Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show with your host, Eric Mettaxas.

Folks, I have the privilege of speaking to a native Chicagoan. Do you know what that is? That's somebody who's lived in Chicago for a long time. His name is Matt Rosenberg. The book is What Next Chicago? Notes of a pissed off native son. Wow. Matt Rosenberg, welcome to the program. Thank you, Eric. It's a pleasure to be here. I know of you,

because of your dad, the legendary Milt Rosenberg. My goodness, how long did he do radio? I mean,

how many years was he in that world? Thirty-eight years he was on WGNAM, but it was just a second job. What was his first job?

He was a professor of social psychology at the University of Chicago, and I grew up in Hyde Park in Chicago.

A professor of social psychology with common sense.

And a great curiosity, which I think he passed on at least partially to me.

So you've been a journalist, you've done a lot of things. This book, I mean, everybody in the country, including some Chicagoans, are wondering what in the world is happening in Chicago.

So what is the book about?

What next Chicago?

What ultimately are you saying here?

I'm addressing urban progressive misrule in our nation's biggest cities. I'm looking at the unified theory

of systemic racism and positing that that is not the problem, that the problem is that urban

political elites, largely of color, are running our nation's biggest cities into the

ground. What I'm also trying to do in this book, I went deep into the south side. I moved back

to Chicago, where I lived for 30 years from the time of being a young child, six years old, to, you know, my mid-30s when I finally left and moved to Seattle with my lovely wife, where we raised two children.

I had to come back in 2020 looking at the city in chaos and turmoil.

I went deep into the south side, talked to black

people in their homes and workplaces about what's gone wrong, how to set things right. So

that was a big part of it. But then the policy piece, Eric, was very big. And I felt, don't shy

away from this. How is it that the public schools are failing? How is it that the criminal

court system has run off the rails? How is it that fiscal governance has gone so wrong? Why is it that

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