Richard Hanania on Vivek Ramaswamy, Affirmative Action, and the Winning Agenda for 2024

I think people who are interested in ideas tend to think ideas are important. My sort of study into wokeness shows that it's actually often not ideas, it's just sort of bureaucratic initiatives or responding to a certain election or trying to get voters in some way. It leads to this law that leads to this like industry popping up, and then this industry sort of justifies what they wanted to do in the first place. It's not like there's a type of like there's a conservative gene or a conservative trait or a liberal trait, right? So it seems like a certain combination of a kind of man becomes a conservative. He might be smart but not too smart, and he might be masc— very masculine, right, or very sort of tribal in his instinct. And I think that combination is sort of the, uh, the talk radio guy. I think that— I think that guy is a certain type. And then you have the high intelligence, maybe low testosterone, maybe low competitive, sort of womanly, and sort of like this empathy and stuff like that. I think those guys tend to be— tend to be liberals, right? Trump really matters for our politics. I think he's gonna probably most likely scenario is he wins the nomination, probably loses the general, or he might win. If he loses the general, I think he's the nominee in 2028 and probably 2032 and probably indefinitely.

He doesn't die? He's not.

He doesn't die. No, he doesn't die. They run his hologram. Yeah, after a while. After a while.

Today's episode is with writer and political scientist Richard Hanania. Richard is one of the leading intellectuals whose voices and opinions make it to the mainstream, though he himself may not be a household name. He has a new book titled The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics. Richard sat with me for a wide-ranging extended conversation where we discuss conservatism, diversity, and the history of the culture wars. Let's get right to it. Here's Richard. Richard, welcome to my podcast. Thank you for joining.

Glad to be here, Erik. Thanks for having me on.

So Richard, for, for my friends who may not be familiar with your work, when they ask me, hey, what's your great intellectual contributions, I typically point them to a few things. One is your, your Wokeness as Civil Rights piece or kind of series and your kind of Origins of Wokeness, your upcoming book, which we'll talk about. Then also kind of the psychographic profiles you leftists and rightists or liberals and conservatives. Liberals read more, conservatives watch more TV. Conservatives are more immoral, lower IQ.

That's a little bit of an exaggeration. Sometimes I enjoy myself.

I know. And then also your analysis of the gender dynamics and how that influences dysfunction in organizations or just how things have changed in politics or in everyday life. And you had a piece on women's tears wins in the marketplace of ideas that is also a playful phrase, but gets at some real things there. Do you identify with those as your greatest contributions, or what would you add to that? Don't be immodest.

Yeah, I think the wokeness stuff, I think I said something new and important, and that's why I'm writing a book on the topic. You know, greatest intellectual contributions. Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah, I think Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV is something new. I think it's something that sort of strikes people as intuitively correct. But I, I think I put my finger on something that's sort of a constellation of things that sort of people understand, but nobody sort of put in one place and gave like a pithy, you know, phrase to and collected all the evidence. Uh, the thing that originally, um, My first piece to get wide circulation was Why Is Everything Liberal? I am proud of that one. I think it does explain a lot about our modern world. Yeah, I mean, I've done foreign policy stuff. I have a foreign policy book. You know, it's okay. I think it teaches you something about American foreign policy, definitely. It hasn't got that much attention, but, you know, that's another one. You know, it's also up there. And so, yeah, I write a lot of different things and people, you know, sometimes they like really obscure pieces or they like the popular pieces. So, you know, I'm glad.

Yeah. And the TLDR of the foreign policy was that you used sort of the public choice theory that we use to analyze kind of domestic dysfunction among governments, and you applied it to our foreign policy apparatus. Is that right?

Exactly. Yeah, I think it's useful. I mean, people, maybe it's not that surprising to people who are not like scholars of international relations, but I think people who are closer to foreign policy sometimes have had their minds sort of warped by the conventional ways of thinking about it. these things. And I think that a lot of IR theory has sort of led people astray, and people who are not international relations specialists might have never been taken in that direction in the first place. So some of them just might not be that surprised. But for people in the field, I think it's a useful contribution.

So Vivek Ramaswamy, and we'll get into Vivek mania in a bit, he came on the podcast and he said that he was enlightened by his conversations with you in terms of how he's thought about the origins of wokeness. Originally, he implied that it was this implicit or emergent pact that corporations made to appease activists without sacrificing profits. Thanks to conversations with you, he has seen how actually it's more fundamentally rooted in kind of law that stems, you know, stems back a few decades. Why don't you add some nuance to what you perceived as his interpretation and, you know, what is the actual reason in your case?

Yeah, I mean, I was, you know, very impressed with, you know, from what I've got to know, from how I've got to know Vivek, I mean, just from him personally. I think, you know, when we started to get to know each other, it was like slightly after I'd written in American Affairs. Review of his book, which wasn't a positive review. It was a very negative review. I felt a little bit bad about it, but he reached out and we talked about it and we discussed the issue and we both cared about the issue. And he was really open to the critiques, open to a lot of things I was saying. And so as he launched his presidential campaign, he's really talking about Wokeness Is Law. I was on his podcast. It was just recently released. And he wants to know about the executive orders. He wants to know about the exact laws. It helps. He has a a lot of people here like I do, he's a graduate of Yale Law School. So just knowing a little bit about the law, how the legal system works, I think is useful here. It makes people more easily able to understand the larger argument. And Vivek himself brought the ESG issue to my attention. That wasn't really on my radar, but the more I talk to people, especially people in business, it seems to be something that's very serious. And Vivek was really the first person I heard talking about it that I didn't know what it was, and I give him credit for that. So yeah, I think it's a sign that this stuff is, breaking through. You know, I see hints of conservative governors and state legislatures going to work on civil rights law stuff. I mean, one is Texas just got rid of diversity initiatives in state hiring. I mean, what took so long? But the fact that people like, you know, like 10 years ago, like diversity was just like, it was just like corporate, it was corporate, it's just like, you know, just nothing. It was just seen as like fluff language. Nobody saw it as like anything sinister. And the strength of what's happened in the last, like, you know, 3, 3 years, 3 or 4 years, is it's really become politicized. Now, if you say, you know, we're into diversity in our corporation, it's like saying, you know, we're pro-choice or we're for higher taxes. Like, nobody would have seen it as, okay, this is a, this is a left-wing position. You're, you're, you're coming down and saying we're, you know, with half the country and we're against half the country. Institutions generally don't want to do that. They'll do diversity if it just seems like, oh, it's something that everybody agrees with that nobody could be against. But The politicization of the concept, I think, has been something that's happened in the last few years, and I think it's a positive development.

Positive development in that there's pushback to it?

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, because if it's apolitical, if everyone just likes diversity and it's just seen as like baseball, apple pie, then nobody's going to push back on it. Corporations aren't going to think twice, right? It's like recycling or something, right? Recycling isn't really seen as that ideological. I mean, leftists like recycling more, but it's really not. So a corporation doesn't worry about backlash if it has a recycling program. Someone activists' demands recycle, you know, they'll at least pay it lip service. And all government institutions were doing this and all corporations were doing this as far as diversity goes. And, you know, now they have to think about it a bit. I mean, there's hard pressure coming. I mean, from like what DeSantis is doing in Florida, what I just mentioned they're doing in Texas. These state legislatures are really going after this stuff. Next time we have a Republican president, you know, there'll be stuff that they could do at the federal level. And yeah, the politicization of the concept, I mean, is the first step towards change, he thinks.

It is interesting. I remember I was finding notes that I was preparing for an interview in like 2016, 2017. And one of the— it was a tech interview. And one of the questions was, you know, the host would ask it to everybody, and every guest would more or less give the same answer. But it was like, what do you— what needs to change in tech? And the answer that I wrote was, we just need more diversity. And it's just— I just say that to say that it was so second nature. Like it was so unanimous, so obvious that it was both the morally right thing to do and that it was just organizations would do better. Uh, they would just like be more successful. And so how, as a student of this, how did this idea become so ingrained, like unanimously when it's, it's not, uh, you know, it wasn't like decades prior, like how did it, how did that happen?

Well, I mean, so my book really traces this history closely. So, you know, it's available for preorder now. Unfortunately, it's not going to be out till September. But yeah, I mean, there was a general progression in that it started off just, they used to have affirmative action compliance offices. They used to have just straight up, we're going to do, if not quotas, then trying to outreach to minority groups. It was seen as corporations and government had an obligation to help Black Americans, or they tried to do something for women. It changed to a diversity rationale just with the Bakke decision in the 1970s. And basically it was just like 4 liberal justices said okay with quotas, 4 conservative justices said, uh, you know, no affirmative action. And then just one in the middle said, you know, no quotas, no, uh, you know, uh, no making up for the past as a justification. But if an organization wants to use diversity as a justification to, you know, do this, you know, have this, you know, feel-good sort of concept and make the institution better, that could be acceptable, right? And so the concept of diversity only really takes off Uh, then, and it's diversity could mean anything, right? Like in practice, what diversity means, anytime there's diversity, what they care about, if they want more Blacks and they want more women primarily, right? There's, you know, Hispanics, LGBT, a little, a little bit of that, but that's basically what it is. But if you just, if you don't think about it, if you don't like know the specifics of what exactly is going on, diversity sounds like, oh, conservatives are underrepresented, get more conservatives. Oh, farmers from, you know, farmers and ranchers from Wyoming, like let's have that. And like you think, you know, veterans, like they're sometimes brought into this. And so like if you think, you know, if you just hear diversity, you're like, oh, that's not like taking away from some people or giving to others. That's not, you know, it's not even a culture war thing. There's conservative groups that are underrepresented and liberal groups, but that's not how it works. I mean, we know from the affirmative action cases that go to the courts and, you know, the universities have to hand over all their documents. All they're doing is giving massive benefits to Blacks and then second most, you know, Hispanics and Native Americans and just getting demographic balancing. That's all it is. It's just old style affirmative action. But they've called it something else. You know, this worked really. I mean, like 10, 15 years ago, like even conservative politicians didn't say like diversity was bad. It was just like a thing. Oh, you're into diversity. Don't be, you know, don't be mean. And you know what changed? Partly I think it was, you know, Trump came along. The, you know, the left sort of became more unhinged. I think, you know, the diversity, like a lot of the crazy stuff people were seeing being said at like corporations and stuff, they could see that they were coming out of, you know, DEI bureaucrats and at the universities. So I think people really, you know, these people sort of overreached and people looked at what these people were doing. And then part of it was, you know, people like me and, you know, Caldwell did this with his civil rights book too, talking about, you know, making the connection between sort of law and what's been going on. Because if you know the history, I mean, the connection between affirmative action and affirmative action always been a dirty word on the right. I mean, and then they, you know, and then people rebranded as diversity, you know, just if you know about the historical connection there, then, you know, you're not fooled. It's something that's, you know, very easy to see. So yeah, I think people, I think just sort of the dynamics of the polarization of our politics, these people sort of getting crazier and overreaching, and then people just going out there and making the argument has really changed things.

To add on to the overreaching point, when did equity get bundled with, like, I understand diversity inclusion, like, let's reach out to people who haven't been historically, you know, included. And thus you can make the case that, hey, there's this latent talent that you want to include in your organization. And it's like an arbitrage opportunity. But then like the term equity doesn't feel like it, like, like what is that doing there?

Yeah. I, yeah, the history of equity is, yeah, it's strange.

I do.

When do you, like, I don't remember this like popping up. I, you know, I want to say around 2016, 2017, you know, what you learn is like these, you know, human resources, uh, is sort of like an industry and they have their own trade journals and they have their own conferences. And this stuff, you know, sort of all has like an underpinning in law. But these people sort of go in their own directions, right? Like they have different sort of intellectual currents and practices and things that catch on. So I don't know about the term equity specifically, but at some point somebody said equity and it must have sounded good and they all started saying that.

You write in your book, the focus on woke capital as a cause rather than the symptom of what has gone wrong in our culture reveals a lack of knowledge about the extent to which government has put its thumb on the scale. What are the biggest ways in which government has put its thumb on the scale? And because I think the thing you're saying is, hey, people often say, hey, wokeness is a religion. But what you're saying is actually that, you know, religions stand the test of time. This quote-unquote religion hasn't been tested and in fact has been, you know, subsidized or enforced by law. And so which laws? And you unpack in your book, but why don't you give a preview?

Uh, so yeah, I mean, there are a few here. So first of all, I mean, the Civil Rights Act Most people think it's just something that banned discrimination based on race. It did do that, but basically it's been interpreted to require a disparate impact standard. So if I give the canonical case as the IQ test, this was the subject of a Supreme Court case, and whites do much better on it than Blacks. So take the paradigmatic example people are always worried about. The burden of proof shifts on the employer to prove that this was necessary, that there wasn't something else he could have done, right? And so the— and it's not just IQ tests, but basically the disparate impact standard is very broad. If a police force wants to have strength or height standards, well, I mean, you have to think about women. You have to think about whether a lot of women are not going to be able to meet that standard, which they often are not. And so basically everything an employer do, and it applies not just to hiring, but firing, promotions, is potentially subject to a disparate impact lawsuit through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Hey everybody, Erik here. I'm excited to talk to you about a new podcast we have called In the Arena, where host Jesse Janae, founder of company Lumi, and regular set of co-hosts including myself interview leaders and entrepreneurs who've been through the wringer. Everything from major acquisitions falling through to major company scandals to cancellations to even People facing prison time. And we talk about the biggest crises of their lives and how they got through it. First interview is with Emil Michael, Chief Business Officer at Uber, who talks about the entire Uber saga and pulls back the curtain at what really happened. Second episode, already out, is with Austin Allred of Bloom Tech, formerly Lambda School, who talks about some of the biggest issues they faced along their rise. Upcoming, we have Martin Shkreli, The head of marketing at FTX, someone from Fyre Fest, Sophia Amoroso from Nasty Gal, and many other entrepreneurs and leaders who've been through the wringer. Check out In the Arena.

When Elon Musk fired a bunch of people on Twitter early on, there was an article in some newspaper, like New York Times or Washington Post or something, where they said, you know, they reported that from within Elon's camp or within Twitter, somebody said, did you look over the list to make sure, you know, they weren't having a disparate impact? Of the engineers you fired, right? Were too many of them, you know, women or minorities? And apparently, you know, Musk, to his credit, just brushed them off, right? There's this— there's, you know, discretion here. And actually, there is a lawsuit. I don't know what happened to it, but there was shortly later announced a lawsuit over these firings. So, you know, Elon Musk can tell them to, you know, to buzz off. But, you know, most employers, you know, are not. And this applies to, you know, the Civil Rights Act covers, you know, every— basically every employer, I think, 15 or more employees. So anything of substantial size, you know, if you have 1 or 2 employees, it doesn't apply to you. But for most employees of any substantial size, they do have to deal with this stuff. So there's a disparate impact standard. There's massive affirmative action within government too. If you look at the demographics of the federal government, minorities do very, very well, particularly Blacks. I don't know if other minorities even do that well, but there's massive affirmative action in hiring. They got rid of the civil service examination in the late 1970s, in the early 1980s, because it had a disparate impact. They never replaced it. Basically, government now hires just sort of at random and you can't fire them. There's a bit about that in my book too. So you have that. You have the government affirmative action and government contracting. If you're a government contractor, not a small group, government contractors include about 25%, they hire about 25% of the American workforce. So a quarter of the workforce, you're required to have affirmative action. And they spell out exactly what that means. Divide by races, look for underrepresentation. try to correct those underrepresentations. But they, you know, has grabbed onto this and said he's going to do something about this, you know, his first day in office. So there's another one. And then you have, you know, harassment law too. So people who are worried about free speech, you know, your employer, it's not just the employer that can discriminate, other employees can discriminate. And the, you know, the discrimination can be things like making the wrong jokes or anything that's called racial harassment. There's a professor named Eugene Volokh at UCLA who points out that the standard says isolated cases cannot be, you know, a, uh, a reason for a lawsuit, can't create a hostile work environment. But basically an employer just has no discretion other than, uh, to basically ban anything that might offend anybody because you can't control every, you know, employee, right? So it's like you can't tell an employee, you know, you can make jokes as long as everyone else is not making jokes. That's not a, that's not a reasonable standard. So the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission based on this harassment standard, comes in and says, you know, if you're in any doubt, leave it outside the office. I mean, people are so like, oh, this threat to free speech is new. Like, no, I mean, corporate HR, product of government regulation, has been there for a very long time. Now they're shutting down, you know, speakers at universities. But like, you know, like you just as a small businessman who just wants to have a business and have whatever culture you want, have your friends and, you know, make jokes or whatever, that's basically, you know, that's basically illegal. And so, yeah, you have the disparate impact standard, affirmative action, contracting, harassment law. There's tons of others. I mean, I highlight these as the main ones. I mean, there's small business loans that are set aside for certain minority groups. There's sometimes direct pressure, like the insurance industry will go testify to Congress and they'll want something done, and then Democratic lawmakers will start grilling them on why don't they have enough Blacks in positions of leadership or power, right? It's just sort of this informal sort of nudge to, you know, to get them, move them in the right, in the right direction before they can get something. Uh, so this is, this is everywhere. And if for people who, you know, I wrote this book and I, I thought about this because like, you know, I'm concerned about these things like, uh, like a lot of other people are. And I was just frustrated in how little sort of understanding that there was, that it's just a religion. Like everyone just decided to, to do this. Um, with, you know, no reason. They all just started talking the same way, like a bunch of zombies. Like, you know, we don't have a law, like we don't have governments, like we don't have incentives. And these are the things that, you know, these are the things to worry about. These are the things that you can actually change through politics. So I encourage people to try to do that.

Because one piece you also had is, is wokeness is a paper tiger, uh, which is basically saying, hey, it hasn't been stress tested. How durable is diversity as a concept? And, you know, some people will bring the critique Like, they'll critique, um, kind of what Christopher Rufo is doing in, um, with critical race theory or some of the, the, you know, other stuff. And they'll say, hey, you could change the law, but if you don't change kind of hearts and minds, like, they're gonna do the same thing and just call it a new name. One, I'm curious if you're sympathetic with that critique of the Rufo school. And 2, like, why wouldn't that apply here? Like, diversity, at least in my industry, tech, it seems Pretty deep-rooted.

Yeah, I mean, so, you know, there's a couple things going on here. So I actually wrote a piece, I'm not critiquing the Rufo approach, I think it's useful, and I think Rufo does agree with this. But yeah, I do think that, you know, like the kind of things that you're teaching in public schools, I mean, the fact that those people thought it was a good idea to teach them in the first place is the problem. So, you know, get rid of critical race theory, they'll call it, you know, uh, social studies or, or whatever. Um, and that's why I'm a big, I'm a big believer in school choice. I mean, I believe it, I believe in markets. I believe that the markets will generally reflect what people's preferences are, what people are comfortable with. I think competence is a thing. So yeah, the school issue, I believe in giving the choice to parents. The parents cannot possibly— private institutions are more responsive than public institutions are, of course, because you could take your money, you could go elsewhere. Parents are not as liberal as organized labor or these other sort of education establishment education industries, education schools. I mean, just a lot of crazy things that people don't have to listen to them, right? If they don't want to, if they don't have governments, if they don't have government schools, or they have choices for educating their children outside of government schools. And then, you know, and so like, I think, you know, I think a good example here is I've been talking to people about this a little bit about Hollywood movies. You know, Hollywood movies are subject to a market test, right? And they're not really as woke as say the kind of, you know, the academic departments or sort of federal bureaucracies. Why? Because people want to see action heroes. They want to see pretty, they want to see attractive people. I mean, they want to see heroes overcoming obstacles. They want to see normal human morality reflected. They don't want the morality of San Francisco's DA office, sort of, you know, nobody's going to watch that story because that doesn't appeal to human nature. And so, yeah, I think that markets reflect choice and they reflect human nature. And I mean, and you know, look at that. I mean, people could point to, uh, in the school context, people have pointed to like sometimes the craziest private, uh, schools tend to be private schools. So these like Westlake, Harvard here in LA, there's been like Bari Weiss, I think, has written about these things. And they're right. But if you actually look at the majority of private schools, the majority are either Catholic or conservative Christian schools. We focus on these very elite, uh, institutions that, you know, they're important, they have a lot of influence. But the majority of kids in private schools are going to schools that are much more conservative than the public schools are. And I think there's a lesson to be taken from there. And I think the wokes aren't going to disappear. I mean, this is a real thing that a lot of people believe in. The question is just like, are they able to force their views on the rest of society? And changing the law, I think, hopefully would prevent that.

Yeah. And there's a question of just like, they won't disappear. Right now they have total monopoly more or less, or over big companies. And the question is how much diversity, to use it in a different way, would then be introduced. A related idea is this, there's this phrase like, go woke, go broke. And it would be interesting to see a study of Nike with Colin Kaepernick and Bud Light with the thing that Dylan or whatever, all of these companies, who made these like decisions and actually like, what is the, like, how did it affect their bottom line?

I've seen, I mean, I've seen anecdotes and I've seen, you know, conservatives will say it works and then liberals will say, oh, it's, you know, it didn't work. I've heard that the, I've heard that the Budweiser stuff, I mean, as we're recording, I heard that it really did. There really was like a, like one of those big falls that like can't be explained just by, uh, I think, I don't know. I haven't really looked into it, but it seems like the Budweiser things, other ones, like maybe Disney will go down, but like people say, oh, that might just be normal variation. the stock. It's very hard to prove, but I've heard that Budweiser has actually come down a lot. So you could tell if Dylan Mulvaney is different. That's actually pretty hilarious. If that was the line that once you cross that, that's it, that finally the masses rose up. This goes back to my other article. I mean, the conservatives just don't care as much. I mean, they don't live their lives according to politics. They're looking for the best deal or whatever. I mean, just the fact that I just wrote an article on Substack about how Substack is the difference. Being a subscription-based model while Twitter is an ad-based model. And I analogize that to conservative and liberal media. Like, liberal media is a subscription-based model because they have people who will pay for it. I mean, the New York Times, the Washington Post, uh, these are, you know, these are institutions you pay for. Uh, conservative websites are overwhelmingly ad-based and they look, you know, they look terrible. They're just, you know, tracking you and, you know, trying to give you personalized, uh, ads. And so yeah, this is, you know, this is sort of, uh, you know, inevitably, you know, the people who care more are going to influence society. I mean, like, people like Conservatives seem to think sometimes that because they're approximately half of the population, they should have half of the cultural— they should just get affirmative action. They should just get credit for their numbers and just like, okay, corporate board, we're going to represent you 50%. And then they can just go home and just watch TV. No, the world doesn't work like that. At some point, you do have to take responsibility for the way society has turned out. speak up for my beliefs. And, you know, you do too, and a lot of other people we know do. But the fact that there's a lot more idealistic liberals, um, who believe in something and are willing to sacrifice for it, it's just, I think, a fact of our world.

Vivek actually was talking about doing something like affirmative action for conservatives. You think that's a bad idea, right? It's just best to roll back the whole, the whole thing?

Yeah, I mean, I think Vivek is— I think he has something clever where he says, um, if you do DEI for other things, you have to do it for conservatives too. Um, you know, I think it's too complicated and like a little bit too clever. I mean, I think it's just best to roll that stuff back. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, the idea that you're going to make political discrimination like a protected class— first of all, that didn't work for James Damore. James Damore tried to sue on this basis at Google, and they just said, well, you violated the, you know, civil rights against women. You made women feel unsafe. So, you know, you're— it doesn't count. This is not a legitimate political view that you can sue based on, you know, anti-discrimination grounds. But like, you know, it's like we need less lawyers, fewer lawyers and fewer bureaucrats running our lives. No, less bureaucrats, you know, less lawyers, fewer lawyers, more markets and more individual choice is the way I'd go.

Zooming out a bit before getting into more liberal conservative stuff, when did the brain drain happen in the sort of conservative part? Like when did all Ivy League students or more talented people just become more and more liberal? Like how did that evolve?

Yeah, I think if you go back to like the '50s and '60s, I mean, if you're talking about the, you know, the most elite, you know, they were— there's a good book on this called The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement. And so like the American, you know, like the American Bar Association, like in the '40s and '50s was sort of a force for conservatism. And like, you know, lawyers were considered, you know, elite lawyers were sort of considered more likely to be conservative. And this book actually traces it to, you know, there's a connection where sort of more of the elite with the growth of government under Roosevelt and then Johnson. Basically, government became a big funder of intellectual work and legal work. So public defenders became a thing, but just government indirectly subsidizing public interest groups. And it sort of traces the leftward shift of all the elites. I'm talking about not half the population, but I'm talking about the bureaucratic You know, bureaucratic class lawyers, elite college students, and so forth. If you just look at like college students, you know, or college graduates, I mean, very recently, uh, Mitt Romney won college-educated whites. I mean, this was only 2012, uh, right? Um, and so, you know, they weren't really, you know, split up. It was really the Trump era. I mean, the Democrats for a while had like the elite of the elite. Um, but, you know, the, like, the complete brain drain from the conservative movement just started after Romney's loss. And I think it's gotten worse over time.

It's interesting because Vivek, in theory, could represent like a smart right-wing candidate. And yet he seems to be trying to appeal to that same base or something like taking a very different strategy than Mitt Romney, I guess, took. Like, is that just what you have to do to win the right? Or like, how do we have a Mitt Romney or someone of that line of like—

Romney had to like, you know, go kiss Trump's ring. You remember this? Like, there was, you know, polls at the time showing that if Trump ran in 2012, he would be like one of would be the leader. So people were really into Trump, or, you know, Republicans are really into Trump already back then. And Romney got Trump's endorsement. You know, you know, Romney deep down, you know, always hate— must have always hated Trump. Uh, but, you know, the fact that Romney, you know, went out there and still, you know, people knew that wasn't him, right? He still had to like do these things. He had to still be sort of his, you know, and, and like there's 2 different things you could think about about what the base wants. There's like part of the base are just like activists and they want most conservative, you know, the most conservative person as possible. And that, you know, that's at least has some intellectual— that could hurt in a general election, but at least has some like intellectual basis, right? And there's just a part of the base that just likes, you know, the fighting and like the rudeness and the crassness and, you know, doesn't trust anyone who's too smart or, you know, too accomplished. And, you know, that's part of it too. And I think that latter, you know, I think like 12 years ago, I think when Romney, you know, uh, or when Romney was running, you know, 11 years ago, I think there, you know, I think that it was like The ideological people, the Tea Partiers. I mean, this was what the Tea Party movement about. It was like a serious ideological movement. I mean, it you know it had beliefs. It it wanted to primaries when it wanted to primary someone. It was because it was because they voted the wrong way. They wanted too much government spending. Now you know there's primaries in Republican Party. They're just over do you worship Trump enough, right? Do you think the 2020 election was stolen? It's really not about not about the issues in that way. I think this so it was a gradual it was a you know it was a gradual process. I think it probably started that you know I think I'm a little bit of a. Tech determinist, uh, on these things. The, the rise of, um, uh, AM radio, uh, there was the, uh, you know, Rush Limbaugh in the 19— in the 1990s and people like that. Uh, Gingrich, you know, sort of rode that wave in 1994. And then Fox News comes out, um, just a few years later, uh, in the late 1990s. And then you have, okay, TV and radio, like, and then, and then conservative— just conservatives are just, you know, very good at producing infotainment. And infotainment is not, you It can be used for issues. It can be used to like you know make sure someone is ideologically you know staying close to what the base wants. But you know it's become over time more personality based. So this was like you know the obsession hate the obsessive hatred about Bill Clinton. I mean the going trying to get him for the Monica Lewinsky stuff. I mean that's that wouldn't have happened in the 1980s, and it wasn't because of his ideology. I mean Clinton was a you know a Democratic president but relatively moderate, and they just hated him like you know just like you know he was like you know the You know, he was the devil incarnate. And like, why was that? I mean, I think it was just sort of this dynamic of sort of talk radio and then cable news coming along and sort of, you know, deranging the right. And then you had like 9/11. And then for a little while, you know, conservatives sort of rode that wave. But, you know, then like, you know, this became much more in the culture, like, oh, you know, the terrorists are going to get us, you know, Al-Qaeda, the whole lot. This was like sort of, you know, this gave conservatives a little bit of an advantage. But it was also sort of, it was leading them in the direction of just, you know, TV watchers dominating everything. And then like Obama comes along and it's, it's funny because it's so there's this like, uh, there's like this, you know, this, uh, subterranean, uh, subterranean racism that's like there. It's like the birth certificate thing, but like you can't say that it's racism. It's just like this sort of, this sort of stupid, you know, birth certificate thing. Trump rides that, of course. Um, the Tea Party with the ideological stuff comes in and then Romney, you know, the Romney wins. He has to appeal to these people, but he's still Mitt Romney. And then in 2016, sort of just like, you know, the, the TV watchers and the, you know, the cable news people that just, that just just takes over because Trump is one of them. I mean, Trump is a better, you know, uh, would be a better talk show host, was a more successful talk show host than any of these guys were. And sort of the party and sort of conservative media and what it was just, just merged at that point.

I assume you'd, you'd say that, you know, you can't win an election or you can't have like durable power without having like some high IQ, you know, mindshare. So if you were in charge of sort of, you know, Republican strategy, over the next decade, I'd assume that would be part of your goals is to regain some of that mindshare. Is that true? And if so, how would you go about doing that?

Yeah, I think so much of it is style as much as it's substance. I mean, Trump, it's not his— Trump was perceived among voters as like the most moderate Republican candidate. Right. He was seen— I think he governed with pretty conservative direction. But in 2016, he talked about protecting entitlements. He still talks about that. Um, you know, he talked about, you know, trade, you know, the trade, these sort of left-wing positions. And so it wasn't like Trump was so conservative he made everyone come out to be liberal. It was just that Trump is, you know, Trump is Trump. He's, you know, he's the— he has gold toilets and, you know, he has, you know, supermodel wives he trades in every few years and he loves McDonald's and, you know, he's rude to people and he's racist. I mean, this just, you know, this just drove, you know, liberals and, you know, people who like to see themselves as part of polite society, that drove them, uh, up the wall. And so it's not, you know, I think the abortion issue is actually unique. I, you know, I think that one is actually the substance of the issue matters a lot that I've written about that. But for most things, I think it's more, it would be more a stylistic makeover. Just, you know, if you wanted to put me in charge and, you know, how to focus to win, it would be more a stylistic makeover than a substance one. Just get, you know, generic white man in business suit, give him the most conservative, just get a nice smile, give him the most, you know, give him the most conservative positions and he would do better than You know, he would have won a lot of those Senate races in 2022, right? He'd be, you know, the generic white male businessman, could have won in Arizona, uh, could have won in Georgia, uh, could have potentially won in New Hampshire. But they, they motivated these, you know, uh, much more flawed candidates, and that was the problem.

And then the flaws are, you know, the focus on the Stop the Steal, which is stupid, and then also pro-life, which is just, as you've written about—

Well, yeah, but it's not even those. Even if they had opposite position on those things, like Herschel— I mean, Herschel Walker's been like illiterate. I mean, it doesn't matter what it's Which, I mean, people can see that this man has problems. I mean, this man hears voices. He has all these, you know, baby mamas that he pulls guns on. I mean, he's just a, you know, you know, this is, this is beyond issues, right?

It didn't stop John Fetterman.

Yeah. I mean, Fetterman wins. Oz is interesting. I was actually thought, I thought Oz came across as not that bad, but somehow, you know, it didn't work. But I think, yeah, Blake Masters, I think people, you know, I think he appeals to sort of a lot of intellectual right-wingers. I don't think there's any evidence that, you know, what he was You know what he was arguing for appeal to the to the broader electorate, and then you know New Hampshire. I mean New Hampshire too. I mean yeah, I forget I forget his name, but this guy was another one into you know the the election the election stuff. Yeah, the election stuff doesn't help. I mean the the pro-life stuff doesn't help, and the election stuff doesn't help. But a lot of these people just were sort of you know there's a good analysis. There was some good analysis. Five Thirty Eight showed that like a good predictor of winning. Elections is having held previous office. So politicians who have— so a lot of these people are first-time candidates, right? Masters was, Herschel Walker was, Dr. Oz was. And somebody with that background is much less likely to win an election than someone who's been the leader of the state Senate, right? These are the people that McConnell would like to nominate. And I don't know why, there must be some skill in politician, at least those people have proven that they've, uh, that they have those skills, whatever those skills are. Like, it's not like me or you can sit here and say, oh, Blake Masters is a good candidate and this guy is not a good candidate. You know, me and you are not the average voter. I mean, you know, most people who talk about politics are not the average voter. We're just going to get off of our instincts. Um, so I think you got to sort of, you sort of have to, uh, uh, be, uh, a bit humble here and just sort of know that stylistically what you think might sell is not necessarily what's going to sell.

And you should probably be looking at people's tracker Yeah, there's a question if, if sort of the era of Trump and just the era of the internet, um, and how people build audiences can change the game in the sense of like— I know this is kind of even silly to mention, but if MrBeast was like, you know, 12 years older and had the same following, you know, could he like rally people to vote for him? Or is it like, could celebrities actually win?

Like, I wondered about that. So yeah, I think on the right there was an opening for it just because it became like a movement about personalities in the media, sort of, uh, it was like that.

Yeah. Like The Rock or Oprah or, I don't know, one of these.

Yeah, I'm surprised none of them gave it a shot. Dr. Oz sort of did and it didn't work out great. I mean, he was, you know, he's not at Oprah level, but he's a, you know, he's a pretty famous celebrity. Uh, he tried, he won the nomination, and then he lost the, uh, the general election. Uh, Howard Schultz, you know, tried, tried, dipped his toe in the waters, you know, saw it wasn't gonna work and then, and then backed off. Yeah, I've always wondered, um, like why Mark Cuban, you know, maybe doesn't try it. Um, you know, uh, uh, uh, Steyer tried it, didn't— but he's not famous. Nobody knows who knew who he was before he ran for president, even though he was very wealthy. Um, and so yeah, I, I wonder the extent to which just being a celebrity, um, is enough. You know, not everyone's going to be Trump, but yeah, like Oprah or The Rock, like, I would be fascinated to what would happen if they ran in the Democratic Party. I genuinely don't know.

Totally. If you were advising Vivek's campaign, besides telling him to be pro-choice, um, and, you know, center women's voices and be a good ally, what, uh, what, what other advice would you give to him?

I think he's doing a great job. I mean, he's, you know, I saw you see the polls. He was always at zero. Now he's always at one or two. I mean, that's, I mean, that's, that's something, right? He's, he's, he's getting, he's, you know, he's at the same level as like Mike Pompeo basically. And like Mike Pompeo was like a congressman and Secretary of State. No one heard about Vivek until, you know, a month or two ago. You know, he's doing, he's doing well. I mean, you know, he's got an uphill climb, but he's doing an excellent job of like talking about this wokeness stuff. I, I had an article specifically about Vivek, you know, selling a positive culture war message. I think he's— I think a lot of these guys are extremely negative. I think, you know, like Josh Hawley, I think is a good example of this. I, you know, I just look at it, just— it's just pure resentment. I mean, it's just like these elites, they're doing this to you, they're doing that to you, you know, they're hurting the working man. I don't see any sort of positive vision. So Vivek goes out there, he says, you know, diversity actually hurts merit. I mean, he's talking about, you know, he's not just trying to protect people from these, you know, big scary elites. He's giving people a positive message that is in the context of the American tradition. And so I think he's doing a great job there. And the production value, I mean, the podcast that came out with me the other day, I was surprised. I mean, he's really invested in these things. And so I think he's cleared the first hurdle to make a difference, which is like, get your name out there and be talked about. I just saw he was talking to Riley Gaines. So everything, this Riley Gaines, this woman is like getting canceled at the thing and he's just having a podcast with her the next day. I mean, Vivek doesn't sleep. And so the next step is just sort of You know, doing the retail politics thing well in New Hampshire and Iowa.

I'm curious if he, if he, if he's taking the right issue, like the climate stuff, just the stuff that he's taking on. Are these like popular, you know, does he have popular support for them?

Yeah. And the Republican primaries, I don't know if like climate is the big one. I mean, that seems to be a genuine, that seems to be genuine belief from Vivek. But the wokeness thing, that's driving the party. I mean, Nikki Haley, if you watch Nikki Haley's announcement video, you think, oh, Nikki Haley is Mrs. Moderate, you know, trying to be the establishment. All she's talking about is woke. I mean, she's really just going on about how terrible woke is. She says it's like, at some point she says it's like the biggest threat to our country. And she has other disagreements with, you know, the populists. But basically, like everyone understands that like anti-wokeness is sort of where the Republican base is. That's what's motivating them and the intellectuals too. So he's seizing on that. And I think there's for good reason. And then, you know, he's doing the, you know, day-to-day things that people, oh, they, you know, they care about standing up for, you know, Trump's integrity, you know, after the Alvin Bragg, you know, arrests him. Uh, you know, they care about the trans in sports. Vivek is going further and talking about this trans stuff than a lot of people are. I, I think it's, I think it's, um, I think he does it in a right way. I mean, I think he does it in a way where it's like he takes the extreme position, but there is a, there, you know, a lot of this stuff is like you can't, you can't teach. You can't just say do this or that. It's like the kind of person you are. Like Vivek is a striver, optimistic, successful immigrant, right? He's not an angry guy. He's not an angry guy from the middle of nowhere who feels the world is Left behind. Or like, so a lot of these elites, like these people seem like lower level elites, like they're elites, they went to like good schools, but they're like a little bit more resentful of the liberals who are a little bit more successful than them. That's not Vivek either, right? Vivek, I think his personality sort of comes through. So he's able to talk about these issues, sort of hit what the base likes, but at the same time not having a lot of the pitfalls that a lot of Republican politicians have. So I don't have tons of advice for him. I think he's doing a great Given where he started from.

You've written about how kind of anti-woke on its own is a losing position. You know, it's not positive enough and people don't want to be associated with losing, you know, losing visions, a loser with losers in general. And so I'm curious what you think like a positive vision could look like that could have a constituency. You know, Vivek is talking about merit and excellence. And while that's attractive to, you know, perhaps some of us and some of our peers, like, I wonder if that has enough kind of like, uh, you know, concreteness for, you know, the average person, as opposed to someone who's having a positive vision of like, you know, 2-parent household, like, you know, just like, uh, you know, or even Blake's, uh, Blake Masters saying like, you know, one income per householders. I don't know, something that's like more rooted to conservative, um, values or something. How do you, how do you think about like lifestyle even?

I mean, well, I mean, if you want, I mean, the traditionalist lifestyle, you'll be a minority party. I mean, the vast majority of Americans don't, don't don't want that. I mean, they maybe they would like the option of one parent working home. A lot of people already do do that, but you know, people aren't you know there's not a big clamor to stop women from working out there in the public. People generally like like money and like having two income households. I don't I don't think as we as a country, I don't think that we are a big diverse country, and I don't think there's much that unites us. But merit and you know colorblindness, I still think that's pretty that's pretty strong. I mean, I think people you know tend to believe that. I mean, I think polls. Bear this out. I think you know how affirmative action does poorly at the ballot box bears this out. So I think yeah merit the best people are gonna get where they are, and like maybe combined with the messages like this is part of our collective identity, this is what America makes America great. We're not some you know country that privileges some caste or some racial or ethnic group. You know we let the we we let people compete and we let the chips fall where they may. I think that a lot of the China anti-China stuff in Vegas really really really into this. Into this messaging, and as are most Republicans these days, I'm not a big fan of it on policy grounds. I think it usually leads to a lot of silly suggestions. But you know, if to the extent that people need something like oh, we'll be meritocratic and we'll have a successful free society, and that will beat you know the kind of communist Chinese who are coming with us with their with their balloons, which you know I'm not particularly scared of. But you know, to the extent people do need something, I think maybe you know communist China as a punching bag might work.

You mentioned you're a believer in markets, and I do wonder if we were able to repeal— and I think you said that or wrote about how a president could actually issue an executive order or repeal an executive order that could have a major impact. We'll get into that in a bit. But let's say that some of the laws that were sort of tilting the playing field were totally repealed. I wonder if markets would show that just diversity is kind of an emergent strategy for at least, you know, for over half the population to rise up in their careers, and they really care about their careers. And, um, well, merit and excellence, like, seem nice. If the opposite means that they will have a better career, like, wouldn't they prefer that? Like, isn't there something structural, structural advantage to, you know, giving more than 50% of the population, like, better jobs?

Well, I mean, it's— if you're gonna give some groups preferences, I mean, that's inherently a zero-sum game, right? So every single person who you think is going to get ahead through, through quotas has a person who's gonna lose out. And generally, you know, the people don't want to admit that they get ahead through quota. So no, you know, I don't think so. I think this is— I think the, you know, the idea— I think just to try it as an experiment, like talk to someone who's not very familiar with American politics or someone who doesn't pay attention to American politics and just bring up the story that, oh, you know, what the people in Jack Whittier are doing, like they're getting rid of algebra class, you know, because some group doesn't perform as well as the other. Like just try that on like an immigrant, someone with no experience in American culture. It sounds absurd because it is absurd. I mean, and so a lot of the stuff is absurd, and particularly in the American context when we're sort of the society which doesn't have a common ethnic background or doesn't have a sort of a state church or anything like that. It just inherently appeals to people and it's part of the American idea. I mean, even the equity people, I mean, they don't say we should just get our fair share because we're Black and we're 12% of population and that's just just— that's just fair. I mean, they try to make some argument like it's going to help everybody, and it's actually— it is the real fairness because racism is holding people back. Um, and so yeah, I do think— I mean, I do think this is— I do think this is a winning message. And I, I don't— you know, I don't think the affirmative action— I think it has to sort of operate in the background. It's just too inconsistent with— you know, to explicitly argue for it is just too inconsistent with other values people hold.

Some people who are a fan of what Trump was kind of going for actually wanted Biden to win because they— in Trump, they saw someone who helped his enemies and hurt his friends. Um, like the New York Times, ACLU got so much bigger, and all these organizations just got so much bigger. And there was— he— because he served as a boogeyman. And, um, and it's basically this implication is like, unless you have a way to win, you gain power, all caps, like don't even fight. My sense is you disagree with that.

It's pretty silly. I mean, because we have Yeah, we're in April and we're mid-April. A judge just had a radical decision in Texas that took the morning-after pill that's been on the— that's been for 23 years been used by women. First time in history, basically, a judge has overruled the FDA and said something is not safe, it has to be taken off the market. And so that's not the decision I would've made. It's not something I'm happy with. But Winning actually ends up winning because you appoint the judges. I mean, we're really a judgiocracy where Trump had one term, he got to appoint 3 justices. Bush and Obama had 2 terms each and were only able to appoint 2 presidents each. So Trump happened to be there when Ginsburg died. I mean, Ginsburg died at the right time to give him his 3rd Supreme Court nominee, and they filled up the federal judiciary too. Uh, so, you know, the judiciary is really, really important. I, I do believe— I've written about this too— that Trump did cause a backlash, um, and maybe hurt conservatism in the long run. But look, I mean, it's, you know, you—

it's—

the elections are the main game, and like the reaction to the election is also important, but don't mistake that for like the actual power and the actual ability to appoint people and do things in the world.

All I can say in my very limited field, and maybe this is just a you know, casualty, and it's, it's a small price to pay. But in, in, in technology, in terms of like the state of activism, like it got so much worse when Trump was in office. And right when he got out, things just got way better. Because before, if you were pushing back against any sort of left excess, they would say, oh, you support Trump, you're a bad person, like you have to let this happen or whatever. And, and after that, there was just no boogeyman. And some people wonder if Dobbs was actually like a Pyrrhic victory where it creates this boogeyman again, where sure, you win on that issue, and for those people, they care about that. I disagree with it. But like, does it cement left power elsewhere by creating this boogeyman? And thus you should like pick and choose which victories you want to have and make sure that they're like real substantive, enduring victories for your party?

Depends on, you know, your priority list. The people who think abortion— stopping abortion is the main issue will say, no, I'll sacrifice affirmative action, or I'll sacrifice, you know, tough-on-crime policies. I care about abortion. Me or you have a different opinion. So, you know, all these people will say, you know, they're maybe a conservative label, but, you know, they care about different things. Um, so yeah, I think, you know, good strategy is to push on the things you care about and then not try to, um, not try to have your movement hindered by the things you don't care about or the things you disagree, uh, with your movement about. About that, you know, tech, um, becoming, you know, less, uh, left-wing after Trump is gone, I think, you know, I think what I remember the summer of 2020 was really crazy. You know, when you have this, like, you know, this outbreak, this frenzy, that can never last forever. So 2019, 2020 was crazy. And just people, you know, that always leads to a backlash. People can't just maintain this, you know, sense of, like, craziness, like, 24 hours a day. They have to, you know, they have to sort of move on at some point. So I, you know, I wonder how much is just, you know, accident. It was just, it was just going to happen. Like, George Floyd was sort of the peak, and then things were going to change after that. But unquestionably, look, whether Trump in office or Romney in office is more likely, I, I have no doubt that Trump in office is much more likely to lead to backlash and to make society more liberal. I think if you're a Republican, you take either Trump or Romney because you want to win and you want to do things. But if you have a choice between the two, yeah, I think you try to get the guy who's not going to inspire the backlash.

If you could rank the priority list of issues that would lead to Republicans winning, you would certainly strike abortion off that list because it's a losing issue for reasons you've written about. Um, would, would crime be, uh, among the first? Like, for me, I wonder if, like, what is a woman is like a rallying cry that could, uh, you know, win popular support.

I don't see— I mean, I don't see a lot of evidence because a lot of people are not seeing the trans issue in the way conservatives see the trans issue. They really are seeing there's people with like deep problems and they're complaining and they feel sorry for them. What is a woman? You have a penis. Like, you know, that works for conservatives. I don't know if that's like—

no, no, but they have kids and they send their kids to school, and if they see enough libs of TikTok videos, they're going to be like, what the Yeah, I mean, but most people are not watching, you know, libs of TikTok video.

I don't know how representative that stuff is. I mean, some of it surely exists, but I don't know if like people are seeing it everywhere in their lives. As far as like, you know, what's a winning issue? Are you asking me what's a winning issue or like what I care about?

Both.

I'll start, I guess I'll start with the winning issues. I think the, like we talked about, the affirmative action civil rights law, the Vivek stuff, stuff that Vivek's taken up, I think is Yeah, the crime issue. I mean, if you look at, you know, I think politicians generally know, you know, what they're doing. So if you— New York Times did an analysis of the 2022 midterms and Democrats were— all their ads were on abortion, or the majority argued, or the plurality, whatever. That was the biggest issue for them. And for Republicans, it was crime. And I think both sides are right. I think they understand that people want, you know, people want their abortion rights and they want to be free from crime, right? I think that is the median voter. The thing about the Republicans though, in running on the crime issue, is that there's not a lot— well, this is true, I guess, for abortion too at the federal level, although the judges, it does matter for Senate races. The federal government doesn't have tons of control over the crime issue, but the extent to which you can make it into an issue, yeah, I think it's definitely worth talking about. That's true. That's correct. You know, I think they should probably. I you know, I think that a lot of this you know the entitlement reform stuff. I think Social Security and Medicare are heading in a bad direction. I really care about doing something here, but I know it's not it's not popular. You know, my suggestion would be just lie and say you're going to protect Social Security and Medicare and then and then not do that. I mean, I think that was basically that was Trump to a certain extent. Trump tried to repeal Obamacare, and it would have like taken away a lot of Medicaid funding. And this is not this was Paul Ryan's dream, but it wasn't consistent with what Trump said during the. Campaign and just barely, you know, barely falls short in the Senate. But yeah, I think that, you know, I think that probably not running on that, going, uh, moderate on the economic issues, uh, I think is helpful. Um, I think the immigration issue, you know, I'm not— I'm friendly to immigration. I think it does help Republicans generally to run against, you know, crime and disorder, but you've also got to do it in a way that doesn't seem— yeah, that doesn't seem mean to people. And I wonder if sort of being a little bit more accommodating to immigrants, you know, is a good way to sort of, you know, just to be harder on crime and to be harder on affirmative action and diversity stuff, because then people can't say, well, you're a racist, you just want to hurt minorities in every way possible. If you could hold this up and say, no, I'm not, I'm, you know, welcoming to minorities who, you know, play by the rules and contribute to society, of course. I think that could be helpful, but that's, that's not where the base is. The base really wants to, wants to hammer immigrants.

Let's touch on crime first. You wrote a piece on, I believe, the invisible graveyards of crime, and you were referencing the Prime Minister or President of El Salvador, who's taken a very tough stance on crime as it relates to gangs in his country, maybe implicitly recommending that maybe something similar or even close, or maybe there's something we can learn. Why don't I let you unpack what you were trying to say in that piece and And what do people kind of like misunderstand about?

So, you know, the crime issue, it's crazy. I mean, we sit there and like if one person, you know, gets shot by the police and whether just sometimes seemingly justified and sometimes not, we, you know, it must be a, you know, 10 to 1, 100 to 1 ratio of what the kind of national coverage it gets compared to like all the crime in the streets. But look, you know, people, you know, dying don't care whether they were killed by police or other criminals. Crime has all kinds of effects. Effects beyond just like the victim, like someone was murdered or someone was robbed or something. Like, you know, people who've lived— you know, it destroys— it destroys cities. I mean, people flee from— you know, the tax base flees from cities with high crime rates. Um, you know, like, you know, liberals complain about, you know, these, uh, uh, these areas that like— are they called the food deserts? Well, yeah, I mean, because like it's not profitable to run a business because you have to worry about shoplifting and you have to worry about, you know, your employees potentially getting shot and all these other things. Um, so crime is a major, major issue, and particularly in the Ameri— not everywhere, but in the American inner city, yes, and in much of Latin America, uh, yes. And, you know, these— you have El Salvador, you have a country of a few million people, and it has basically, you know, the crime rate of, you know, some of the worst American, American cities. And so, like, well, you know, what kind of politics would you demand if, you know, our entire country were— was Chicago or Detroit? What would be the pri— you know, the New York Times had an art— uh, had a headline recently, you El Salvador crushed its brutal gangs, but at what price? And it's like, the price is worth paying. It's really worth doing this when your murder rate is 50 per 100,000 each year, right? I mean, people can't live under those circumstances, normalize. And in this article, I just did a little bit of calculations here. And basically, I mean, you're going from Detroit to the American average in the murder rate. This is what Bukele did in the last few years. And like, you look at the number of people he had to lock up to do it, and you just do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Assume some percentage of them are innocent. I'm sure it happens. You know, I'm sure there are going to be innocent people who get caught up. But like, you know, you're El Salvador. You don't have like, you know, a lot of good budget and well-trained police and like lawyers and, you know, well-trained judges and all this stuff. No, the gangs basically run your country. And you've got to figure out a way around this. We're in America under much luckier— you know, we could do a real crime crackdown. Without major civil liberties violation and giving everybody due process. I'm sure we could do it if there was the will to do it, but we don't. And that's convenient enough because most people in positions of power and influence, they don't live in the worst parts of the country. But I really have compassion for El Salvador here and really dislike to see sort of this lecturing from the outside. And so, yeah, I think Bukele's crackdown, I think it's hard to imagine, it's hard to make assumptions where this is not justified. I mean, these things are hard. These things are hard to calculate, sort of how this works. But, you know, I just like to say, you know, make the assumptions you want and show me the calculations where this is not worthwhile to do. I think it unquestionably is.

How do you explain sort of like, how would you psychoanalyze someone who worries about whether a minority is, you know, dying from the hands of police, but doesn't worry about sort of the orders of magnitude higher deaths that come just from like homicide In their own communities, like is it that they're just bad at math or that they are uninformed or that it's actually not about the minority? It's it's not about that. It's about something else. It's this other game kind of that they're playing. Like how do you explain that?

Yeah, I mean, it's got to be to a certain extent people are bad at math. I think that's right. But people, I mean, I think under people who live in inner city neighborhoods, I think no, you know, like their police aren't the ones likely to shoot them if they get killed. Yeah, and I you know it's tempting. A lot of people, a lot of conservatives or moderates will blame. Oh, these liberals, this luxury belief thing. They're the white liberals are the ones who want this. But unquestionably, the people in the inner city, I mean, they they care more about you know they pro the police killings bring out the protests in a way that the normal everyday street killing does not. And if you look at actually the voting results in these elections, you know it's you know in Chicago, like the relatively the anti-crime candidate didn't do as well with blacks. That's generally the pattern. I mean, blacks usually vote for the black candidate. That's why Eric Adams. sometimes gets the Black vote, but it seems like they end up usually more on the side of the soft-on-crime constituency. So I think this is something real within these communities. And to the extent that white liberals also believe this, I think a lot of it, they are actually channeling the actual preferences of Black communities. I mean, they're not imposing— I think liberals are just too deferential to Black communities, if anything. If you want to take that sort of like the opposite of what people are saying, oh, white liberals are doing this to Blacks. Like, no, white liberals are channeling Blacks. Blacks in the inner city do actually have these preferences. And the psychology, I think it's pretty normal. I mean, I think it's like, I think that a lot of Black people do see, even if the police are Black in their city and even if their mayor is Black, they do see sort of the wider society as fundamentally a white society. They do see it as sort of a white man's world. Um, and I do think they see authority as, as white. And I, I think it's like that too. I mean, I think Americans, you know, they care more about a crime committed by an immigrant or a foreign country than they do their fellow Americans. And I think the sort of the— there's a lot of the sort of racial sort of solidarity in the Black community that does, does lead to this.

How sure are we that being harder on crime, like significantly harder on crime, would radically reduce crime?

Like, what does the, the data suggest from other places that have Yeah, well, I mean, it's hard because like when we, when we like, it's not like the, you know, the, uh, American policy changes all that much between a Democratic and a Republican president, right? Like you're a cop on the streets, you don't notice the difference between the Biden administration and the Trump administration. Um, you know, so, but I think that like we can look at the extreme cases like El Salvador and we can, we can see what happens. I think that it's not a coincidence that the Americans', um, crime rate went up in the 1960s as we started, um, we started going softer. I mean, in every way. Like more civil liberties for criminals, uh, giving them, you know, attorneys, giving them Miranda rights. This all happened, you know, at the exact same time that crime went through the roof. You know, there's a plausible case. You look like, of course, like you have a right to remain silent. Like, you know, criminals will often just tell you like what they did and what other people did too. Like, obviously there's going to be a cost to this, you know, having to, you know, get, uh, a warrant, uh, you know, putting more stringent requirements on whether you can search somebody, just, you know, not locking people up, letting them go. So there's a sort of— there's sort of like, why would people doubt this is sort of the question. And I think it's clearly that's ideological. It's ideology that's leading. They don't like the idea that, look, someone is behaving badly, you create the incentives for them not to behave badly, you incapacitate them, you take them away from being able to harm society. And that has a disparate impact, of course, and all that. People just don't like it. And so they're looking for something else. It's clear just from the plausibility of it and sort of history that this is how things work.

If you could wave a wand and change anything about how we did prison reform or police reform or anything regarding crime, and your goal was to reduce crime in a utility-maximising way, what would you do?

I think the death penalty is probably better than any other thing, and I'm probably using it very liberally and sort of making You know, how far can I go? Making a spectacle out of it would probably be very helpful. I think society, you look at like these old cases and like this murderer kills someone and then like, you know, 6 months later, they, you know, or weeks later or whatever, they hang him. And it's like, what was society? What was like, you know, it's the deterrent effect.

Yes.

But it's also like, what is society saying in that case? Okay. You've taken a human life. We're going to repay that and we're going to repay that immediately, not give you another 15, 20 years in and make you into a hero, right? We're going to take care of you. I think that's sort of the negative attitude and sort of the, okay, you're disposable now. We're going to get rid of you. I think it's probably just as strong as the— well, I shouldn't say just as strong, but also strong. The deterrent effect is probably stronger. But yeah, I think the death penalty would make— I would make use of it. I think the facial recognition technology and DNA technology, Matt Yglesias, my and your favorite liberal, He's talked about this too. I mean, people don't like the facial recognition technology because they get desperate about it. But it's like, what do you want? This is perfect. You're getting AI to tell you who the criminals are and you're getting them on video. And so I think we get more of this stuff too. I think Jennifer Doleac has done some stuff on collecting DNA of criminals and that really reducing recidivism. And so yeah, I think in general tougher. I think more police help. Um, there's, there's a lot you can do. Um, it's just, you know, ideology prevents us from doing it.

So, uh, you're recommending, I believe, what scholars call the Michelle Tandler approach.

Well, I'd legalize drugs. I wouldn't— I wouldn't— I'd leave the fentanyl people alone and then just get the people who are doing the, you know, the crimes, not the, not the traders. But, but yeah, basically her heart's in the right place.

Yeah, it's, um, Elon was coming for legalizing as well. Uh, and, you know, I'm about to move back to San Francisco and you hear these stories of crime and it's just, it's scary. One wonders what, what they should do or what, what can even be done, but it's certainly not the approach.

Yeah, but of all the people to hang, why focus on the fentanyl? I, I don't know, like, there's so many, you know, the people who break into cars, right? Uh, like, focus on the people. There's so many. There's not like there's no shortage of people who do things to other people, right? So, you know, start with that.

Some of our mutual friends, I was talking to them, they said that prohibition actually Like, it actually reduced alcohol. Like, do you think that legalizing it would increase usage?

I mean, it's plausible. Yes. I mean, yes, I think that, yeah, I think when you make something illegal, you may, you know, it's like, not like, you know, people are like, oh, you ban guns, people, only the criminals will find a way, or marijuana. Like, no, like, things that are illegal are harder to find. That, yeah. And then not everyone is, you know, not everyone is like, you know, MacGyver, like, you know, being able to find, you know, whatever they need. That resourceful and that careful. And so, yeah, clearly. But you know what? That's the cost of freedom. I mean, look, you have— I mean, you can get rid of alcohol. I don't doubt it would save lives. I mean, look, there's a lot of drunk driving. There's a lot of killings that happen when people are under the influence. Yeah, I'm sure banning Popeye's chicken would probably save a few lives, but whatever. Saving lives. I mean, what's that like? That's a dystopia. Yeah, like trying to save as many lives as possible. That's Xi Jinping during COVID right? I don't want that. I don't want a society that's going to maximize lives saved. I think that's a terrible way to govern.

Yeah. You want a society that's going to maximize what?

Happiness and progress and wealth and liberty.

Just finishing the loop on diversity, there was a school of thought that said that diverse teams do better. Scott Page, I think, Diversity Difference, stuff like this. And I think they tried to conflate sort of like interdisciplinary thinking with sort of like racial diversity or gender diversity. You know, in tech they'll say things like, you know, Pinterest could have only been like founded by a woman. It was actually founded by a man, but you go— he like— there are certain types of companies, I believe a woman, a prominent woman invested in it, and she could have only seen it. And, you know, Black people or women are more likely to invest in certain types of things. Or anyways, you kind of get my Is there any evidence for the effect of racial or gender diversity?

Yeah, I mean, the evidence for this stuff I think is pretty weak. It's plausible. I mean, you can be a lot, but it's a question of how much— if you watch Mad Men, right, and they were all white men, they would occasionally bring the woman in and say, what do you think of this? So the question is, maybe you need a woman to say, this seems wrong, or this won't work, or whatever. But can you just get that from asking your secretary or asking your wife or something? Do you really need— if she's not the best suited to be the business executive, do you really need to bring the woman in? So no, I don't think there's a lot of evidence. But look, things that— the markets are good for figuring this stuff out. I mean, you don't need to force people. You don't need to force it on people if it works. The only reason you need to force it on people is because there's some doubts about your theory. And especially academia, it's very— people know the replication crisis, but it's not just the replication crisis. It's like the way you frame the issue. Academics will take this thing that works in this very narrow context and say, well, this shows diversity is good. It might just be some puzzle or something that has no relevance to any real-world situation. And usually they can't do the real-world test. They're too hard and the world is It's too complicated, it's too expensive and all that. And so, yeah, I mean, again, it's one of those things. Great theory. I'm sure it works in some places. I'm sure it doesn't work in others, right? Do you need your coders, you have a very technical question, to be gender or racial diverse? I don't see any way that would work. I mean, any reason for that? If you're making a movie, you want to appeal to a broader audience, yeah, maybe. I mean, you want other people in the room. So it's going to be very context-dependent.

I'm curious. Let's say affirmative action gets repealed. In the next 5 to 10 years, how do you expect these issues, kind of like the diversity expectations of equal representation in business, how do you expect it to evolve? There's a certain generation of people that really believes it and believes it strongly, and it affects their careers in very real ways. So do you expect it to be further politicized? Do you expect Like, what do you expect to happen?

Uh, so, okay, one thing I don't expect is Vivek comes into office, signs executive order, you know, repeals Executive Order 11246, and they go and publicly fire all the diversity counselors the next day. Like, I don't think that's— I don't think that's gonna happen. Uh, but I do think that next, you know, you really do push back against race-based governments, next time there is, you know, there's austerity, you know, uh, they're, they're looking to fire employees, those calculations are going to change, right? I think that future corporations, that you know there's a lot of turnover in the Fortune 500. I mean, capitalism is still a dynamic process, and so I think the next generation of corporations are going to come. They're not going to have these offices. They're not going to have these vested interests. You know, people used to say, you know, Google for the first number of years didn't really have an HR department, right? Soft, you know, there was this used to be this this stereotype of like, you know, this tech is this unregulated place where these bros can do whatever they want. And I you know, I think that. That might have been true 20 years ago, but the shakedown artists came for them and they ended up changing the culture. I remember the old shakedown regime where it was just very explicit, like Jesse Jackson says hire more Blacks and they just give Jesse Jackson— Google would just give Jesse Jackson a check. Now it's much more elaborate. They have all the diversity people within the organization. And so, yeah, the next generation of companies, it'll be like what Silicon Valley could have been, could have remained if if it came up in a world where there wasn't civil rights law. But unfortunately, there was civil rights law and they got captured. So whatever the industries of the future are, I suspect they'd be less woke. It would have more impact on them than the current companies and established interests.

It'll be interesting to see. You've come across as very anti-woke. You've been a leading writer about that topic. So people conflated you with right wing. And then as you were seen as more right wing, you started to write more about how people on the right don't read. are lower IQ, etc. And part of this is in jest, but you had a certain disgust on the right. And then you repudiated some of the ideas around being sympathetic to Russia or China, and you were kind of liberal democracy pilled. So you had a bit of an evolution. Do you see kind of almost like a reverse audience capture when a certain group likes you? It's like a Groucho Marx phenomenon of you start to Either dislike them or you just are more aware of their flaws.

Yeah, that's that's true. That is yeah that is happening, and I I wonder how much of it is just Twitter. I mean the it's not like the people who write essays like responding to me anger me. You know usually they're you know sensible. But then the Twitter the people are they're bad, and like I guess the wokes they're not they're not my like they're not my network right? So they're not dunking on me all the time. They're not fighting with me. It's it's it's these you know these conservatives. And I end up, yeah, I end up really, really disliking that, but I try not to have that be sort of the determining force. I think when you've come, you, when you've sort of gotten it from like both sides, like you've had these mobs come after you from both sides, you're, you, you don't have the illusion that it's all, oh, these innocent, cowering conservatives and these big, bad leftists who just want to cancel people and want to hurt people and want to come after people. No, I've had very, you know, vicious just conservative, uh, mobs. Probably the worst mobs I've had, you know, have been, have been conservatives. Um, and so yeah, I mean, having that perspective makes you understand that it's not just one group, you know, victimizing the other group in, uh, in American society. Um, but you know, I try not to sort of like just be driven by these, uh, personal grievances. You know, I still— and I think I'm still able to say like, look, I, I still think Republicans are more correct on most issues, so I generally do want them to win, uh, elections, um, you know, just because they, they don't, you know, they don't meet my intellectual standards as far as like why they believe what they do or why they do what they do. I mean, I'm able to look past that. So yeah, you know, you can try to not have audience capturing, you try not to have reverse audience capture, you know, you try to just, just figure out, you know, what the, what the best ideas are.

Do you think it's a little bit of the midwit meme where it's like the, the lower IQ but they're coming to the right conclusion? The mid-IQ might be the left, and then there's certain people on the right who have a better process for coming to the conclusion but come to the same conclusion.

It's issue by issue. I think on the gender stuff, yeah, I think it's so clearly fake. I think the DEI and the woke stuff, a really stupid person can see through it and a really smart person can see through it. But no, there's certain issues where conservatives are just stupid on and smart people are not coming to those conclusions either. So it really is issue by issue.

I, I wonder, it seems that blank slateism is a core tenet of, you know, being an upstanding person in society, um, today. And I, I feel like that's gotten harder and harder to believe, and that at some point it will just be like, and you just can't believe that and also be a thinking person. And thus, like, that will change on the left Well, Charles Murray thinks this.

Charles Murray thinks that scientific evidence will come in for heredity and intelligence and all this. But though, you know, what I say to that is like, look, like, do you think that the evidence for differences between men and women are overwhelming? Do you think any other evidence will ever reach the level of the certainty of that we know men and women are different? And I don't think so. I can't see it. Like, I consider that the most proven thing that you can imagine. And still, like, you know, it's— when you look at STEM, why are women underrepresented in STEM, it's still, you know, it's still mostly blank slateism is what you're supposed to say. Uh, so no, I don't think evidence is going to save us. I don't think any scientific finding is going to come back and say, oh, we found the gene. Like, we already know about chromosomes and we still think, you know, men and women are, are the same, and, you know, when it's convenient. Uh, so no, science, science won't save us. We'll have to argue for these things directly.

Yeah. I wonder if advancements in behavioral genetics might—

No, nobody cares. The twin studies have been around, I mean, for, you know, 30, 40 years. They're very convincing. They're very high quality. I mean, the twin studies, the adoption studies, I mean, they blow your mind when you first read about them, but nobody cares. I mean, it just hasn't made— I, you know, I wish one thing, you know, I wish conservatives would use this stuff because it's actually, uh, it's actually very, very powerful. And like, you don't have to just say all experts are wrong and all science and data is wrong. You could say like, no, you have the bad data and we have, you know, You have the flawed methodology and we have the good methodology for figuring these things too. But, you know, not many people have sort of the brains or the inclination to want to do that.

You wrote a piece, you know, effective altruism will be woke or die, or anti-woke or die. You could have, you know, substituted kind of any gray tribe group for effective altruism. Um, you know, and it just, it feels like blank slateism is the, is the crux issue. And to me, it feels like they're all Conceding on that, or like there's no way they can fight back without being kind of out of polite society. Yeah.

So I was recently at the Emergent Ventures conference for people who've gotten a grant from Tyler Cowen in the DC area. And there are a lot of, you know, obviously a lot of EAs there. And, you know, one thing somebody said that I think is correct is that like the EA movement's influence will not be as EAs, right? The EA movement's influence will be in people taking lessons. from them. And I think that's probably— and trying to do something with it. So I think you see the hints of EA, like sort of an error. You see sort of like EA thought sort of making its way through different things. So I think that like YIMBYism, I think there's a lot of overlap with these EA people. I think like an EA approach to crime, for example, I think you're seeing a little bit of people talk to that. They don't call themselves, say, we're EA approach to crime, but just Doing the costs and benefits and not being sort of hostage to ideology. So EA as an EA movement is maybe not as interesting as EA and what it does, how it influences right-wing thinkers and how it influences left-wing thinkers and people closer to politics. I think there's still a lot of potential there.

Talk about how you became liberal democracy pilled, Rukuyama pilled. And how you think about that in context of the critique that even Fukuyama to this day doesn't fully appreciate just how susceptible liberalism is to wokeness or far leftism because it doesn't have any brake pedals.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, to start with the last part, wokeness, I don't think we should exaggerate how— I mean, it's bad. I hate it. I mean, I wrote a book on it and spent a lot of time on it, but I'd rather live with a woke elite than a socialist elite or a communist elite or the other I'd rather I'd rather be than be trying to do the woke stuff too, even than like doing a new great society, like expanding government to the extent that Johnson has. I think you have more freedom under under a woke government governance. So I don't I don't see woke as like an existential crisis for democracy. And as far as like how it became sort of look, it's it's it's like I think people a lot of people want to believe that liberal democracy is a you know is the best off best system of government, and humanity doesn't have. An alternative. I think the evidence for that, you know, has generally been not as strong as, you know, people would have liked to think. I mean, you have, you know, examples of countries with massive economic growth and, you know, doing very well, like Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan. Now, when you look at these countries and you look at sort of like the human capital that they're working with, right, South Korea is, you know, is one of the most underperforming countries for like IQ relative to GDP per capita. So South Korea, when you consider it's made up of Koreans, is not that impressive. But I think that China was sort of the big one because it's the second biggest economy in the world and they've had remarkable economic growth for decades. The greatest improvement in a large number of people's living standards ever, right? They had 7%, 8%. People say it's exaggerated, but it might be. But still, I mean, you can't doubt that since the Deng reforms, China has seen massive improvement. In some ways, you know, society more successful than ours, saying like, you know, crime and things like that. They don't have the kind of disorder that we have in our society. And so there was a plausible case that, look, there's something to be said of the China model. Then COVID hits, and actually the China model sort of looks even stronger because China gets this thing under control. And like, there's these articles in like mid-2020 that like, oh, China's like, you know, gone back to normal and we're still locked down, right? Because they just crushed it. Like, wow, this is a really— and it's still really impressive. I mean, what they— how long they held off zero COVID. COVID is really impressive, even if it's not perfectly reported or whatever. I mean, the fact that they could sort of contain this thing for that long was really impressive. But then it turns out years later, their budget is gone because they spent it all on COVID testing. They don't have money to do anything else. And they keep the zero COVID thing forever after vaccines are available. They build a vaccine that's not very good, but still, I mean, it's probably good enough to go back to normal life. You don't have to lock up people forever. And their economic growth slows down. You think they might be self-interested enough to do something about that. And not only that, but you see Xi Jinping talking about sort of like this idea that capitalism has gotten out of control. Look, that's never good news. Look, when your leaders start talking like that, they usually don't have something better. They're just sort of asserting control or trying to achieve equality, and it's going to make people worse off. And so you have this sort of this turn away from From capitalism, right? And so China doesn't. You know, I don't look bullshit at the birth rate collapse too. Maybe they solve it. Like this is another thing that may like maybe they solved it. But like if their competence extends to like they're very good at like you know stopping COVID but not good at like increasing their birth rate, they're doing some things that are you know interesting at least interesting to like watch how it turns out, right? Like banning men who are who look like sissies from TV. Like maybe that's a good fertility like intervention. Like I don't know. Like right encouraging women to actually have kids.

They have.

Like they have this ministry of like women's affairs in China, and it's pretty funny. It's like, oh, thirty and not married? What is wrong with you? You are bad for China. Like that's not usually thing is like a women's affairs office is doing, but they are but they are doing this. And like you know maybe there's fruits of that. If that fails, then you just get the tyranny without any of the without any of the plus side, without you know without the economic growth or without the reversing the birth rate issue. So you know I'm much much less optimistic about China's future than I was recently. Russia, I mean, nobody thought Russia was like, you know, the smartest-run country in the world at any point. But, you know, for it to screw up this bet, to have this sort of war that like, you know, the troops on the ground don't know they're fighting until the day before, and like, you know, isolate yourself internationally and, you know, not even do that well. People expect you to just sort of roll into Kyiv. I mean, the US, you know, expects this, and yet you don't. You get stuck, you know, you only break off a chunk of the country which everyone fled from and nobody wants to Nobody wants to live in anyway. And then, you know, the U.S. I mean, the U.S. bounces. I mean, the U.S. bounces back. I mean, the U.S. bounces back from COVID I mean, it's you know, I there was like these articles like by Peter, like people like Peter Church and saying we're gonna have a civil war. I always thought that was nonsense. I always thought that was exaggerated. And you know, things look pretty good. And the point is, you know, there's no there's there's no alternative. Like the you know the China, you know, with the technocratic model, I think has failed. And it's actually was a reasonably seeming technocratic model. If you read about the Chinese promotion system and the reliance on standardized tests, you think if anyone could have pulled off a meritocracy that had reasonable decision-making, it might have been China. But apparently the system is broken in some ways. And so there's pretty good reason to think we're not going to be able to do any kind of monarchy or whatever thing people are hoping for.

Peter Zeihan, for the audience, is a thinker who's gotten a lot of acclaim in the last few years because he predicted US isolating itself a little bit. And his worldview is that what really matters in terms of determining a country's success is demographics, population balance between generations, as well as geography and energy. What he doesn't look at, it seems, is culture and governance as opposed to Munkar Olsen's worldview, who I think is all about institutions, Why Nations Fail, or the Bology worldview, which is about human capital, IQ, and also technology.

So is Zeihan optimistic about Africa because they have the best demographics then?

That's a great question. I suspect he isn't. Or I don't hear about the countries he's excited about are Turkey, Argentina, France. He's excited about countries that did well before World War II, that are independent, that independent manufacture their own stuff.

Turkey is interesting. Yeah, Turkey, I can see Argentina. I don't know why you would think that France has decent demographics, but, you know, problems with that too. So that sort of makes sense.

How would you describe the Hanania worldview in terms of like, how would you rank order some of those Things in terms of what really determines a country's—

It seems to be markets, and it seems to be sort of the inherent human capital of the population. I mean, you look at the Chinese, they've done well every single place that there have been Chinese. Same with Japanese. Koreans have South Korea and North Korea, and obviously North Korea is its own thing. But look, we saw it in Eastern Europe. I mean, the countries that basically the wall came down, these countries didn't have, um, great resources. Like, I'd never heard about great resources out of, you know, Poland or Hungary or whatever, uh, but these countries, you know, did well. So I think that, like, and I think that we're— I'm, you know, I'm more optimistic sort of about the world. I think it's like, if you look at, like, sort of, uh, you know, the sort of the decrease in poverty, I think that after the Soviet Union collapsed, I think we really saw, uh, just people understand that, like, sort of central planning wasn't gonna And the long-term trend has been a move towards markets. And so most regions of the world, life has gotten much, much better. And I think it's probably going to continue. I see China is a big one, but that could turn around. But in general, yeah, I think living standards are— I think globalization worked. I mean, one of the things I think that people get so wrong talk is like globalization, you know, screwed up and everything is much worse off. It's like, no, like poverty like declined at a faster rate than any other time. People complain about Americans. Look, Americans are still living better than they did a generation ago. There was, you know, some, uh, growing— you know, there was some, uh, uh, complications, complications here. But I don't think our politics and like it's going haywire was a result of our trade policy or because of globalization. I think it was a technology that, um, that, you know, with cable news and the internet and the social media that sort of drove people insane. So, yeah, neoliberalism, Clinton, Blair. I mean, I think that's the path to success. I'd be more right-wing than them, but basically, I mean, that's better compared to historically what's come before it.

So you're obviously pro-markets. Are you sympathetic to the critique that there's certain cultural degradations that happen because of markets? And you mentioned in China, they're trying to do, I guess, some government social engineering with around, um, you know, fertility, um, or even like, uh, you know, traditional gender roles. Is there a type of social engineering at the government level, whether it's encouraging marriage or encouraging, you know, um, you know, people to have more kids or, or encouraging traditional gender roles that you might support because markets just tend to lean in a certain direction? Or do you think that, um, that's actually not what's happened? What's happened is in fact it has been so tilted And so we haven't had free, like, actual free markets in terms of culture.

You know, the question is, you know, what is the— you know, if you dislike the direction that the culture has gone with, uh, you know, just with sort of a free market society, what is the alternative? And it's, you know, you had like something like Iran, right? I had an article on Iran, right? They had, you know, they had— it sounds like what the, you know, the, uh, the, you know, tradition tradcons, you know, wanted. You had a government that believes strongly in a moral vision that, you know, forced that moral vision on people. Like, you know, government with a strong role in the economy, and it has a low birth rate, and the people are, you know, the people hate the government, and the government just, you know, rules by brute force. Uh, and so the question is, like, I, you know, I like, you know, stable families, and, you know, I like, uh, I like, you know, uh, people, like, not having tattoos on their face. And I don't know, I have these, like, sort of these conservative instincts of the things I like too, but I just don't see, like, I just don't see the path to government being wise enough or able to really affect these things in a positive direction. I'm open to if you want to subsidize births and stuff like that. I'm not totally against that. If you want to make tax credits to make marriage easier, I'm not against it. It's not the worst thing in the world. I just I just don't have faith that you could do much here without like really heavy-handed methods, and then even then, like Iran, it could backfire.

That's as well put. Shifting gears here a little bit, do you do you think that there are people who are just like temperamentally or genetically right or left wing?

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah. Look at Sean Hannity's head. Do you think that that guy? Can you imagine Sean Hannity doing Chris Hayes's show and Chris Hayes doing Hannity's show? Can you imagine that?

No.

Try to imagine it. Yeah, these people were obvious. I think, I think the physiognomy is definitely a thing. But yeah, there's these instincts that of course people are, people are different.

Yeah. And, and how do you like— what is it about Sean Hannity that like makes him like— his physiognomy that would make him more right-wing? Or like—

Yeah, I— it's, it's, you know, it's, it's hard to say. So conservatism seems to be— it seems okay, liberal— I mean, it seems like there are different types. It's not like there's a type of like there's a conservative gene or a conservative trait or a liberal trait, right? So it seems like a certain combination of a kind of man becomes a conservative. He might be smart but not too smart, and he might be very masculine, right? Or very sort of tribal in his instinct. And I think that combination is sort of the, uh, the talk radio guy. I think that— I think that guy is a certain type. And then you have the high intelligence, maybe low testosterone, maybe, uh, uh, low, low competitive, uh, sort of womanly and sort of like this empathy and stuff like that. I think those guys tend to be liberals, right? And then for women and men, for women, it's going to be a completely different thing, right? Where the more masculine women seem to be more attracted to liberalism and the more feminine women, right, are attracted to conservatism. And I think there's different types of like the IQ distribution and the personality distribution and between the sexes. So yeah, I think, you know, if you like want the behavioral genetic studies, I mean, they do show that ideology is driven by politics and sort of, I think these are sort of the And do you think the parties will continue to polarize on those axes, like, just even more?

Or how do you expect the parties to realign, if at all, over the next few years?

It's inseparable from Trump. It's inseparable from what I think is going to happen with Trump. I really, like, some people believe that historical forces just sort of happen and individuals don't matter. Like, no, Trump really matters. Individuals matter. Elon Of course, matters. These people matter, but Trump really matters for our politics. I think he's gonna probably most likely scenario is he wins a nomination, probably loses the general, or he might win. If he loses the general, I think he's the nominee in 2028 and probably 2032 and probably indefinitely. So I think it's gonna be. I think it's probably gonna be the Trump. I probably think it's gonna be. He's not. He doesn't die. No, he doesn't die. They run his hologram. Yeah, after a while. After a while. No, he. I think as long as he's physically able, I mean, I think he could be. He could be the nominee. I don't think there's any. I don't think there's any natural reason to think it would stop. And if he's not, he'll be a huge figure of the party. I mean, his trials will be the center of our politics, right? Even if he's not running for president or if he's not president. So yeah, I think Trump is sort of an accelerant for these forces, and I think he's going to be there for a while. So I see it sort of continuing. I think the abortion thing is probably going to Is going to contribute even more to this, and that's you know because that issue is just I think just started. I think the poll you know we just started the politics of this you know that's taken up the political realm for a very long time. So yeah, I think you know we've polarized and we we're going to be more polarized. I hope that like maybe the Trump show gets old and like it doesn't have to affect as many parts of life. We can be equally polarized for people who are into politics, but politics can be like less of a thing that like normal people are like oh you know you crazy people just fight. We're just going to do our own thing. We're going to have you know. normal businesses and normal art and normal family lives. That's the hope. But I think the polarization, I think, is here to stay for a while.

Were you close to Ezra Klein's understanding of why we're polarized? And do you have a different view?

Yeah, I think Ezra's pretty much correct. Yeah, I read that book a while ago. I'm trying to remember the thesis, but basically he points to the collapse of identity at the sort of one axis, right? Right. And I think that's correct. And I think that the technology has got to be sort of part of it. I think if you look at sort of the, over time, you see like sort of the subscription numbers for the New York Times and the Washington Post go up and like the other newspapers in the country go down. You have the cable news channels and they specialize, they find their niche audiences. So yeah, I didn't find a lot in that. I didn't find a lot of the book to disagree with.

I think it's a lot of its basic I'm curious to get into your politics a little bit. You're definitely not a populist, it seems. But unlike right-wing elitists, you prefer democracy over systems like integralism or Duginism. Your Fukuyama post makes that clear. And so if you're kind of pro-democracy and anti-populism, how do you think about managing that tension? Do you want the masses running things or not?

I guess I'm just, I guess I'm just like a normal Republican, I guess. Then I guess I'm just a normie.

I mean, that, that, like a Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush.

I mean, closer to that than either populists or wokes or monarchists. Look, it's so funny, like the right-wingers who hate democracy. Look, the only reason you people have any power or influence at all is because of a democracy. Like they think that like integralists will be running the country if we don't have democracy. No, it's going to be Fauci and Biden and Kamala Harris. Of course. I mean, like, what is this? this stuff is, you know, this stuff is, uh, is, you know, sort of, sort of silly. I, I think democracy is like not like a real thing. It's like a spectrum, you know. It's like, it's like, you know, we say, oh, somebody does something we don't like, we say, oh, that's undemocratic. But, you know, I think you need a system in which, uh, you know, in which sort of, you know, people, you know, leaders can get feedback. And China actually tries to do this from like top down. They have this like complaint system and they monitor public opinion and all these other things. But I think it's sort of a central planning thing rather than a sort of spontaneous sort of feedback thing where, like, right now you have, like, a city government and you can go yell at them. And that's a way for, like, you could run against them and you could talk about them on social media. You can't just sort of replace that by trying to figure out what the people want and then sitting there in your room and then drawing up how to respond to public opinion. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't think it's necessarily like a tension. It's like, you know, it's like historically, like, you know, the more, you know, the, the, you know, I do think that there is a problem in that, uh, historically, like, there's been like a big government has expanded, um, in democracy as time has gone on. I just don't see, I don't see like dictatorships having, you know, a better model. And then they, you know, they also expand government because Because it seems to be that's what people want, and they also need to respond to what people want. They just do it in a more clumsy way. I don't see really an alternative. I think one good thing about democracy is it's sort of like if you look at something like you know embryo selection, right? Which I think you know genetic engineering that I hope is going to go somewhere. Like I used to think maybe China will be more enthusiastic about the stuff than America was, and now Steve Chu I think still thinks that. But I don't think that now. I see China. They came and they arrested. That scientist who, uh, who, um, who did the thing with the cloning, the baby where they inserted the genes into them. And, you know, like, the US is probably one of the most, or maybe the most unregulated country in the world for this embryo selection stuff, basically, because you can make as many embryos as you want to do whatever you want with them, basically. Although we do ban, uh, gene editing. And part of it is just like democracy focuses on other things, so it can't really crush like all the sources of, uh, progress or innovation. So I think And I think that the development of big tech in the United States, it's sort of the same thing. It's not like Biden or Trump or whatever, Clinton or whatever said that, oh, we're going to have this big tech economy. It's just that this new thing came up and government was sort of too slow and too sort of clumsy to really pay that much attention to it. And then it sort of took off and it changed the world. Maybe that kills us with AI according to some people, but in most cases, is actually a good thing. Um, and I hopefully, you know, hopefully we'll have more of that.

I'm curious how you make sense of the Elon Musk kind of political phenomenon and if you think it's a kind of winning strategy to kind of become, you know, pretty heavily partisan, but to do so from a place of just like higher IQ, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, I think something like that. I mean, I think works, you know, I think that like People are too sort of wedded to the idea that there's like these people called conservatives and there's people called liberals. And like on one side, you just sort of have to figure out the best strategy for beating the other side. And I believe it's more dynamic than that. I think what conservatism is affects what liberalism is, and whatever liberalism is in a specific moment affects conservatism, right? So conservatives did not care about women, so they were not passionate defenders of women's sports, right, until the trans issue So liberals, you know, weren't, you know, weren't, they weren't even that pro-immigration until Trump came along and then made them pro-immigration, right? There's, so there's, you know, I think one question people should always be asking isn't just like how my side should do it. Maybe that's the right question in an election because an election is just a zero-sum game that happens, you know, every 2 or 4 years. But like the rest of the time, they should be asking, you know, me as a conservative or me as a liberal, how can I make the other side the most tolerable You know, version of themselves, or maybe you want to make them worse because you know you want you want a backlash and you think you'd win through some you know complicated thing, whatever. But you've got to be be thinking of these things. So the Elon phenomenon, I think, is interesting. I think when you have somebody of unquestionably like nobody can question his intelligence or his you know his success in life, it's definitely a PR coup. You know, for your side, if you can if you can get him on your side unquestionably. His behavior, though, I mean, probably negates a lot of that. A lot of that, right? He changes, you know, he changed his Twitter name to Harry Balls. And okay, so now he's playing into, okay, conservatism is like, he might be smart, but look, he's got the emotional maturity of a 5-year-old. And like, it's very easy for liberals at that point to sort of brush it off. So I was excited like, oh, Elon Musk becomes conservative. Maybe this has like a big change. But I think sort of his personality has sort of played into some liberal narratives about conservatives and how he's acted and probably it's, it's a wash at that point.

You, you were mentioning earlier that people matter, people change the course of history. One debate we had in a, in a group a long time ago was, do ideas matter? Um, or is it— you had this phrase once, it was like hormones, cope, and something else I can't remember. Um, reflect on or unpack that kind of debate and where did you net out on it?

Yeah, so I mean, people— like, I think that this is sort of a theme, and that I spell this out explicitly in my book on wokeness You know, there's a kind of guy who likes to like read philosophy like, oh, there was Rousseau and there was, you know, there was Marx and there was Thomas Jefferson and there was Locke. And like society is just like the aggregate of like 10% Marx and like 60% Jefferson or, you know, whatever it is. And, you know, I think that it clearly doesn't work like that. If you look at sort of what wokeness is, there's no philosophy, you know, you could tie it, oh, the Gnostics, oh, somehow it's Rousseau, somehow it's Marx. Marx. Like, nobody was saying that before wokeness. Like, nobody was saying in 1950, oh, I've read Marx and this is going to relate to transgenderism, right? The people are just, you know, they're, they're, they're just sort of reverse engineering because they see what's happened. And so that they can go back in time and say this was caused by some philosopher, the Germans or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Frankfurt School. I mean, you know, it's like, like they, you know, they said they did that, you know, it's like some of this stuff. I mean, and of course you'll find somebody who did say something that sort of looks like today because You know, people say all kinds of things, right? It doesn't mean that that person caused it. I think people who are interested in ideas tend to think ideas are important. My sort of study into wokeness shows that it's actually often not ideas. It's just sort of bureaucratic, sort of, you know, it's sort of people responding to sort of bureaucratic initiatives or responding to a certain election or trying to get voters in some way. It leads to this law that leads to this like industry popping up and then this industry sort of justifies What they wanted to do in the first place. And so yeah, I think that like every— like, I think the Trump movement is another sort of example of this. It's like Trumpism wasn't a thing until like Trump came along, right? And then people will go back and they'll graft their own sort of explanation. Oh, it was, you know, upset about trade, or it was this, or was that. I mean, Trump just had some instincts, and then people like this guy who didn't have like a coherent philosophy, people just sort of can make something up around that. And then they can claim the mantle of Trumpism. So ideas, I think ideas are important. I think abolition or something like pro-life could be in this category. It's like a specific cause that people take up and that gets put on the radar and people can change the world that way. But these ideas, obviously Marx, I mean, obviously Marx doesn't exist. There's no Marxism. Obviously that's another clear case of that. But the idea that some ancient philosopher, some philosopher said something about liberty or said something about Some, you know, there's some debate between, you know, the Pope and, you know, the Protestants of, you know, the 1600s that, that today explains our politics or something like that. Uh, I just don't see a lot of evidence for that. I think it's very easy to sort of just see patterns here where none exist.

It is interesting, putting those, you know, etymology or whatever, you know, of, of these ideas aside, it is interesting how colleges are just so good at kind of indoctrination. Like, I remember myself, I was, you know, 18, going to college, had like zero political beliefs or pretty, you know, and then after college, I was just super woke. Like, I didn't even think twice of it. And I didn't study the critical theorists or whatever. Like, there's just something— University of Michigan.

Okay. And did you see that other pattern? The kids you came in with, did they all end up woke too?

Yes. Yeah. And University of Michigan is super— like, there, there was a conservative, like, club or whatever, but they were losers. And it just like, you know, this was— I went to college during Obama's election, um, first election. It was so— it was pretty like, you know, I went to college in 2008, so it was pretty like severe wokeness. But we were definitely like talking about diversity. Like, we were definitely like, you know, left on so many, so many issues. So much so that my dad threatened to like not pay for my college as an immigrant. Yeah, I just— I, I don't know how they did it, but it just Is that not your experience or your perception of people entering college?

I don't know. I mean, I've always thought that there's some, you know, some research that suggests sort of that it doesn't change all that much. Like, if you look at freshmen versus— I think during— I went to college around the same time, and I think the Obama thing was unique because Obama really captured the imaginations of young people. So it might have just been the time. It might not have been that the college actually brainwashed them. I mean, it's my recollection of college is like most people did You know, they were sort of— they followed their inclination. There was a committed few who were really into, like, what, you know, they're like these people worship authority. So like their professors would talk about some like crazy feminist or something and they would get really into it, right? Um, that was, you know, like in my, you know, not very good school at the University of Colorado. Um, there was a few, you know, a few people like that just really into it. And then they would congregate in a few departments, like the real crazies, they would go to like women's studies or something like that. And then I remember like most of the other people just sort of being apolitical. Although now that I look back at it, I did work in the mailroom at the University of Colorado. So I did see that when people's voter registrations came in the mail and I was able to just look at them because they're just a postcard you could put in the box. And I tried to find a Republican actually, and it was funny. I went through dozens and dozens and every single one was a Democrat. So yeah, did the University of Colorado students around 2008, did 100% of them come into college as Democrats? Highly unlikely. I mean, but again, this was also the Obama era, and maybe Obama just captured the imagination of the youth. So I don't know. I did notice that the University of Chicago Law School was sort of an opposite thing because the University of Chicago Law School is very into law and economics. Like, there's a very strong connection between the legal— for law school and the economics departments. A lot of professors teach in like both areas. And so like people would, um, uh, you know, like we would be incorporating the class. Okay, like if you just law and contracts or torts. Like, how does it, you know, affect economic growth? And like, even like, we had a lot of professors who were like, I don't want to hear about what's fair, I don't want to hear about equitable. These were like the professors teaching these classes, um, you know, that all the 1Ls had to take. And I did notice a little bit of a brainwashing, uh, too, in the conservative direction, and the people would use more sort of economic language to, to talk about things. And so yeah, my— I, I think my— I think I probably agree with you more than I disagree with you. I'm a little bit confused by the literature which suggests that this doesn't exist. But, you know, intuitively, I think experience tells me it does. So yeah, I don't know.

Building on your point, you know, sort of the conversation around do ideas matter? What do you think about the claim that actually, you know, sort of far-left ideas are really like a series of tactics for a group of people to just gain power within an organization, especially like young people, you know, to rise up? And just like, are you sympathetic with that?

I mean, it is part of that. I mean, there's all these ways to understand conservatism and liberalism in politics. And like, That does happen unquestionably, right? And you need the ideas to sort of make that work, right? If you try to— a woman goes crying, 1950s, they put her in a mental institution. They say she's got problems, right? Today, they give her the keys to the company, right? So obviously there needs to be some kind of background for things to work this way. So yeah, I mean, I think that to conceptualize liberalism and wokeness as kind of a generational warfare, particularly, I mean, it sort of becomes inevitable, maybe not inevitable, but sort of much more likely when you're like, if you're a liberal white male, what do you say? All the women and all the Blacks in your organization are against you and saying, you've hurt me in some way, and your entire ideology says that white males are oppressing women and minorities. How do you even defend yourself? It's very difficult. So it's unsurprising that, yeah, people would take advantage of that.

Shifting topics a little bit, I'm curious how you see the conversation on feminism evolving. Like, if you compare where we are now to where we were during the MeToo era, it feels like there's like a reactionary feminism movement that has emerged. The Louise Perry case, the Mary Harrington and Mary Eberstadt way before her. I'm curious if you think this kind of put aside that specific movement, but just like reactionary feminism or, or, or pushback to feminism within women has legs? Or like, how do you see feminism going forward?

I mean, this reaction seems to me, seems to me to be in like an online movement. I don't see any like politician who's standing up and calling herself a reactionary feminist or any male politician saying, oh, I represent these women. These are these reactionary feminists are my kind of woman. Like, no, it seems to me that like what's going on with women in politics now is a big focus on the reproductive rights issue, um, and, you know, the sorting by, uh, the sorting by sex. Um, and then like, yeah, I— do I see anything sort of— is there anything beyond that? That's, uh—

Your prediction, I believe, is that going forward women won't be as in as high positions as, as they were, um, or with as much frequency if there is in fact a level playing field. That's I'm predicting that.

Oh, so I'm assuming affirmative action goes away.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm guessing that that's the prediction. And if, if that happens, like, how will feminism respond? Will they like triple down harder on, on that as a tactic? Like, what do you, what do you think?

Uh, I think that movements tend to sort of— I think they may be so distracted by the, you know, the abortion rights stuff that they might just not focus on that. I mean, I think this, I think this stuff is huge. And I think they're— I think it's going to be going, you know, there— I think that there's going to be the pro-life movement's going to be going for in vitro fertilization. I mean, there's already Some talk of that, maybe maybe birth control. Even if it doesn't happen at the national level, it'll happen at some state level, or there'll at least be talk of it, and that will grab people's attention. You know what? If there was like you know if there was sort of a rollback of civil rights law and women were not that represented, would that make them double? Look, I don't think they're that represented in like corporate boardrooms now. I mean, I think it's pretty still pretty male, and like the Senate, you know, and stuff like that. You know, other positions of power tend to be pretty male, and so. It doesn't seem to be that strong of a correlation between— it's like you have a critical mass of women and they change the culture, but the culture never moves to 50/50 just because men and women are different and more men will be able to attain the highest positions possible. I do think that there's got to be some kind of— I think that the trans thing, which is primarily a young woman thing, I think does reflect some kind of You know something very deeply wrong is going on here. Like there's so you know there's there's the it could be in some way that you know women being encouraged to be exactly like men and seek the exact same thing men want. They just decided that they were men. I guess they just they just decided they were they were biologically men. They were men, and so they changed their genders. Yeah, I mean I think there is a response to something deeply deeply unnatural. I think that the so the trans thing and the women's thing is not is not. necessarily easy to separate. I think the next generation of like people who's gonna see like these older people who like had these, you know, uh, you know, these surgeries and these other kinds of things, I think it's gonna— I think it's gonna create a backlash. I would be, you know, I, I don't think trans could, you know, increase indefinitely. I think this, this thing is just sort of— is, is going to sort of play itself out. And maybe we get a sort of a, a more reactionary feminism at this point, but that's, you know, generational terms.

I think in the immediate term, it's going to be reproductive health There's a certain claim that says that the world, or at least the US, let's say, just tends to, or is moving leftwards over time. And there's some, it's like a hockey stick, which has some pushback, but it's never big enough to offset the gain. And we're just on a road to pedophilia and bestiality and all these things that conservatives are concerned about. like what's after tea. And then like, if you reflect back to like what conservatives care about over 40 years, you know, it's like, well, Christianity, you know, marriage, gender roles, like a lot of things that were like core to how they live their lives have been gone. You have a post that recognizes that actually conservatives have some wins. You know, you mentioned abortion, gun rights, you know, a few others in there. My sense is you are Um, very skeptical of the idea that the, the world is just— or US is just moving left. And, um, and that's why you're more comfortable with the idea that there are brake pedals. Um, it's, you know, Jonathan Haidt might say some things like this, or Tyler Cowen, like once leftism just gets a little bit too crazy, it will just like naturally offset itself. And so you don't— you're— that's why you're, you're more okay with a woke elite than like a socialism elite, because you don't think the woke elite will get much worse than it is today. Is that an accurate summary of where you're at?

Yeah, so I mean, whether things are always getting liberal, I mean, I think it depends on exactly what you're talking about. So because when conservatives have focused on specific issues, right, guns or abortion or something, uh, homeschooling, they, uh, they have victories. I mean, they, they do normal politics and they win in normal politics ways. Now, if like your definition of conservatism is society has to be more religious, conservatism hasn't done But no society has done that. I mean, every society, I mean, you have to just sort of accept that some things are sort of a natural part of progress and that every society, look, when people get more exposure to the world, they get more exposure to ideas, they get wealthier, they get more secular. I mean, that's just life. I mean, rural areas, and I'm sure if you go to the Middle East, you go to Muslim countries, the rural areas are much more religious than the urban life, right? And people in People are being urbanized, they're getting wealthier. This is just sort of the natural thing. With the internet, I think the internet probably made religion— I mean, now you can sort of, your priest makes a claim, you can sort of Google it. I mean, it's inevitable that that's going to create some doubt in people about the faith that they're raised in. So yeah, I mean, it depends on what you're talking about. So if you're talking about religion, I think yes. I mean, the idea that— But if you're talking about gender roles more specifically. So if you look at like women participation in the labor rate, it's been pretty, you know, it went up in like the '60s and '70s. It's been pretty stable. I mean, it seems like we've determined that like as a society, 65 or 70% of women work and it's not going up to 100%, right? A lot of women don't want to work. A lot of women want to be stay-at-home moms. So that, you know, that number of, you know, women in the workforce, you know, percentage as a percentage hasn't edged up. And so, you know, that's a sort of indication that people are still sort of, to a large extent, living, you know, traditional, uh, lives. So it really depends on, you know, what you're talking about. I mean, wealth, you know, wealth is sort of, you know, leads to people being able to do what they want. And I think there is a human nature and people do want things. It's not, you know, these people, you know, the idea that it's all memetic, like if we just tell people to want a traditional society where they're all sitting on the farm and, you know, they don't, you know, the women don't work and they have 10 kids And, you know, they, uh, you know, they just go to church every Sunday and, you know, that's the life. And we just tell people that's the life they'll want, that's the life they'll want. I mean, I don't see any evidence of that at all.

That makes sense. There is an increasing group in, um, technology, but also probably more broadly, of people who are, you know, anti-woke, um, but they're also, you know, not traditionally right-wing in the sense that they're pro-choice, they're pro-immigration, they're pro-gay marriage, um, they're pro-technology, you know, technological growth and economic Well, one, do you agree that that's an increasing set of people? Do you think that those people are politically homeless or would they find a home in being a majority in the left or the Democrat or Republican Party?

So Marc Andreessen doesn't think these people exist. Do you think these people exist? He thinks it's like 3 people and we're extrapolating from them. Are there a lot of tech right-wing people?

I, well, they wouldn't call themselves right-wing, but they're, yeah, anti-left. I think they exist. Um, I think it's open question. Is it 10%? Is it 5%? Is it 30%? I don't know. I mean, it's the great tribe, right? Like, how big is the great tribe? And, you know, is there ever a constituency for the great tribe? Right. But like, Elon might've been part of this great tribe. Like, and so could the great tribe take over the Republican Party basically?

Oh, if they wanted to. Yeah, I think they could. I don't see anybody trying to do that. Yeah. I, you know, I think that, you know, Well, could they take over? I mean, look at Peter. Look at Peter Thiel funded— he basically bought 2 Senate seats. Well, won one, but then got the nomination in 2 seats, right? And that's incredible. I mean, to just do that, one guy just doing that. So I think the political system is pretty open. And he started with these guys who are outsiders to politics working with established politicians. There's probably an even a greater, uh, you know, a greater return to that. So yeah, I mean, if there was a real movement, it's like, you know, what do you need? You need money, you need ideas, you need cultural cache. Yeah, I mean, people in tech have that. So the, you know, the prominent people in tech, I think if they, you know, the world is open to them if they do want to— look at me, I mean, I've influenced politics. I've, I mean, you know, I've influenced Vivek, and who am I? I have nobody, I have nothing. And, you know, Vivek is now saying he's going to repeal, you know, Eel, and he's sure to be the next president. So that shows you, I mean, look at Rufo. I mean, that there's, you These people who, with a lot less than a lot of the tech guys have, you know, making a big difference.

Charles Murray had this tweet recently and you wrote about it where he said, hey, we need religion. And you wrote about, uh, you know, men need sex, not religion. They do. That's not the right headline.

Yeah, they need sex and violence. I think I might have been a little bit more provocative.

Unpack what you're trying to say in that piece and why you disagree with the Murray, um, analysis.

Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, you know, these people A lot of the people who think society needs religion, they tend to be doomers about where society has gone. And I just don't see the evidence that— so the GDP is growing. I mean, there's something bad happening with teen girls and young women, right? But most people, yes, there's overdoses, but 99% of people are not addicted to fentanyl or whatever. The life expectancy is basically fat people, people eating too much, and then the drugs too, right? And so most people don't seem— societies don't seem like they need religion. I mean, European societies are more secular than we are and they're not having the decrease in life expectancy because I get they don't need it much and they don't have as much access to opioids. And so I don't see this sort of broad trend that humans really need religion. Now, there is a correlation where religious people are happier.

Yeah.

You know, at the same time, like the areas that are least religious, you know, they tend to have, you know, the better economies and that's where people want to get to. People are emptying out of sort of religious regions and areas of the country and area of the world and going to secular places. Man needs something, right? Like it's not just, you know, people can't, people are going to be, you know, people aren't, people can't just, I think, want to make as much money as possible and sort of, you know, just live this sort of sanitized life. But I think people are pretty good at sort of finding that meaning, right? Like, people, you know, get married even in countries without much religion. Um, people, you know, they have sex, they chase— well, maybe not like Japan, but like, you know, most of the other countries in the world, they have sex. They get into other things, you know, it could be sports, it could be politics. Uh, you know, people get into hobbies, their career, and that seems to, you know, that seems to give people meaning. Now, people, these people want like You know, like, I think a lot of, like, intellectuals, like, right-wing intellectuals, think that people need, like, cosmic meaning. Like, I'm gonna have to live forever, and, you know, the universe cares about me. And maybe some people do need that. Clearly some people do, because it's just too depressing to sort of not think that way. But I don't see evidence that, like, the majority of people or all people need that.

And I, I think what they're also saying is that, yeah, we find it in politics, and that's bad because that leads to Um, you know, all this tribal sort of warfare.

I mean, look at— I mean, they think the first half of the 20th century was a time of, you know, wise politics? No. I mean, I think you have to sort of compare it to these things.

So, I mean, some people would say that like the New Atheists were, were making a big mistake, or they were, you know, not appreciating kind of the fundamental, you know, religious nature of humans, in that, you know, if you repeal religion, they'll just like find it in other Do you think— do you sympathize with that critique of New Atheists?

The New Atheists, I mean, I think were interesting, uh, because, you know, I agree with them on like a lot of like specific, probably most specific issues that they're worried about, the things that they don't like religion for. But I think they, yeah, I think they are not taking enough account of, of human nature and sort of what people need. So, you know, I say everyone, like society doesn't need religion, but I would never say that like nobody needs religion. Like if we, like everyone could be Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens and like be happy, like Obviously, for some portion of the population, they really do need it. And I think that was the mistake. As far as the doing, it's very interesting because they were responding to 2 things, right? They were responding to the Christian right and they were also responding to Islamic extremism. This was the years after 9/11. And so they were fighting this 2-front war and it sort of went out of style because everything became about whiteness, right? And so you criticize the non-white people. And so the world sort of left them behind, right? And so there's no place for them. You have these sort of right-wingers who are sort of more identitarians themselves and more sympathetic to Christianity, and these left-wingers who just think anything, but at the same— who think anything non-white is good. At the same time, I mean, Islam did— they were sort of wrong in that— I don't know if they were wrong if they made a prediction of this, but Islam did sort of mellow out in Europe. The terrorism thing did not. They seem to be mostly assimilating. Germany, I mean, Germany was supposed to fall apart because of all the Syrian refugees. It seems like the crime rate— I just saw stats recently, the crime rate didn't even budge all that much. And so, yeah, I mean, atheists and new atheists are sort of an interesting sort of time capsule. And it's interesting to think about why they don't really fit in our modern categories.

Speaking of minor categories, going back to the liberals and Republicans' strategies for it to have their own— some people use the word client base or electorate. The left tends to go for the minority population and the right tends to go for the— San Francisco is called the middle American radicals. But the challenge with that is it perhaps creates the kind of populism that you're less excited about. And so I'm curious what you think is a path I think they could learn from—

I mean, I think they can learn from Joe Biden. I mean, Biden is— Bidenism is like more of a stylistic, you know, I thought I saw you— I think Brian Chow talked about this in your conversation with him. Biden is more a stylistic revolution. He's way to the left of Obama but has less of a backlash than Obama, right? And part of it is like, you know, his white privilege. I think that's true. I think that Obama really was like sort of did rub a lot of these about right-wingers the wrong way because of his race. It has Ivy League, all that stuff too. But yeah, he really defanged a lot, has been a successful politician, had a very successful midterm given the circumstances, and is probably the favorite for 2024. And so yeah, I think that style and substance can be completely different things, right? I mean, I really think that, look, there are Republicans who win at the state level who do very well. They tend to be boring guys who are not the guy, you know, the ones who get all the attention or who are not the best at getting Twitter followers. So yeah, I mean, there's, you know, if you're a conservative, the, the, you know, if you're a conservative, the, the, the main hindrance to doing this though is the base and what they want. The question is, are they so disconnected from reality that like nothing matters? Like maybe you could, like, with a highly educated electorate, I think the Democrats have this, you could say like, oh, this is the least electable person. But like with a less educated or less like, you know, literate Sort of literate in the sense of like read, not literally can't read. They don't read. You can't even make that argument because they'll just think, oh, you know, Trump has the biggest rallies. Everyone loves Trump, or everyone loves this guy. Everyone, you know, and so they don't learn from history. So this is this is the difficult part. I think this can be taken over. I think there needs to be a synthesis. I think that a lot of the never Trump types, the Jeb Bush and like that crowd—I had a conversation with Tim Miller not that long ago, and he's in these circles. I think I think those people are like they don't have. They can't do this synthesis. All they can do is rage against Trumpism because they don't have the same sympathies. Like they don't have any of the grievances that the Trump people have. Someone like me, I mean, I share some of the grievances with like you know the populists and the right wingers have, and so like somebody who has like who shares those grievances, but at the same time sort of sees what the problem is with MAGA sort of populism run amok. I think that's going to be the person who can synthesize. But it's got to. But again, it's got to happen after Trump because like if Trump wasn't here, like DeSantis would just be. Sailing to the nomination, people would say, "Oh, this is a reasonable politician." He might not even have to go so far right. He might be able to be like more electable, and it might actually work. But you know, it's it's hard just when Trump is there, and you know, just the force that can't be moved.

Yeah, it is too bad that Elon is not a U.S. citizen because it would be fascinating if he ran.

Yeah, I think I think so too. Yeah, I don't know if he I don't know if he would, but it would be it would be interesting. Yeah, we should we should try to draft. We should try to draft that. We should try to do a tech guy, a governor in each state. We should just like seed them around the country and then see what, see what can happen.

Do you think actually like in the next 12 years Vivek has a chance of making it? Like if you had to predict what is Vivek's path, um, what would you expect?

A lot of, a lot of Vivek-specific questions. Uh, look, the idea of any individual becoming a president is a long shot, right? Um, and so the odds of me or you or Vivek or anyone else becoming president is just very, very long. I think he has a future in Republican politics though. I think he can run the OFCCP and Department of Labor. He can be a high-ranking official. I think he could run for office. I think he could do well. So yeah, I think Vivek is— I'm bullish on Vivek. President, he's going for the full thing, the whole thing very early on. But I think regardless of how that ends up, he has a good future.

I want to ask you about other esteemed right-wing thinkers. First, Bronze Age Pervert. I'm curious, because in some ways there's like some similarities in terms of, you know, secular rightism, you know, an interest in Nietzsche, roots in 2015. How do you sort of characterize the Bronze Age Pervert phenomenon?

So I have a Bronze Age Pervert take that I think I've shared with you, and that I think, you know, I think I'm gonna save for now. I'm wondering if I should, you know, I should write this up. But I will say generally, I do appreciate a good Nietzschean. I don't think we have enough of that in our society. I think everyone's trying to be an egalitarian. And even the people who think they're anti-egalitarian are really egalitarians in their own way. They just have a different tribe. He's a hilarious writer. I mean, his book is very funny. It's entertaining. Yeah. I think that the— and he's I think he sees sort of the problems with a lot of the populism too. I think he sees the problems with the pro-life stuff and with the sort of the left-wing economic stuff, or trying to explain, particularly Matt is trying to explain cultural things in terms of conspiracy of capitalists or whatever. So yeah, Bap is an entertaining enough figure.

What would you say are kind of your biggest disagreements with the, let's say, Tyler Cowens or Bryan Caplans? Is it That they are, you know, not willing to go far enough on the— are they egalitarians at heart, or like, where would you say the big disagreements?

Uh, you know, they're probably, I mean, closer to me politically than, uh, most other people, I think. Well, Bryan Caplan, I mean, this is, this is not like tied to anything else, but Bryan Caplan doesn't believe in animal rights. Uh, well, I do. I don't know if Tyler believes in animal rights or not, but I think, you know, a more humane approach to animals is probably correct. But I'm, you know, I'm sort of— this is not an issue that a lot of people talk about. Tyler's worldview is generally pro-progress. I think I've moved more towards him on foreign affairs and international issues. I probably don't go as far as he does. I think he probably thinks that he really— I think I see him as more of a supporter of American foreign policy. I think he's more hawkish on China than I am. I think I think there's a way, actually, that's a good one because I did talk to Tyler a little bit about this at Emergent Ventures and I was telling him that basically I think that after the end of the Cold War that the US had, Boris Yeltsin, Clinton, I was reading a book by Mary Surratt called Not One Inch. And I think there was a missed opportunity where we could have really had peace with the Russians. We could have really moved towards the abolition of nuclear weapons. My understanding is that they were ready to do And the US just wasn't happy with the US. Well, had the power at the time, it was going to keep pushing forward. And I think there could be understanding reached with China. I think we could have a positive influence. It's like the right and the left. We say, oh, the right influence left. We influence China and China influences— well, China probably doesn't influence us that much. We probably influence China more than they influence us. We're the cultural— yeah, we're the real cultural superpower and we're the one in their backyard while In our backyard, although we imagine you know China has all this influence in the U.S., which I just don't believe. And so yeah, I think there's on the AI stuff, I think there's like I don't know how worried to be about it, but like you know the fact that I don't know means like we should be we should be at least taking some precautions. And I think there could be sort of if we were able to sort of you know work with the Chinese here, I think we could do something. And I think like you know a lot of you know I think the Chinese just want to stay in power, and I think probably a lot of their bad. their bad instincts and their bad behavior over the last few years is based on America trying to build a coalition to check their power. So yeah, I think I'm more of maybe a liberal internationalist than Tyler is.

Lastly, how about Scott Alexander?

Scott Alexander is funny because I don't know if he calls himself a liberal or other people call himself a liberal, but I agree with everything he I think that he's more— there's an instinctual thing. I think he's comfortable with hanging out with people who are polyamorous. And I'm not a big prude, but the polyamory thing, I don't tend to like. And the trans stuff, I mean, I think he's much more comfortable with that. But I'm not a big policy person. Yeah, I mean, in some ways I'm like a traditional conservative. I think probably if you told Scott Alexander what Rufer was doing, I don't know what he'd think. He'd probably just say, I don't think that's the greatest thing in the world. I don't think he'd be so up and down against it completely, or maybe he would, I don't know. I guess our interests are probably in different places. I'm interested in sort of the day-to-day of American politics. Yeah, it's hard to say. Scott Alexander, I'm very congenial towards. I think it's easier to disagree with a politician or something. than it is somebody like Scott Alexander, because Scott Alexander is just such a unique and interesting figure, and we sort of focus on different things to a large extent. And a lot of the different ones, when you say, what are your differences with him? Most things that come to mind tend to be more just like, oh, this is a thing I've thought about a lot, but he's not thought about a lot. So it's like, you know, it's going to make sense that we differ.

It's interesting. You reviewed Jonathan Rauch's book, The Constitution of Knowledge. You talked about sort of, I guess, you know, the attack vectors within, I think you called it white male liberalism. And it's interesting because Jonathan Roach wrote a really great book called Kindly Inquisitors in like 1992. And that was the book that got me really excited about like classical liberalism. But seeing that he like is unable, it's unable to defend itself. It's almost like, what is a liberalism that can actually defend itself? I guess it's one that is more on the side of liberty than equality or equity.

But Rauch does this very annoying thing that I write in my review, is that he acknowledges that, oh, it's bad that institutions didn't have a lot of women and minorities. Okay, then those institutions— Western institutions are so great, but white men can't build great institutions. Yeah, we should change those institutions because you just told us that diversity in institutions And building them is like very important.

So like, you know, what is, what is this argument?

Oh, it's just a coincidence. White men built everything that I happen to like, but don't pay attention to that. And now we're going to include women and different kinds of people and nothing's going to change. I just don't think that's realistic.

Gearing towards closing here, you know, you mentioned that in one of your posts how liberals read more and conservatives watch more TV. At the same time, you are a big TV aficionado yourself. Uh, so I'm curious, if you could recommend, uh, one TV show to liberals, uh, what would it be? And, uh, one book to conservatives, what would it be?

A TV show, uh, to liberals— I mean, I think that all, like, liberals like these, uh, prestige TV shows, and I always see that there's much more of a sort of conservative message, uh, that, you know, that liberals I would think would be comfortable with, but then liberals often, you know, will end up liking the same shows. And that's very interesting. Michelle Goldberg Had an article in the New York Times about Succession. And people are going to watch this, you know, are going to watch this or listen to this later. Uh, we're, you know, 3, I think 3 or 4 episodes into Succession. I won't give any spoilers, but her take on Succession was like almost the exact opposite of mine. Uh, but we, you know, we both, we both really like, uh, we both really like the show. You know, I think that you, you, I think most, I think people should probably, if they want to understand conservatives, they should probably like watch Tucker and Hannity and sort of get I think like watch like a full like both of them like together just to get like the two sort of these two sort of sides of conservatism. They're not the two sides; they're not the only aspects, but they're like two sort of distinct branches of like sort of what conservative conservatism is right now. It's a generational thing. It's an online versus TV thing. I do think if you haven't watched Succession, I think I think you should because I think it's sort of a you know a test of sort of your politics and how you see it. I think everyone everyone who's really into politics ends up liking it, but it seems to me that they like. great for sort of different reasons. And then a book for conservatives, I think it depends on sort of what they're interested in. I'm a big fan of Nietzsche. I think Zoroaster is a great book, even though I'm not a big philosophy guy. I do like Zoroaster. I think Hayek's Road to Serfdom. I still think the ideas about central planning— I used to think this stuff was very basic and like why the price system is important and why central planning doesn't work. I grew up sort of reading that stuff because libertarianism was a big thing, but apparently I think kids have lost that. So you need to understand why all the things you believe in now still don't work. There hasn't been any great new conceptual breakthrough that makes tariffs a good thing or industrial policy a good thing. I think that that's probably still worth checking out for people who haven't. And then, of course, my book, Origins of Woke, will be out in September, and people should read all my articles on wokeness as preparation and then read that when that comes out.

Yeah, we'll put them in the It is interesting. If you're super pro-AI, some people think that actually the price problem might be fixed by a centralized algorithm that will be able to—

Oh, you'll finally be smart enough to do central planning. Yeah, we'll see. Not the first time that claim's been made.

Yeah, exactly. Maybe last question. Any commentary on Silicon Valley intellectual culture? A lot of people listening to this might be entrepreneurs or investors who are kind of politics curious, but, you know, it's not their main thing. And you have a little bit of a sense for what Silicon Valley has been, or tech in general, has been exposed to intellectually. Any commentary on that?

Yeah, I think that if they are interested in politics, I think this goes back to sort of what we've been talking about with ideas versus sort of processes and sort of my theories about how the world and how policy changes. I think you have to get directly. Like, don't think that like you're just gonna like have a very high-level thing, you're gonna have some great art, and that's gonna like change people's minds and that's gonna change the culture. Like, you know, maybe like in the very long run, but the, the most direct path to power is, is power. I mean, and often cult— and people think culture— people see the flow from culture to politics. They don't understand that so much of culture is also downstream of politics. These things interact together. So if you're interested in culture, do the Do the cultural thing, right? If you're interested in politics, don't go this indirect route. Go the direct route, and then the culture will also be influenced, and you know you'll you'll you'll change the world in the way you are. So I think my work on wokeness—I think why it's had a big influence—is because it's that I'm not telling something people something abstract. I'm telling people something. This is what happened, and this is exactly what you can do. But I'm spoon feeding them. I'm not leaving anything to sort of that can fall through the cracks. Because if you think someone else is going to like pick up, it's probably you see it in in in in you know building companies or whatever. Like you think there's just a great idea, and you think someone's just going to pick up the baton and do it, and then often it just doesn't happen. Like you have to do it yourself. Like no, like you you have to sort of figure out the steps of like why this thing is important, why it's relevant, exactly what it can be done, and you can influence people in that way. And that means whether you know you could be a writer, you could support a writer doing these things, or you could just go into the political activism directly and just. focus on your issue. I would, I would tell people to be more concrete here and think of it sort of more the way you would a business rather than, you know, these sort of abstract ideas about theory or culture is going to somehow change the world. It does, but like, you know, it's very— it's much, much harder to do and much, much more uncertain.

It's interesting. Maybe, maybe too many people took the Breitbart idea that, you know, culture is more important than politics.

Exactly. They took it— we took it way too far.

My guest today has been Richard Hanania. I highly recommend, uh, reading the book or pre-ordering book, um, and, uh, checking out Richard's Substack and Twitter. Richard, thanks for, for joining the podcast.

Thanks, Erik.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store.