Roland Fryer has spent his career finding things out and refusing to sugarcoat them. His research on race, policing, and education has repeatedly landed somewhere progressive orthodoxy doesn’t want it to land, and he’s paid for it, professionally and, at one memorable point in his career, literally, when someone shot out the windows of his house over a program that paid kids to do well in school. Fryer has been on the show before, when he walked through the improbable path that took him from his childhood in Texas to a Harvard economics department. Though I first asked Fryer for his take on the Jason Arday scandal, he told me the specifics of Arday’s alleged lies and tragic end weren’t the real story for him. Instead, the story is about the incentive structure that was underneath Arday—a system that hands out opportunities based on noisy, low-information signals, then never follows through with the honest feedback that would make those opportunities mean anything. Fryer learned this the hard way moving from Chicago to Harvard early in his career—the same ideas that got picked apart in one seminar got praised two weeks later at a different institution, and he didn’t trust that shift. He’d rather take the tough feedback than the polite silence, even when the polite silence would have been easier to sit through. That idea—that avoiding hard truths doesn’t actually help anyone—runs deeply through his latest project. Fryer and Bill Ackman just launched the Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage, a $1 million prize aimed at scholars who already suspect something true and unpopular but are too afraid of the fallout to publish it. Fryer’s pitch isn’t that everyone needs to become a provocateur. It’s narrower and, I think, more interesting than that: He wants to make honesty cheaper, so bravery stops being the price of admission. We also got into his own research on race and intelligence, where the data cuts directly against the genetic determinism some of my other guests have argued for. And because I couldn’t resist, I asked him about his brief, oddly serious stint doing stand-up comedy under a stage name. Fryer thinks comedians are some of the best social scientists alive—people who’ve figured out how to slip an idea past someone’s defenses before that person even realizes they’ve been persuaded.