Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klaven and this is this week's interview.

My guest today is Jonathan Rosen.

He's the author of a remarkable and remarkably good book called The Best Minds, a story

of friendship, madness, and the tragedy of good intentions.

I read it on my device, so I don't have the actual copy of the book, but I have the cover in there.

This book is riveting. It's a personal story, a memoir of a tragic friendship, but it's also

a dramatic study, not just of one of the greatest policy blunders in American social history,

but also the philosophy underlying it. So it's not just a book of a big story.

It's also a very deep story. Weirdly, that's not why I read the book. I read it because my wife

gave it to me because she said this author grew up in a suburb and a milieu exactly like the one

you grew up in, except 10 years difference. And it was kind of almost like a social experiment

reading this story about a guy growing up in my world, except 10 years later. So it was kind of like

an episode of some TV show where you move through time. Just fascinating. I want to talk to him

about all these things. Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me. So to begin with, could you tell people as much of this story as you want to tell

them to get them to read the book? It really is a remarkable story and kind of unique if you can

just explain it to him. Sure. Of course, it took me 10 years to write it. So I'll try to be shorter

than that. The very short version is that my best friend from childhood who lived on my very

short street, who I met when I was 10 and who competed with me and I competed with him for everything

was very brilliant, graduated Yale in three years, then had a psychotic break. And despite that,

and despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia, had already applied to Yale Law School, was accepted

really embraced by a group of professors who became his mentors. He couldn't get hired,

...