I gave this talk at the Double Helix Theatre in New York, probably the most effective public talk I've ever given in my life. It was about 10 days ago. And I started, you know, my first sentence was, like Barrack Obama I'm a product of the South Side of Chicago where, you know, books, birds and Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave us hope for the future and where four family values held us together during the Great Depression and World War II: pursuit of the truth; personal honesty; fair play towards other human beings; and civic responsibility to the less fortunate. Now that sort of summarizes what I think I am. So you know, pursuit of the truth is not what these academics want. Personal honesty – they're quite willing to be dishonest. I don't think they're showing true civic responsibility to the less fortunate. One out of every three black kids in New York City winds up in prison. That's a pretty high level. It wasn't true 50 years ago, we had a much more law-abiding black population. This Black Panthers and all that rap music, it's awful! This Kanye West, terrible man, glorifying, you know, criminals. So all you do is you, you know...

[Q] I would have said that the four points you made, there are others who would say the same thing, but it doesn't capture you as what distinguishes you from others, I think, is an intolerance for hypocrisy that distinguishes you. There are others that have those same views about honesty and so on, but the thing that makes you, I think, among many things, but one in this arena...

This was, you know how it was developed? The absolute hypocrisy of my Irish grandmother, who was just saying, just you know, things were good. The Irish were just totally hypocritical. Well, what was up? So you know, I just used to, the word hypocrisy I have was synonymous with my grandmother. She was very kind to me, she was, you know, there wasn't, it wasn't that, but it was just not... So these are things which go so deep in my childhood that were all there by, before I went to the University of Chicago and, but my father, he really was...

[Q] Did he have that as well?

Well, as I say in my book, he hated anti-Semites. So you know he really, he really liked people who pursued the truth.