Welcome back to Conversations. I'm Bill Crystal. I'm very pleased to have us our guest today,

Charles Murray, who I consider to be America's leading living social scientist. Welcome, Charles.

Thank you, Bill. I don't know if that is that phrase?

Oh, it's I'm dazzled of coming from you especially.

Maybe damning with faint phrase given what some of your social science colleagues do, but no.

It is genuine phrase.

Mentz is a genuine phrase for me.

So I think people would be interested to know,

how did you become a social scientist?

You know, it's one of those funny things

that you can remember about when you were a kid. I can remember

reading the Reader's Digest when maybe I was 12 or 13 years old and seeing an article about

the Rand Corporation. And I swear I read that and I said that's the kind of place I'd like to work.

I'd never heard of a place like that. That sort of indicates to me that there was some deep proclivity toward this kind of work.

The more direct answer to that question is I was over in Thailand with the Peace Corps.

This was 1965 to 67 right after college and my wife at that time had

been a Fulbright scholar. She was Thai. She had to stay in the country to work off her teaching obligation, and so I had to stay

in the country and find some work.

And I ended up getting work in a study of Northeastern villages, and it was part of the hearts and minds kind of effort

that the U.S. military was having at that time.

And I did that work and I wrote that report and in the course of that I started to learn about

regression analysis and I said this is really cool.

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