Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Education has been a major theme in your career. You finished UCLA. Throughout your life have done very well. What is it you think you’ve learned about education — we’re here at a university — that you get and we don’t, that you would like to tell us? I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve gotten everything. I certainly would not have the nerve to think that everybody here doesn’t get something that I got. I just try to tell people that knowledge is power. You’ve got to accumulate as much power as you can. That requires that you go to the library and that you read and experience life in ways that enable you to use that power. If you look back on your life, all the different things you’ve done, and you had to sum up, what’s the underlying unity in all the different phases of your career — hanging out with jazz musicians as a kid, listening to racine, playing with John Wooden, winning so many NBA titles, MVP awards, writing, I think, 11 books. Having been in a number of very successful movies, having made a few movies yourself as executive producer and being in them, other things I haven’t mentioned, your Time column, being on Twitter, working with Hilary Clinton. There’s actually still much more, but if you had to try to sum all that up in terms of the unity, how that all ties into the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar philosophy, how would you put it?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.