another if we're behind closed doors on social media, right? That's not a substitute?
BROOKS: Yes. So you can't. You know, on social media, there's judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere. And on social media, you're just performing. And so I think social media is a big cause for why we've seen especially the rise of depression among young people, but it's not the only cause. And so you mentioned Robert Putnam's book. Another cause I think it's because we're less active in civic life.
SMERCONISH: Right.
BROOKS: Another cause, I have no data behind this and nobody is ever written about this. But I think we used to live more in extended families. So if you had uncles and cousins, you had to know how to deal with the crazy Uncle Al.
SMERCONISH: Yes. BROOKS: And now we live in smaller families. And so there's less social skill required. And finally, in the thing I focus on, we actually used to teach this stuff, like how to ask somebody on a date, how to sit with somebody who's reading.
SMERCONISH: A date, what's that? Now I can just swipe it.
BROOKS: Right, exactly. And so like, how to ask for an offer forgiveness. You look back at schools, like 70 years ago, it seems kind of corny, like courtesy club.
SMERCONISH: Yes.
BROOKS: I'd be polite to people.
SMERCONISH: Sure.
BROOKS: But actually, it's kind of useful how to break up with someone without destroying their heart. I teach college level. And a lot of my students, they've had very few romantic relationships. And some of them, one, you know, one said, every time I've been broken up with, the guy just ghosted me. He didn't have the courtesy to say I'm having -- this isn't working out. I'm sorry. They just vanished. So of course she goes through life distrustful thinking the next guy is going to vanish on her too.
[09:10:02]
SMERCONISH: Yes or no, final answer is this book impart an argument for National Service?
BROOKS: Absolutely.
SMERCONISH: OK.
BROOKS: Absolutely.
SMERCONISH: I thought so. Books great. Thank you. Thank you for being here.
BROOKS: Thank you.
SMERCONISH: Up ahead, am I choosing to say these words and to host this program or is it all predestined? My next guest is a neuroscientist. He believes that people actually don't have any free will. How did he reach that conclusion? What would be the implications?
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SMERCONISH: Do humans lack free will? And if so, what are the implications? Is all of our behavior beyond our conscious control? That's the provocative theory of my next guest, neuroscientist and primatologist, Robert Sapolsky, who has for more than four decades been studying both humans and baboons in Kenya. His TED talk, the biology of our best and worst selves has garnered over 2.5 million views.
[09:15:20]
Sapolsky's new book is this, "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will," it's a follow up to his 2017 bestseller and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst." If there's no free will, this has broad implications for society, from our careers, to our families, to the criminal justice system to what we're all going to eat for lunch today.
So I chose or at least, I think I chose to invite him on today's Book Club, to discuss. Robert Sapolsky joins me now he's a professor of biology, neurology and neurosurgery at Stanford University. And he's a MacArthur Genius Grant winner. Dr. Sapolsky, thank you for being here. What is free will as you use those words?
ROBERT SAPOLSKY, PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY, NEUROLOGY & NEUROSURGERY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY: Well, probably the best way to get at that is to first define what is not free will, because that's what most people operate on, which is this intuition, you find yourself in a moment, where you have an intention, I'm going to order a type of ice cream right now. You pick chocolate over vanilla. You consciously know you intended to do that. You know the consequences likely to be that they're going to hand you some chocolate ice cream. And you know that you had alternatives.
And for most people, the fact the moment this, how palpable that moment of choices is a pretty good stance and for free will. It constitutes free will, in most people's lives because you add intent. And what nobody addresses in a realm like that is where did that intent come from? How did you become the sort of person who at that juncture, would choose chocolate over vanilla who would want ice cream at all, who would like have the means to buy it, who would not be off busy hunter gathering or something.
Instead, the whole issue is, we can intend things and choose to them pursue it. But as much as we try, we cannot intend to intend things different than what we do. And that's because of the biology that has made us who we are.
SMERCONISH: OK, maybe it makes sense for ice cream, but one person fires into a crowd, another person, unfortunately, is in the crowd and is a victim. Do you see them both similarly?
SAPOLSKY: Absolutely. Because all we are victim perpetrator, chocolate ice cream eater, nihilist, whatever, all we are is the outcome of what came before. And what came before that and what came before that. And when we understand what makes for human behavior, we are nothing more or less than the sum of biology over which we have no control and its interactions with environment over which we have no control.
We arrive at a moment where we feel like we are making a conscious choice and indeed we are. But we are choosing based on the person that circumstances is turns us into being.
SMERCONISH: Where in lies personal responsibility? SAPOLSKY: Well, the thing that really puts me out in the lunatic fringe is I think when you really look at this closely, personal responsibility doesn't make any sense any more than feeling responsible for your eye color or responsible for like how many cells you've gotten in your left kidney or some such thing. We are simply the outcome of our good or bad luck, biological and environmental.
And when you look really closely, blame, punishment, praise, reward, none of it makes any sense because none of us really earned the temperament that we have and the personality that we have and the vulnerabilities and the proclivities.
SMERCONISH: OK. Dr. Sapolsky, let me look at it from a different angle. How about someone born into a life of distress who is able to free themselves of that environment, whatever that environment might be, fill in the hypothetical? Doesn't -- isn't that at odds with your argument that we don't have free will because something about that person allow them to escape the life for which they were apparently destined?
SAPOLSKY: Exactly. In your wording, something allowed them. They did not choose to. They did not change their circumstances. Their circumstances were unique enough that they were changed in a way that they could escape from what was the statistical probability of their outcome? And what we see here is the second totally, like seductive realm of people thinking they're seeing free will.
Yes, there's stuff we have no control over. There's attributes that we were given that we were gifted that we were cursed with. We're tall enough to play in the NBA. We're too tone deaf to sit in the opera, whatever -- to sing in the opera, whatever. But what do you do with your attributes? Do you show tenacity? Are you self-indulgent all? And that's where we make this like Grand Canyon-size leapfrog in deciding the traits that you have are biological. But what you do with it is made out of like Sunday morning sermons and gumption and things to that sort.
[09:20:31]
SMERCONISH: OK. One other angle, if you're right, if Dr. Robert Sapolsky is right, and there's no such thing as free will, then by rights, we ought to open the jails?
SAPOLSKY: We should open the jails. We should open the corporate men's clubs also. I'm fishing for what an equivalent is here. Because nobody deserves to be in jail. Nobody deserves to have a corner office as their CEO. Nonetheless, we got to have people running corporations, and we need to have people taken off the street who were dangerous.
SMERCONISH: OK. But wait a minute. Wait a minute.
SAPOLSKY: And we need --
SMERCONISH: In the academic realm, I assume you're a MacArthur Genius recipient. I assume you're the guy with the corner office. Do you deserve to have the corner office? Was that not because of your work and intelligence?
SAPOLSKY: Absolutely. I got the right genes. My parents traumatized me in the perfect right way, not one inch too much or too little so that this was the outcome. I got sufficient protein at this point. I'm wearing like the right color socks this morning, in terms of sort of changing what I have to say, no. I didn't earn anything. You didn't earn anything. All we are is the outcome.
But still, yes, we have to have dangerous people off the street, even if we don't hold them responsible. And we have to have competent people taking out your brain tumor, even if we're not making them think that they're naturally a better human than others because they want this and they're a neurosurgeon. But we can do this. We do this all the time. We subtract a notion of responsibility out of realms where we have to constrain some people, where we have to facilitate others.
And we could do it, for example, like there's this type of human who's dangerous, who's dangerous to people around them, and we have to protect people from them. And we can do it. Your kid is sneezing a lot. So you don't send them to kindergarten tomorrow, because they're going to get everybody else sick. You keep your kid home. You constrain them. You quarantine them. You protect society from their sneezing, but you don't preach to their kid about how they have a rotten soul because they're sneezing.
SMERCONISH: I can't think of --
SAPOLSKY: Not only --
SMERCONISH: I can't think of a more provocative subject. To be continued, OK? Maybe over a couple of beers or something else, who knows. Thank you, Dr. Sapolsky.
SAPOLSKY: Good. Thanks for having me on. Happy holidays.
SMERCONISH: You too.
[09:23:01]
Up next, the fraught confrontations on campus about the Israel-Hamas war are just the latest battleground regarding free speech. And a university president lost her job over her inability to satisfactorily address the topic has canceled culture made it impossible to please anybody. My next guest says he's got a solution.
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SMERCONISH: The war between Israel and Hamas just the latest lightning rod on the ongoing debates across college campuses about where to draw the line when it comes to free speech and cancel culture. After the recent disastrous congressional hearings with college presidents outcry from donors, business leaders and others, led to the resignation of the President of the University of Pennsylvania. The timing couldn't be better for my next guest's book, "The Canceling of the American Mind." Its introduction includes this passage, since cancellations exploded on campus in 2014, they have ebbed and flowed. During the ebbs, many have been too eager to declare it through, but every time cancel culture has come back stronger than ever. We can't just wish it away. Instead, we have to establish the free speech culture that will short circuit cancel culture.
Joining me now is its coauthor, Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or FIRE. So it's been a banner year for the kind of issues that you get psyched to discuss.
GREG LUKIANOFF, AUTHOR, "THE CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND": Yes.
SMERCONISH: But has it been a banner year for free speech?
LUKIANOFF: Oh, absolutely not, unfortunately. I think that a lot of people due to the testimony and due to a lot of things that are coming out of the Hamas work, people are more aware of the dysfunction in higher education. But unfortunately, a lot of people, a lot of institutions are taking the message of the testimony as being we have to clamp down even more on free speech. And the book, one of the reasons why I am glad that canceling at the American mind, you know, came out right around now is because what we're saying is like that's what they've been doing for years. And it's been a disaster.
SMERCONISH: Except now to me, it seems like the ideological lines have totally blurred.
LUKIANOFF: Yes, absolutely. No. Definitely, there are people who are absolutely, you know, against canceled culture who seem to be much more pro censorship now. It's really hard, but it is normal. And we do talk a lot about, you know, threats from both the right and the left in canceling of the American mind. But right now, people seemed to think that, you know, maybe more censorship is the answer, which is insane.
SMERCONISH: Bill Maher, you recently were on his program and he went through some of the current buzzwords as they pertain to Israel and Hamas, a reminder for every body at home.
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[09:30:08]
BILL MAHER, HOST, "REAL TIME" ON HBO: When I break down the phrases that I hear, first is the intifada. There are a lot of people who say you shouldn't say that. I disagree. Free speech. Intifada. That's one of those vague terms like jihad. It probably means violence.
But you know what, uprising, whatever. OK. Then there is from the river to the sea. OK. That's a little more genocide-y, but, you know, let's give the benefit of the doubt. It could be, well, we just want the Jews to move, not die.
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SMERCONISH: And, of course, the next was by any means necessary, where's the line, Greg?
LUKIANOFF: Well, generally, the three things you got to look out for are incitement, imminent lawless action. You have threats. And you have discriminatory harassment.
And we are seeing an uptick in all three on college campuses, particularly threats. We saw -- absolutely death threats at Cornell, for example. At Harvard, you saw some incidents where they're just outright assault.
So, campuses have been really bizarre in the sense that they have been weirdly tolerant of violence or shouting down speakers. In some cases, you know, throwing rocks at people. It has been a bad year for shoutdowns. Those need to be fought. When your students are assaulting each other, you have to -- you actually have to punish them for it.
SMERCONISH: Penn is my alma mater for law school. I'm not a defender of the whole tenure of Liz Magill. I got to tell you I don't think that she should have been drummed out. What do you think?
LUKIANOFF: I think that Liz Magill is not great for free speech. And one of the last things she did after her testimony not going very well was say, you know what, we're going to consider abandoning tying our contractual promises of freedom of speech to constitutional standards, which was, honestly, one of the scariest things I have seen a university president say.
SMERCONISH: Right.
LUKIANOFF: And meanwhile, the vision statement that some of the donors who wanted to oust her came out with is one of the best things I have read on restoring free speech and common sense at higher ed.
SMERCONISH: OK. But weren't they a little hypocritical then in not giving her the right to honor free speech, as she saw it?
LUKIANOFF: Penn finished second to last in our campus free speech ranking.
SMERCONISH: Harvard was the last.
LUKIANOFF: Yes. Harvard was dead last, exactly. And Magill has been around for longer than Claudine Gay. So, I think there was no way forward for free speech or academic freedom with Magill still --
(CROSSTALK)
SMERCONISH: Should schools even take positions?
LUKIANOFF: I think that when it comes to global positions --
SMERCONISH: Right.
LUKIANOFF: -- the things that don't directly affect their campus, they shouldn't. Because it establishes an orthodoxy. It leads them to, you know, weird situations on opining on things that really it's for the professors and the students to come up with those opinions, not the president of the university.
SMERCONISH: And that's an idea, you correct me if I'm wrong, but you talk about it, that came out of the University of Chicago.
LUKIANOFF: The Calvin Report, yes.
SMERCONISH: The Calvin Report. Explain what that was.
LUKIANOFF: The Calvin Report was this wonderful statement that University of Chicago came out in 1967 at the time when, basically, the pressure was every university has to, you know, follow the politics of the movement at the time and declare their support for the causes of, you know, their students wanted. And University of Chicago said no. That we are not the critic ourselves. We are the host to the critics.
We are not actually supposed to establish orthodoxies of these schools. And so many of these schools have established orthodoxies. They -- every time they come up with a statement on an issue of global or local concern, they are basically saying, this is the official position of this university, and that's inappropriate.
SMERCONISH: The university presidents were horrible in their presentation at Congress.
LUKIANOFF: Yes.
SMERCONISH: Right. They were tone deaf.
LUKIANOFF: Yes.
SMERCONISH: They should have slammed the table. They should have condemned Hamas.
LUKIANOFF: Yes.
SMERCONISH: They should have condemned anti-Semitism. Then they should have explained that they are somewhat tethered to the First Amendment, even though they are private institutions, and that explains what they are and are not able to do. Final word from you?
LUKIANOFF: Check out thefire.org. Don't send your kids to schools that do badly on our free speech ranking.
SMERCONISH: Thank you for that. It's a great book.
Up ahead, before Oprah, Sheila Johnson was the first Black female billionaire. She started the cable network with her then husband, is now a hotelier, with stakes in three sports teams, who launched her own film festival. It wasn't always an easy road. She's here to tell her remarkable story.
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[09:38:50] SMERCONISH: Before Oprah, there was Sheila Johnson, the first female Black billionaire. In 1979, she co-founded the cable channel Black Entertainment Television with her then husband. They sold it in 2001 to Viacom for $3 billion. The following year, they divorced ending a 33-year marriage.
Since then, she founded the Salamander collection of hotels and resorts, became a stakeholder in D.C.'s NBA, NHL, and WNBA teams, and having served as executive producer for Lee Daniels' "The Butler," staring Forest Whitaker, founded an annual film festival in her small Virginia town of Middleburg.
Along the way, she has encountered racism, lost a child, suffered emotional abuse in her first marriage. It's all here in her recent autobiography "Walk Through Fire: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Triumph." Sheila Johnson joins me now. Was Oprah bummed that you beat her to that list?
SHEILA JOHNSON, AUTHOR, "WALK THROUGH FIRE: A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LOSS, AND TRIUMPH": I have absolutely no idea. And, you know, I admire her in everything that she has done. So, I hope that she's OK with everything.
SMERCONISH: OK. Today, you are like a pillar of Virginia Horse Country.
JOHNSON: Yes.
SMERCONISH: Hasn't always been that way.
[09:40:00]
When you arrive in town, I love this in the book, what's the Powder Horn Gun and Antique shop?
JOHNSON: Well, it was a gun shop that actually was on the right-hand side every time you come into Middleburg and it had a Confederate flag in the window. And I had just recently moved out there. And every time I drove into town, it just grated my last nerve. And I just wanted to do something about it so I decided to buy the building. And because I could --
SMERCONISH: I take it the Confederate flag is no longer there.
JOHNSON: No, it's now a wonderful food market where people can eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner there.
SMERCONISH: So, you envision this resort, which ultimately you brought to fruition, but some signs get put up on yards, don't BET, you know, our area. You took that as racism?
JOHNSON: Well, you have no idea. The town was totally bankrupt.
SMERCONISH: Right.
JOHNSON: And didn't even have a functioning water sewage treatment plant. And I knew that if I built this resort on 340 acres that belonged to the late Pamela Harriman that I would be able to build an economic engine there that was going to support the town. But the other people didn't see it that way.
So, I remember after I had a conversation with the town up on the land and was going to Dulles Airport, there were signs don't BET Middleburg. Yes, that was a sign at the beginning of the fight of my life.
SMERCONISH: The book is called "Walk Through Fire."
JOHNSON: Yes.
SMERCONISH: The fire you have walked through includes that first marriage. A lot of ups and downs, but a lot of downs. And here's what I was taken with. Your parents were very accomplished, especially for African-Americans of that era.
JOHNSON: Yes.
SMERCONISH: Dad was a doctor for the V.A. hospital. Mom was an accountant. He walked out on her. Did that decision impact when you finally decided to walk out on your marriage?
JOHNSON: Well, I think what happens in life is things start to come back around. I was actually shocked when my father did leave. Here we were at the top of the pinnacle of Black society.
SMERCONISH: Yes.
JOHSON: And by him leaving there, it plummeted my mother down. What I realized then is women, back there, had absolutely no standing in life.
They didn't have bank accounts. They didn't have any kind of financial foundation. And that really hit me hard. And from that moment on, by him walking out, it really established a seat in my thought process of how I never, ever wanted to be there.
SMERCONISH: OK. But before there were the Obamas, there were the Johnsons. You were the first family of this country, the first Black couple. Was there pressure brought to bear on you like, hey, you can't leave Bob because we can't have that reflection on the community.
JOHNSON: Exactly. They kept saying, you're the king and queen of media.
SMERCONISH: Right.
JOHNSON: You know, you can't leave there. I had absolutely no support. As much as I worked behind the scenes of keeping BET on the air and really trying to push it forward, you know, many of the employees says, you were the conscience of the company.
I was being erased out of the history of BET and this was something that really got under my last nerve. I mean, I sold my violin. I was a concert violinist in my first act of life.
SMERCONISH: To fund BET.
JOHNSON: To help fund BET and to pay for, you know, rent.
SMERCONISH: Sure.
JOHNSON: And there was so much that I was doing behind the scenes and sacrificing that I never got credit for. You know, and I even started a show called Teen Summit that really would answer the issues of, you know, Black media video, the video market and the way women were being portrayed. So, this was just something that, you know, as the time went on and more of the brand expanded and got very popular within the African-American community, my name was never mentioned in anything.
Not that I wanted it mentioned, I really wanted to push my husband forward. I wanted him to be the face, which he was.
SMERCONISH: Sure.
JOHNSON: But the problem was is I was not respected. And I did not get the credit for anything that I did behind the scenes of BET and that's what hurt the most.
SMERCONISH: But you do now.
JOHNSON: Yes.
SMERCONISH: And 50 years almost to the day after the "I Have a Dream" speech, you opened the Salamander resort. You overcame those battles, even by one vote in the zoning meeting.
JOHNSON: Exactly.
SMERCONISH: And who was standing there when you opened it but your ex- husband and you were cool with that.
JOHNSON: You know, I'm not going to ever stoop to his level.
SMERCONISH: Right.
JOHNSON: I wanted him to see what I really could do because I was never given credit for anything that I had done in my life. I always felt like a failure around it. You know, and the struggles that I went through, you know, he said, let's bring Four Seasons in there. They can buy this. I said, no, I can do this.
SMERCONISH: And you did.
JOHNSON: And we have seven hotels now.
SMERCONISH: Sheila Johnson, thank you. Congratulations.
JOHNSON: You're so welcome.
SMERCONISH: Great book. Appreciate it. JOHNSON: Thank you.
SMERCONISH: Still to come, every day we're confronted with decisions large and small.
[09:45:01]
How can we make sure whether the choice that we're making is the right one? Robert Rubin, the former co-chair of Goldman Sachs, former treasury secretary, uses my favorite method, the yellow legal pad. He's here to explain.
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SMERCONISH: How do you know when you're making the right decision? My next guest, Robert Rubin, had a revelation about that question while he was a sophomore at Harvard. It shaped his thinking ever since. The professor of Rubin's intro to philosophy course ingrained the concept that despite all the thinking of all the great philosophers nothing can be proven in an absolute sense.
[09:50:06]
That was 1958, the world has only gotten more uncertain since. But Robert Rubin did pretty well for himself in the intervening years. He rose to be co-chair of Goldman Sachs, then was the first director of the White House National Economic Council for President Bill Clinton, and then secretary of the treasury.
Through all these roles, Rubin found himself relying on one essential tool, one that I myself employ, and that is a yellow legal pad. He would write down a list of possible outcomes and the odds of each occurring, then choose the course of action that seemed to be the most promising outcome. Thus, the title of the new book "The Yellow Pad: Making Better Decisions in an Uncertain World."
In it, Rubin writes this, "I worry that faced with such unsettling uncertainty, too many people and too many of our institutions have responded by rushing toward absolutes and simplistic answers." Robert Rubin joins me now.
OK, Mr. Secretary. So, one day you're at the White House and a letter arrives, old school, wanting to know, are you the same Robbie Rubin from the fourth grade at the North Beach Elementary? What am I talking about?
ROBERT RUBIN, FORMER CO-CHAIR, GOLDMAN SACHS/FORMER U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY: Well, we moved to Miami Beach, Michael, when I was entering fourth grade. And I've been rather a poor student when I went to the school I went to in New York. But I got to North Beach Elementary School and had this wonderful teacher, Mrs. Collins. And under her, both in fourth and fifth grade, I blossomed and I actually became quite a good student.
She was asking me in that letter was I the same Robbie Rubin that she remembered. And, I think, the answer, Michael, was two-fold. One, I am the same Robbie Rubin, now albeit somewhat older, because at that time, I was in fourth grade. I was so much older when I was in the treasury department.
And -- but the other -- the other meaning of that, I think, is what had happened to me in the interim? How did I become whatever it is that I became? And that got me to thinking about not only what contributed to my -- doing all that I have done in my life, including, I might add a lot of good luck, but also, what has caused other people who have been successful by external metrics, not the internal metrics. Because, I think, what's more important -- which is how do you feel about yourself but rather by what they have accomplished in the world. And that is what that chapter is about, Michael.
SMERCONISH: The Harvard course to which I made reference, that was an epiphany moment for you. How so?
RUBIN: Well, we all got there, and Professor Demos started talking about the great thinkers of the ages. And truthfully, I didn't understand a lot of it. Well, I did (INAUDIBLE) course I might add and that was before -- well, it's true. I did (INAUDIBLE) inflation.
But it occurred to me as this was going on, that there was something else that he had in mind. Or at least it seemed to me there was something he had in mind which was that there were no provable certainties. And even these great thinkers, with all that they put forward, really were not able to prove that certainties that they moved toward in their thinking.
And in time, Michael, the conclusion I reached was there are no provable certainties. And then from that, or extrapolated from that, the view that the way to approach uncertainty is with a probabilistic mindset. And so, what one needed to do when facing an issue or decision is to try to identify a number of possibilities and then try to make judgments about the probabilities of each of those materializing and then make the best choice you can.
SMERCONISH: Look, you had me with book title. I mean, here I sit. I don't know if you can see me on monitor. I've got my yellow legal every Saturday when I'm hosting this show. It's right in front of me. What's the deal with your fascination with yellow legal tablets?
RUBIN: Well, this is a probabilistic approach to decision making, Michael, framed, or if you will, guided every decision I've ever made, whether it was running the arbitrage department in Goldman Sachs, or as you said eventually in the White House, the treasury, and all that I do now. And I am pretty active with policy. And one thing (INAUDIBLE) investment -- my job in investment banking firm.
The yellow pad is the tool in effect. Because what you can do is you can say, OK, this issue is this. And then make this decision, whatever it may be. Here are the various possibilities. And then what are the probabilities of those materializing. And on that basis, you can make the best possible decision you can.
And I would scroll over that yellow page trying to think through what I think these probabilities are. And then as I said, what the best might be. (INAUDIBLE) that those were all judgments. They don't -- the answers don't fly off the page.
And so, one thing that probabilistic decision making does is it causes you to think much more carefully and to look much more carefully and probe much more carefully about every issue you're dealing with because, ultimately, you're going to make judgments about probabilities.
SMERCONISH: I've never heard the words energetic curiosity before. Is that an innate quality or can it be acquired?
RUBIN: Well, I don't know the answer to that. But I know that I have an innate curiosity. It's part of my psyche, I suppose.
For example, I am now 85 years old. And about five months ago or something I thought to myself, you know, this thing called artificial intelligence, whatever it may be, may have a very big effect on the world. And I started taking tutorial.
[09:55:00]
And I now take a tutorial twice a week, an hour each time. And it has been remarkably interesting. Well, let me tell you, AI is obviously going to be an important part of the world that I'm going to be living in and my curiosity took me there.
Yes, I do have an innate curiosity. Whether it is something that is psychologically grounded and almost genetic, or nature/nurture, who knows where these things come from, or it's something you can acquire, I don't know. But if I had to make a guess, I guess, that it is kind of inherent in you, whether, as I say, for nature or nurture, I don't know.
SMERCONISH: Mr. Secretary, happy holidays. Thank you for being here.
RUBIN: I very much enjoyed being with you, Michael.
SMERCONISH: Me too.
RUBIN: Thank you.
SMERCONISH: I enjoyed having you. OK. Well, thanks for joining me on the Smerconish book club. I am so happy. I finally got to share my love of books and authors.
If you want more, check out the more than 300 episodes of the Book Club podcast at Smerconish.com. You're going to see interviews I've done or listen to interviews that I've done with everybody from Liz Cheney to Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead.
Happy holidays. See you next week.
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