Richard Hanania Returns | Trump, the Sexual Revolution, and Immigration

people who liked me before, who don't think my current views are crazy, they still like me now. And the people who hated me before still do, because any acknowledgment of like statistical differences between groups is what they really care about. It's not about, you know, if you actually want to discriminate against people or if you actually hate anybody or anything like that. It's just they need to be in denial of reality. People are surprised by this, but like, you know, of all the politics, like if you choose between like liberals, different kinds of liberals, like right-wing populists, Or like Republican establishment, I'm almost you know close probably closest to the Republican establishment, right? It's just the least bad option. I do like have a theory that like arbitrarily like men having arbitrarily higher status than women, you know, is is probably good for fertility. I don't know how we engineer that. I don't know how we we don't have the societal consensus to do that. If you could just like you know transfer you know two hundred thousand dollars into the account of every man every man and keep everything else the same, yeah, I think there's a good chance we'd have more marriages and more families. If you did the same for women, I don't. I don't think you would.

Richard Hanania is a writer, political scientist, and public intellectual. The last time we spoke on Upstream was 2 months ago, and in the time since, a lot has happened. One, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action. And 2, Richard was the subject of a controversial Huffington Post exposé. We cover all this in the conversation ahead and dial in exactly how he defines his views and his politics. We also discuss the sexual revolution, fertility, and his upcoming debate with Curtis Yarvin. Without further ado, here's Richard.

Richard, you're our first return guest besides Balaji, uh, back, back on the podcast. Uh, thanks so much for coming back.

I wasn't aware. Well, yeah, I'm very honored. Glad to be here.

You've recently published your book, The Origins of Woke, which we talked about a bit last time and we'll talk about this time. There's the beautiful cover. It's a great book. Highly recommend people order it right away. And recently there was a failed attempt at cancellation by a reporter, which I gather only, only increased book sales and attention your way. It was interesting because, you know, there was this meme going around, kind of the unmasking Shaggy, where the joke was basically like that you had been very public with, with sort of, uh, you know, your, your views, and that these sort of allegations— and it was basically sort of comments you made a very long time ago under a pseudonym— weren't this grand reveal. They were perhaps a bit more extreme versions of, of things perhaps you'd already been saying. But you did issue a post where you delineated between, hey, these are the things that I've changed my mind about and I no longer believe, and here are the things that said that I still do believe, uh, that people are angry at, and that's why they tried to cancel me. Why don't you unpack the delineation there of what you used to believe that you no longer believe and what you still do, do believe as it relates to these topics?

Yeah, I mean, so, you know, I, I came at sort of politics, you know, the younger days, sort of just, you know, there are some obvious truths like, you know, men and women are different, that groups differ in crime rate and, you know, scores on standardized tests. Um, and so like, I've never like, you know, I've always like taken that for granted. And I think, you know, a lot of people just sort of see that and maybe they go in an extreme direction, and maybe I was, uh, one of them. Um, and I think that like the diff— you know, and I think that like 15 years ago it was more of a, well, you know, we can just sort of, you know, it was a more extreme version of it. It was sort of exaggerating these differences. It was saying they had like deep policy outcomes that involved like, uh, uh, you know, either, you know, in some way either discriminating against people or treating them unfairly, um, or making generalizations about, you know, what they can and can't do. Um, and And you know, I reject that now, and that was like you know, you know, 12, 15 years ago, like like you said. But then you know, I'm not a I'm not a leftist either, right? I didn't become a leftist and just deny reality and say there's you know there's no racial differences, and you know men can be women and women can be men, and there's no difference between men and women anyway. You know, that that stuff I still think is crazy. And so you know, the people who liked me before, who don't think my current views are crazy. They still like me now, and the people who hated me before still do, because any acknowledgment of, like, statistical differences between groups is what they really care about. It's not about, you know, if you actually want to discriminate against people, or if you actually hate anybody or anything like that. It's just they need to be in denial of reality. And so that's sort of how this thing shook out. And, you know, the people, like I said, I mean, those who were, like, already not offended by me, I mean, they just keep kept treating me the same, and it hasn't really changed all that much.

Yeah. And say more in terms of like, where is the border between, hey, we are acknowledging that differences exist, versus, hey, these are either exaggerations, or we're treating people as a group in a way that we shouldn't? Like, what is— where is the border for you in terms of when it goes— what's the right way to think about it?

Yeah, it's, you know, so like, you know, for, you know, I think probably easier to speak in examples. So like, obviously, there's differences between men and women. Maybe you think men on average have better political views. Like, maybe, you know, I think that might be true. Like, from my perspective, maybe I agree with men slightly more. You know, and this is actually not even that radical a position. Like, on the online right now, there's been like such a radicalization that like this doesn't sound that shocking where it might have been like 10 years ago. Like, you know, a lot of people think, oh, you know, women's suffrage was bad or women should not be in leadership roles. Like, actually, it's not. It's like, I don't know about your audience, but like if you're online, if you're online and you're on like the right-wing Twittersphere, That's like not even like that radical a thing to hear anymore, right? But I reject that. I'm more moderate than like, you know, sort of where a lot of online right-wing people are these days. You can acknowledge the reality and, you know, be aware of it. And I've written articles about it. You know, one that won women's tears and win in the marketplace of ideas for people who haven't seen that essay. And so, yeah, you know, I'm aware of it, but doesn't mean that, you know, you go to the position that women shouldn't work and only should make babies and, you know, have You know, no leadership role in society. You know, same thing with same thing with race. I mean, if if the races you know do differ on standardized tests or they differ in crime rates, you know we should still fight crime and we should still you know try to you know have the you know the economy you know do well and bring everybody you know have technological progress and bring everyone's prospects up, right? Like when the leftists demand you know equality of outcomes, I think that's that's a problem and you know that that is gonna you know lead to hate and social strife and people will push back on that and like. you know, sort of believe in inequality and just hold it up as like, you know, correct or true or natural. And, you know, I'm a believer that we should avoid both those traps. We should treat people as individuals. We should acknowledge statistical differences, take them into account, you know, like, you know, when it's relevant for policy or when it's relevant for cultural analysis or whatever. And then, yeah, try to make humanity better off.

And so is it fair to say you're I mean, basically in the classical liberal tradition, particularly as it relates to different groups of people on, on a race, like you're not suggesting we treat Asian people or white people any, any differently based on the differences, um, there, um, or any other group, but perhaps you're a bit more sympathetic to, hey, maybe we should treat men and women slightly differently on certain issues given that they are so biologically different. Or how would you think about, you know, where your kleptoliberalism starts and ends?

Yeah, I'm not even against treating ethnic groups differently if there's a relevant statistic that you can show that you don't exaggerate, but you're not— or you're not saying it because you hate the people. Like, for example, police, right? The classic example is racial profiling. There are huge gaps in crime rate. And I think I've seen that, like, the gap between, you know, I think, like, actually, like, I think it might have been one year or more than one year where Asian female, like, Black females had a higher murder rate in the U.S. than Asian males, right? So if you start to acknowledge that, like, cops should profile, like, think groups of men are more dangerous than groups of women, of course, right? We all think that. If someone, if the gaps between races are that extreme, you know, you lock up every person of a certain race and you don't, you know, you know, harass them on that basis. But it's a statistical predictor, like anything, like people who wear, you know, hoodies or people who, you know, walk with their hands in their pockets or people who, you know, whatever. I mean, It's just a statistical predictor. Some of these things we control, like how we dress and how we walk. And some of these things we don't control, like our age, our race, our sex. All of them are predictors of how we look, whether we look scary or whatever. I don't know if that's statistically predictive, but maybe it is. And we acknowledge that when cops will profile on that basis in a market. So outside of police work, there's not that many examples where it's obvious you can Or you should treat people differently, right? If you know, like groups differ on average, you can you can give them whatever test you want or whatever you know whatever the benchmark is, and then hire them on the basis or hire fire promote you know once you see how productive they are. So yeah, the crime thing is is important, and that's where a lot of the like you know that's where a lot of the tensions are in our society. Liberals you know get very mad about it, and you know the police say we don't profile, and of course they profile because. They are human and they see patterns. And of course, they would be brain dead if they didn't profile at all. And so the accusations are actually correct. And so this is why it's such a source of tension. But then, like most other things in society, yeah, we can say, don't care about group differences, don't care about differences in outcome, and treat people as individuals and try to make everyone better off.

But yeah, I guess the worry here is that it becomes self-fulfilling, that if a group has higher degree of You know, police inquiries that they're more likely to have, you know, get caught for things that other groups that are maybe doing similar things but just aren't looked into as well. So there's some self-fulfilling— are you dubious of this?

I'm very— yeah, very doubtful. I mean, it's like, well, what is like this understanding of history? Like, you know, there was this— there was this group who committed no crime, then the police started suspecting them, and then their crime rate went up. Like, does it ever work like that? It's like, no. Like, these groups come and they sometimes have high crime rates, and sometimes— like, I think the Chinese were probably like— there was probably racism against Chinese Chinese living in cities, you know, in the early 20th century, but they didn't become, you know, criminals as a result. They have a very low crime rate today. Um, we suspected, you know, Muslims during the War on Terror. Uh, you know, it's like there's pretty much no terrorism, uh, today. There really wasn't much terrorism during the 2000s when we were freaking out about it. It was statistically almost, you know, nonexistent. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, maybe men are just more violent because we, we treat them that way. But, you know, That's, I mean, that's, that's the, yeah, it's sort of a, uh, it's a strange, I mean, it's a very sort of strange thing, right? And like, if you don't take it into account and you pretend like there are no differences, right, you're letting crime run rampant in these neighborhoods. Is that good for like reducing the crime rate of the group that has the crime, high crime rate? You know, probably not.

Right.

You had this post a long time ago. I'm curious how you've evolved since it, where you basically, you were talking about sort of French anti-wokeness as a possible solution. And, and you, you were sort of referencing Thomas Chatterton Williams' reflection that in France they don't—

they don't—

they're truly colorblind, I guess. They don't even think about race. They don't track race. Um, and so he's treated as a— as an individual there. Um, and thus you don't have some of the extreme sort of corrective social engineering measures there. And that relates to a conversation I remember Charles Murray and, and Coleman Hughes had on their podcast, on Coleman's podcast, where Charles Murray wrote this book Meant to sort of highlight group differences as a way to help explain that not everything is a result of prejudice. And he's saying the denial of these differences is causing us to have the improper tools in our toolkit to fight these differences or think that they can be fought. And Coleman is saying that might be right, but to acknowledge those differences is so— and you get at this in your piece, I'm curious if you change your mind on it— is so disempowering. Um, or, or so difficult for a society to deal with and has all sorts of second-order effects that we should sort of push it under the rug?

Yeah, I mean, I would prefer not to think about it. And, you know, I— and we, we don't think about most group differences, right? There are many white ethnic groups. Some have higher crime rates, some have higher incomes than others. We ignore them. Um, one of the arguments of my book is the Hispanic category was sort of created, right? Nobody cares about the difference between Italians and you know, whites, if you call everyone else white, no one cares, right? But we care a lot about Hispanic. I argue, and I think I show that this is a result of racial classification on the part of government. And so, yeah, I mean, these are sort of uncomfortable things. Nobody wants to be, you know, like, I don't care. Like, I'm an Arab and like Jews are smarter than Arabs and beat them in wars. And like, you know, I don't care, right? It's like, I think we should have like an attitude, like we should be encouraging people like Not to have their sense of self, like wrapped up with their sort of group identity. But you know, I think it's inevitable to some degree. But you know, we can turn this, we can turn the salience up, or we can turn the salience down. I think in the French case, you know, they do have these like massive crime differences. They have the religious thing with like, you know, the North African Muslim population. You know, I think they're not as bad on wokeness as we are. You know, they didn't tear down the statues. They, you know, they still can enforce, you know, crime. They don't have like this entire— they don't have this entire regime of affirmative action and disparate impact. They still have riots every now and then. We still have riots every now and then. Right. We, you know, it didn't— it didn't cure every possible thing or tension between, you know, the police and the communities where there's a lot of crime. But yeah, you know, I think that it's just a it's just a matter of degrees. I mean, it's the you know I don't think like yeah, it's like you gotta first of all you have to just care about truth, right? You just want to be like some of us are just honest and want to tell the truth, and you know, and but it's not like something like every congressman should get up and and talk about all the time. The problem is if you don't talk about it, the only people talking about group differences are like the Ibram Kendis of the world. And everyone else just sort of, you know, nervously like looks away and doesn't want to, doesn't want to answer them. And that's sort of, that's also a, that's a problem too. And this is why, you know, I think it's so important to attack wokeness, to attack, you know, identity politics. You might not need to give them 100% truth to attack them. You might attack them with 70% truth. It could be enough to beat them. I mean, there's been pushback on, on wokeness, just getting people to know it's important. Some people, you know, have different degrees of understanding of like group differences. But yeah, just saying like, these people are crazy and we could beat them. It doesn't have to be logically the most coherent thing in order to be politically effective.

Yeah.

Well, let's get on that tack for a bit. Part of your book, I see it as advocating for a strategy that conservatives should use, which is not just focusing on culture, but actually focusing on law and politics. And When we think about, you know, we— you mentioned, alluded to the fact that sort of wokeness is weaker now than it was a few years ago. I'm curious, how much of that do you think has been law versus culture? Or why don't you outline your case for how conservatives should kind of reorient their approach?

I think it is. I mean, I think it is, yeah, law and culture. I mean, they're such— they're so interactive, right? And I can look at cultural— I mean, if you want to call Elon Musk buying Twitter a cultural factor, it is a cultural— it's just one man decided to do one thing right. And I think that's been huge. The SFFA v. Harvard case, I mean, we're only a few months here from the decision. And it seems to me that, like, you know, there is like stories after story in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times about like how like universities don't know what to do. And like even corporate America has taken the hint about how the Supreme Court thinks about racial issues. And then you have that sort of like the— that's sort of the just like that's just that decision. But you also have like sort of the taking, you know, the aggressive, the more aggressive things like banning critical race theory in schools in these red states. You know, there's, you know, the stuff on, you know, gender identity and not teaching it to kids and There's the you know there's the school choice just taking power away from public schools completely. You know, ten states have adopted some form of universal school choice program, and like you know that will probably I mean that makes I think that makes like you know teachers unions and these other nefarious forces sort of they have to be a little bit careful because now like they're they're seriously threatened. I mean they they really hate this voucher stuff because they dislike the idea of you know taking the taxpayer money and putting it in the hands of parents. And so, yeah, it's, you know, 2020 was a peak. You know, it was, you know, it's easier to say that actually in retrospect. And when I was going through the summer of— we were all going through summer of 2020. I was wondering, I was really scared. Like, I was— the only time in my life I've been, like, scared for the future of the country. I'm like, is this going to be like a descent into, like, the Middle Ages? I mean, it was nuts. It was like every corporation was, like, speaking like zombies. You know, there were obviously riots in the streets. I'm like, have people just gone insane? And then, you know, no, it sort of it calmed down. You know, it's probably the COVID you know, lockdowns and all that drove people crazy. And, you know, we went back to sort of like arguing about the same things like the last 60 years: affirmative action, disparate impact, crime, disproportionate rate. But like the pendulum swing, and like you know, the pendulum has always been sort of swinging on these things. And so yeah, I think that I think that the legal changes have been huge. And the cultural changes, I mean, like, yeah, I think they're following. I think they're being felt at the institutional level. I think when a DEI officer gets laid off in response to some law idea or lawsuit or idea that they might not be as necessary, the effect is not felt the next day. It's sort of a hidden effect, right? It's like that person is not in the corporation telling them to do all these crazy things. And so it's like you're tracing cause and effect, but you have to do it in an indirect way because the institutions are changing and shifting all the time and new people are coming and going and you sort of have to be like, you know, you have to be paying very, very close attention to even have like a theory of what's going on. So yeah, overall, I mean, I think that like, you know, I started writing this book a while ago. I mean, it was just released at the end of 2023. It was like complete, I think like 6 or 7 months ago. And obviously I was writing it for much longer than that. So it was like we were pretty close to 2020. When I started writing this book, and yeah, I mean, I think the I think the time since has really I think you know more confident in in my arguments than less so. It's only been a year. You know, I looked up the other day how when did Elon Musk buy Twitter because it feels like five years ago. I mean, it feels like so much has changed. It was literally literally a year ago, almost a year ago, and the SFBV Harvard decision was only two months ago. And if you said you know would it change this much more or less, I would have said not even this much. I would have said oh maybe this is something that's going to be years down the line. We'll see a little bit, but I see. major changes of these, just like these 2 small things. And so, yeah, I'm optimistic on this issue.

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I think another thing that can't be understated perhaps is sort of the just the post-Trump Trump not not sort of. Giving credibility to his enemies to overreach and overreach in the name of stopping him. There was this argument right before the election that went along the lines of, if you want what Trump wants, paradoxically, you want Biden to win because Trump helps his enemies and hurts his friends. Basically, he can't help himself. And one, I'm curious if you're sympathetic to that argument. And two, Are you also sympathetic to it in 2024? Like, if Trump wins, do we go back to this sort of crazy, you know, world that was? Yeah.

You know, I just I just had I just had you just you talking right now. I just had a thought that I hadn't thought before. I think it was what happened. So Trump, I think there's what I previously thought was there was a there's a fatigue. It's just like Trump came, but then he becomes part of like he says racist and sexist things, and he's like this you know guy. But like whatever he had, you know, one term. We've gone through another presidential term. He's going to have another term. It's like, you know, you can only get outraged at Trump so many times, right? But the other thing, I think January 6th might have actually been good for the anti-wokeness cause because the narrative before was that Trump is racist and sexist. Those are the main things about him. So the left responded by being, you know, anti-racist and anti-sexist. Now, like, his racism and sexism is almost in the background. He's calling for Mark Milley to be executed. He's saying, I'm going to purge the government and take control. So he's like, his like just open contempt for like all American institutions and norms. Like the racism is not even like salient. Like it's not one of the things even people think about Trump now. And now, so I guess the reaction has been like liberals become like pro-law enforcement or something, right? Because like that's who Trump hates. So they like the criminal justice system and they like the military and they like law enforcement. instead of focusing their energy on like being anti-racist or anti-sexist. Yeah, I mean, I think I just— I mean, I just had this thought, but it makes perfect sense. It's like the salience of what— why Trump is scary to liberals has changed since January 6th from racism and sexism to anti-democratic. And I think that's, that's a big difference.

If Trump wins in 2024, do you think we go back to this crazy era, or what do you think?

No, I mean, for those 2 reasons, I just think the fatigue of Trump and then plus the— it'll still be there. It'll still be— the story will always be what's he like, is he firing, you know, the director of CIA or trying to get him to do his bidding or, or whatever? Yeah, I mean, there is a thermostatic public opinion where, like— and what's scary for the Republicans is that this hasn't happened, at least in elections, like, where public opinion goes the opposite of whoever the president is. And so you would think conservatives would be doing well in, like, these midterm and off-year elections, and they're not doing particularly well. But the culture at the same time does seem to be You know, like we talked about moving in the right direction. So if Trump wins, yeah, I don't think so. I don't think it stops. You know, I don't think it stops the train because you know what the the laws because I think that where the conservative movement is now, thanks to you know my book and other what other people have been saying, is that it's going to do the right thing on the policy. Even Trump, who you know who's not paying much attention, is going to put in people who are conservative and they're ideological and they're going to do good things on civil rights law. Education and so forth. And like the liberals, I think, will be so distracted with democracy and making sure like Trump doesn't like become friends with Putin and like sell out Ukraine. That's going to be like the major like focus, like what's he going to do about Ukraine? And you know, there's no way he's going to be able to— I think my opinion is no, you know, it's different, off topic, but there's no way he's going to be able to like pull out of Ukraine. He's just going to be— that's all the pressure from both sides of the aisle are going to be towards him taking a tough line and not being seen as soft on Putin and so forth. And so, yeah, I mean, the anti-wokeness movement can sort of, yeah, maybe move under the radar while the people in the Trump administration do the good thing and the culture just keeps shifting in the right direction. That's sort of the hopeful sort of forecast.

What do you make of sort of the establishment kind of anti-establishment? It seems that Vivek, DeSantis have their own versions of kind of like dismantle the administrative state or sort of like anti-institutions, or that these institutions need, you know, have failed us, need to be better. And at the same time, you've people— it's almost like Sam Harris and Ezra Klein are now like bedfellows, where you have like Sam Harris defending the institutions and critiquing the people who are critiquing them. You know, you've talked about like populism makes us dumber. You have kind of nuanced thoughts about it. Where do you kind of stand on this, on this like high-level conversation?

I, you know, I think there's like the idea about like this deep state. A lot of it is just like, I don't believe, like a lot of it is just the Republican Party has become populist, but populist not meaning like what people think about like economically, like wanting redistribution or something like that. It's populist in the sense that like the masses just love Trump and like his personal grievance and his personal soap opera is what they're invested in. Right? So a lot of this, like this mental, you know, the FBI and stuff, it's just purely because because Trump, because Trump is in legal jeopardy. You can't win with these people because it's like if they don't arrest Democrats, they're not arresting Democrats. If they do, they're just you know trying to show that you know they're they're fair or whatever. And so like you know a lot of this anti-law enforcement stuff is just pure Trump cult of personality. And I think that's like what DeSantis and Vivek are playing to. And then, like, you know, there's a deeper sort of conservative critique. There's a more substantive one, the critique towards the administrative state. And this was— there was a Trump executive order near the end where he was going to make it easier to fire bureaucrats. Right. So it's like, it's like an open question. Like, the president appoints like a few thousand people and then everyone else is basically not able to be fired. But the president can change that through executive order. And Trump tried to do that near the end, and then Biden reversed it. And so there is like a sense that like there is like a serious thing here where like conservatives understand that most bureaucrats are liberal, and you can basically, if you have more direct political control, like you know the way judges work, judges are just appointed by Republicans or Democrats whoever wins the elections. But that so therefore conservatives have representation in the way that they really don't in the federal bureaucracy where most employees are just permanent. And then you could do all kinds of things, presumably on COVID, down the line of whatever conservative priorities are. And so that's like— so yeah, there's this cult of personality thing with just Trump. It's going to be interesting because he could win. I mean, he's— I don't think— I think he's the most likely— he's by far the most likely Republican nominee, has a good chance of winning. I think the odds of us getting a Republican president who is not Trump in 2025 is very low because I think Trump's going to be the nominee. And so, like, yeah, there's going to be both aspects of this. There's going to be him do it like if he's in office doing his personal, you know, his personal grievances and vendettas. And then also, like, to a lesser extent, you know, the conservative movement getting some of its priorities by taking more control over the bureaucracy. And, you know, who knows how it'll turn out. But, you know, once Trump is off the scene, And that might not be for a while. I think he could run for president for 5 more times and always be the nominee. But when he is off the scene, maybe it might take 10 or 20 years, these ideas about taking more control of the federal bureaucracy on the right will still be there. And I think, yeah, we're going to see interesting political changes.

Well, it's kind of the flip side or the corollary to the thesis in your book, which is You know, civil rights laws might superficially ban discrimination but are reinterpreted by judges to require it. And so if judges can just decree that the law means the exact opposite of what it says, uh, it can't only be fixed by changing the laws, right? You have to change the people who are interpreting the laws as well.

Unquestionably correct. Yeah, when people ask me what's the impact of SFFA v. Harvard, I say it depends on who's going to win in 2024 and which, uh, you know, who controls the Senate, because it's like Yeah, liberals are going to interpret it in a certain way and conservatives are going to interpret it a certain way. Do you keep going or do you defer to the universities when they say, oh, we really didn't discriminate, or what? It's like sort of you lob an artillery shell at the enemy and they scatter. And if you don't have any more artillery to send over, you don't have another strike, they'll regroup and basically be able to do the same thing that they were doing before. If you hit them and they scatter and then you start massacring them, you have other weapons. And that's, you know, then you're going to have a long-term impact. You're eventually going to beat them. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, all these things are steps. And what happens— I mean, like, you know, it's sort of, you know, the Supreme Court is under their control. Like, you know, there's no way for them to get rid of conservative Supreme Court justices. So at least the conservatives have that no matter, you know, they could not have another person to appoint even in the next presidency. But, you know, the lower courts and all the bureaucrats and everything else, is going to depend on elections. And then, of course, the Supreme Court and who decides to retire when and what strategies they hold, that's all going to depend on who the president is. And so, yeah, this isn't like a one decision or one policy. I mean, it's a continuous dialectic and process. Yeah.

Let's go deeper on the sort of critique that David Sacks makes. I've heard Marc Andreessen make this in podcasts too, where there's kind of this this sort of like, um, this group of people, it represents a minority of the country, but they run sort of the key institutions. It's sort of the cathedral or oligarchy idea, and they sort of determine a set of values or set of policies, um, on behalf of the country, um, even, even though it's a minority, minority position is not supported by the rest of the country. Um, and part of that is values-based, but also part of it is they're just they've done a really bad job at their jobs, um, and that this is happening in the US but also perhaps happening in Israel, perhaps happening in other, other countries. Um, and, and, you know, Sacks tend to use words like our elites are bad, our elite institutions are broken. This is kind of a tech right position more broadly. Do you sympathize with, with that critique? Do you think it's, it's incorrect? What do you make sense of it?

I mean, compared to what, right? I say like a basketball player is good or Bad. I mean, am I talking about a professional player or a high school player? You know, I generally expect government to be bad. Are we bad in like global or historical terms? Maybe not. You know, I don't think so. It's hard for me to see that case. Yeah, I think for certain areas, yeah, like civil rights, COVID, I think public health is in really, really bad shape. But it seems like Every other country was also in bad shape too. I mean, they all—they all—you know, some of them were worse than us, had like mask mandates for much longer, and you know, were very—not many did like human challenge trials. I think the UK might have done a few, done a few—you know—near the near the middle or the end of the pandemic. And so yeah, they have problems. And like the government is so vast, like you know law enforcement. I think you know the conservatives hate the FBI. I think it does a good job, but like. Like, Trump was innocent in Russiagate. He wasn't prosecuted. He's guilty in this other stuff. He is being prosecuted. Right. I do think law enforcement works pretty well in this country, even down to the level of local police. Like, you know, you've been— people have been in third world countries where they take bribes and stuff. I mean, I think we have relatively low levels of that kind of corruption given the constraints of like, you know, what cops can and can't do in this country, which, which, you know, there are a lot of constraints. And then public health is pretty bad, civil rights, even what they're doing is sort of illegitimate, like the Federal Reserve and monetary. I don't have any expertise to judge whether they're doing good or bad things. So yeah, it really does depend on the area.

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What's your framework for where your sort of classical liberalism starts and ends? Or, you know, where in certain cases do you overlap with that bundle of beliefs and your positions? And where do you, uh, differ from that bundle of positions?

Yeah, I think I'm going to write an essay on this. Um, uh, yeah, you know, I believe in, you know, I believe in markets, I believe in democracy, I believe in, you know, kind of utilitarianism, but not Total utilitarianism, right? There is like a sense of like being you know being smart is better than being dumb. Like you know higher culture is better than lower culture. Like beauty is more important than ugliness. There is you know there is that. You know where does you know where does it begin and where does it end? Yeah, I mean it really depends. Like I do like value. Like I mean I do have like values that are not simply utilitarian. Like I do value individual liberty. I think like all else equal. You want to be a free person more than a person who's, you know, and some people have a different view. Some people actually like, they like the idea of like a society where we all take care of each other and we're dependent on each other. And that's like, you know, I'm not against that if that's like the best arrangement necessarily, but it's not something that I think is good for its own sake. Same thing with something like, you know, equality. I mean, should we say Nietzschean? I mean, it's like, you know, good things are better than bad things. Is that Nietzsche or is there somebody else? I mean, does that just come under utilitarianism? I don't know. It feels like a little bit different, but you know, I'm not. I don't go in this direction where it's like all artistic and aesthetic pleasure, and we have like a you know ancient Sparta, but it's cool. It's cool. We're all suffering, and we're all slaves because like you know we built something cool, like beautiful. Like you know, I don't go that far.

I think the classic critique of classical liberalism, or even sort of this like you know in our last episode we talked about how you're just more of a normal you know right winger, more like the Jeb Bush, or there were a couple other names you mentioned, is that. That they are too squishy perhaps, or that they don't have enough, um, sort of like substance to defend themselves against people who weaponize their own values of tolerance and freedom, uh, against them and aren't willing to— like that there is a straight line between sort of liberalism and sort of extreme progressivism, that, that like Jonathan Rauch can't stand up to the, the, the sort of the far left because he's not willing to cross some of the sacred sort of principles of liberalism, which include like equality, you know, the parts around equality. How do you make sense of that?

Yeah, I mean, part of it is like an attitude, you know, it's an attitude thing. Like, you know, Republican establishment is, you know, mostly against affirmative action and these kind of things. But like, if you ask them why, you know, there's no— they're not hiring any women to be their leaders, they'll say, oh my goodness, we have to do so much better. And, you know, we're so sorry. And You know, this and that. And it's like, you know, the correct response is like, "F you." Like, I don't. You know, I don't care. It's like it's like you're you're you're you know you're basically lying, and you're you know you know I don't believe in like Trumpian like just you know call everyone a deep state you know scumbag who should be executed. But like no, there has to be a more substantive response than just like you know you're correct, and you know it's just sort of accidentally we ended up in this place where we didn't have as much diversity as you. Sorry, we'll do. We'll do better next time. You know, there's more. There's substantive things. I mean, like you know, they're you know they're they're sort of in hock with the Christian right, which I'm you know which I'm not a fan of. They're actually you know traditionalists as far as like a lot of these social issues, which you know which I'm not. People are surprised by this, but like you know of all the politics, like if you choose between like liberals, different kinds of liberals, like right-wing populists, or like Republican establishment, I'm almost you know close probably closest to the Republican establishment, right? It's just.

Yeah. And maybe if there was like an edit to the classical liberalism where you took the equality part out, you're almost like an inequality-based, you know, sort of classical liberal in terms of you believe in freedom, but you're not a libertarian in the sense that you're, you know, you think using the government, whether it relates to crime or military or other things, helps defend these freedoms that we have. And maybe that's where Republican establishment has ended up.

Yeah, yeah, they have in a way. I mean, I don't think the libertarian position, even though that people confuse this because a lot of libertarians are sort of soft on crime, I don't think the libertarian position— they believe in arresting people for murder and robbery and so forth. And this is just a technical issue of how much power the police have or what tools exactly they use. I mean, I do think that I do agree with libertarians. I'm against prosecuting victimless crimes. I saw this thing, I don't know if you see this on Twitter, where this one female conservative journalist was in New York City and prostitutes are walking the streets and they're prostitutes, they're foreign, I think they're Asian, and they're trying to pull men in and it's like the city is going, businesses and locals complain, why do they care? It seems to be pretty, I don't know. Like, I had prostitutes working on my neighborhood, would I care? Probably, probably not all that much. I mean, you know, you know, if they were doing it quietly and not bothering anyone else. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, the libertarians do like show like, you know, they do like— their reporting on this stuff is sometimes very good. Like, they show these like police doing these like SWAT team raids on like these massage parlors with happy endings, and you're like, why, why are they doing— why are the cops like doing this? And it just, it makes Makes no sense. It just seems crazy, and you know, going against people for like you know gambling and like poker games, and just just like these weird stuff. And so yeah, I yeah, you know, I do think that the sort of the Republicanist, and this is like I'm just talking general the conservative movement, everything from like the Christian right to like Trump to like you know the GOP establishment. It is sort of it is a weird sort of combination of like I said this on Twitter the other day, like Christianity and. and paganism. It's like, because I was pointing to this poll where like they asked him like, which one of these guys is like a true, like a, like a person of faith? And like they were more likely to say Trump was a person of faith than anyone else in the, you know, and he's like, Trump is, you know, than Pence or like, you know, any of these people. And it just seems like, you know, the Trump cult is really, I mean, he's not Christian in like any sense, right? Like even the way he defends abortion is funny. I mean, or he attacks abortion is funny. Like, He's like he says he's pro-life. I remember during the 2016 campaign, he would be like, "Oh, you know, I knew this woman who was gonna get an abortion, and then her son was born, and now he's a superstar. He's just great." And like usually the Christian conservatives are like, "There's some you know you want to abort this baby with a handicap." And like but to Trump, it's like the fact that like somebody could turn out great and like not be aborted is like the way he defends it, right? I mean, it's just like a very like non-Christian thing the way he even. Caters to them, and you know, it's like it's sort of this, and there is sort of like this. You know, the American right-wingers are more likely to believe in you know the death penalty. You know, obviously not not being fans of welfare, being tough on crime. I mean, there are these things that are you know really just sort of pagan or social Darwin, but like mixed in with Christianity. I mean, it's a you know I'm not sure like how to think about it, but I think Trump really does represent it. I think it's like something that's very interesting, and I think. Underexplored. Yeah, like Nietzschean Christian nationalism, right?

Yeah, fascinating. You wrote recently about sort of the, the Bari Weiss, uh, sort of debate that she hosted with, uh, with a few sort of women, uh, thinkers on sort of has the sexual revolution been good, um, for, for women, you know, Louise Perry, Sarah Haider, um, Anna Kay from Red Scare and a few others. And is it fair to say your take was that Maybe in some ways it hasn't been good, but also we should continue to just give people the freedom to do with— to make their own decisions. Um, all right, where did you net out on this?

You know, I— is it— yeah, you know, it's— I, I, you know, I think Sarah Haider, you know, was really impressive. Uh, you know, she really, you know, like one of them, you know, Louise Perry said, you know, today women like, or, you know, they feel like, you know, they're coerced into sex, you know, this hookup culture. And she's like, and Heider's like, you know, like marital rape wasn't illegal in like most American states until like the 1970s, right? I mean, it's like, you know, coerced sex, is that— did that just start with the sexual— coerced sex, did that just start with the sexual revolution? Of course not. You know, it's hard to say. It's like from a utilitarian perspective, right? It's like anything that reduces the number of healthy babies being born is like by necessity bad, right? And I'm almost like, I'm almost like, I'm good with that. Like, I can bite that bullet, that utilitarian bullet. At the same time, there are societies where they have the worst of all worlds in that they're like social conservative, but they don't have kids either. And I'm thinking of East Asia. You know, I'm thinking of like Southern Catholic parts of Europe. And so, like, yeah, I don't think like not having the sexual revolution necessarily gets you more families and babies. Maybe it does. Maybe it just makes you like a sterile, you know, people who are just like, you know, I can't have babies out of wedlock, but I can't do anything. And if I don't get married and I die alone, that's, that's fine too. Um, and so, yeah, overall, you know, I do think that, you know, freedom— so, you know, freedom is good from that perspective. Um, I think that a lot of our solutions are going to be To fertility and the human enhancement that's going to come from things like embryo selection, genetic engineering. I think more freedom in the reproductive space is the way you get there. I think it's like— sorry, you can't imagine a socially conservative, almost theocratic regime going straight to genetic engineering and embryo selection, right? IVF, all these things. I mean, it's hard to imagine. It's sort of a necessary step. And so, yeah, I think overall I come down on sexual revolution has not failed. It's got its problems, but I think it's inevitable and necessary.

Do you think it's inevitable that sort of dynamics that Louise Perry talks about in terms of casual sex hurting women relative to men and that it makes men less likely to commit and thus women less likely to have children? painting a broad brush, but do you think those are, those are accurate and just inevitable?

I do think that it is. Um, it's true that casual sex is bad for women, and it's true that like a lot of the sexual marketplace is like predatory, right? It's like aggressive and like, you know, uh, you know, smooth, charismatic, or smart, um, assertive men are gonna like often like manipulate women or take advantage of them. You know, life is like this. I mean, you know, and you know, free markets. I mean, that's going to happen too, and like business and you know other places too. And so yeah, I mean there is a there is a truth. There is truth to that, and the truth that like women may be unhappy. You know, I don't think casual sex is good for women. I think there's evolutionary reasons to doubt that's the case, and I think there's you know data on like you know people going out and having. A lot of sex and women, you know, not being mentally healthy necessarily when they do that. And I think there's a lot of evidence of that. But, you know, it's like, what does it mean to like restrict that, right? I think there's gonna— it's like, it's like with the social media, it comes and it causes all kinds of problems. It comes with like addictions, right? But like people do adjust, people see that like, okay, you know, this thing that like didn't— like, it's like a new drug comes on the market, like, oh, we put cocaine into like, you know, Coca-Cola. And we think, okay, maybe cocaine is bad, maybe it needs to be restricted. And then like, you know, we have less cocaine now, it's not like as freely available and people just, you know, there's a, you know, there's not a— the laws change and sort of the societal attitudes change. I think we're going to, you know, I think we're seeing something like that with social media. We're seeing something like that with porn. Like a lot of states have effectively, I think, banned Pornhub or something. I mean, there has been like some— like they had some ID verification requirements and the porn providers weren't able to comply with it, or at least some of them weren't. And so, yeah, you know, I do think that like this, you know, men, women, sex, I mean, I think it does take some adjusting. And I think we're doing it. We're probably in a— it might adjust in cycles. Like, it might be like, you know, like we forget like what solutions we had and like we go back to being crazy. But I don't think it permanently just gets worse and gets crazier.

Right.

Because at least there's either things get better, we adjust, or there's a cycle Or at least for a time, things get better until people sort of forget what they learned.

The better question is more like: Should there be a cultural shading or a cultural guidance or a cultural norm? I'm not against that. And I think one bigger unless like I think people should be able to make decisions that determine their own happiness. I'm less interested in like you know paternalism there, but I am more interested in when it comes to fertility and we and we note the fertility decline because that that does. sort of affect things beyond one's own, one's own happiness. If you were in charge of trying to increase, uh, fertility based on your sort of understanding of the literature or, or just what's out there, what do you think are interventions that, that could be, that, that could make sense or, or could move the needle? Or what do you think there?

Yeah, I don't, I mean, I don't like, there are broad lessons we can learn. Like, you know, there seems to be like You know, it seems like when people sort of are exposed to modernity, it seems like fertility goes down. It seems to be negatively correlated with wealth. I mean, I think you know if you know I I don't know. I don't think there are easy levers to pull. I do think this is a this is a mostly cultural issue. I think that like you know and I think we just shouldn't just worry about fertility. I think we should worry about you know quality of the population. We don't want Permanently get dumber. And on that account, I mean, I do think that just like highly educated smart people talking about fertility and that it's a good thing and modeling the behavior, I think is good. I mean, I'm for the technological solutions like extending women's— pushing back menopause. There's been some articles on scientists and startups working on this. You know, things like, you know, I'm a big fan of like, you know, like surrogacy. I mean, there's just, there's a market case of like, you know, high women who, who's, who like, you know, make a lot of money, like contribute a lot economically, their time being valuable, and to like sell, you know, to basically be able to have their own children, but use women who maybe are not, you know, don't have as many skills to contribute economically or not, you know, contribute that much to society in the economic realm. I think it just makes Makes perfect sense. I would like encourage that. People are afraid of commodification, but that's like that's stupid. People say that about you know like every every human advancement, and so yeah, I don't really have. I don't have. I don't have policy solutions. I don't believe like the things people talk about, like oh make daycare a little more affordable. Oh have this tax credit or that. Like no, like that's not gonna. I mean you know maybe if you make it big enough, like you know a million dollars a year, you know or something like that. I do think there could be like. I do have a theory that arbitrarily, men having arbitrarily higher status than women is probably good for fertility. I don't know how we engineer that. I don't know how we— we don't have the societal consensus to do that. We don't know how to do that without wrecking the economy. And if you're trying to socially engineer that men arbitrarily have higher status, that's going to create a backlash and they won't get status that way. It's sort of just has to naturally, you know, happen. I just think we should model the right behavior and look for technological solutions. That's just not a confident answer in what we can do.

And you're saying men having higher status than women because then women will respect them and want to have kids with them, basically?

Yeah. I mean, just like the relationships will form. I mean, all the, and, you know, nature will take its, nature will take its course. There was a, there was a, I think a paper a while ago, like, you know, so South Dakota had this like boom. This oil boom, like you know, ten fifteen years ago, and marriage didn't go up. But like the fertility rate went up. And what happens when you have this oil boom? It's like these there's these high-paying jobs that can go to uneducated men. Like they can go make six figures, like doing this really hard labor that women really can't do. And it was like a shock that like increased like male status in in that area and just in South Dakota. And the and the fertility marriage I I think my recollection. Marriage didn't go up, but fertility went up. Just like the people who were married had kids and maybe there were kids out of wedlock. And I see that as evidence, just like that arbitrary shock. If you could just transfer $200,000 into the account of every man and keep everything else the same, yeah, I think there's a good chance we'd have more marriages and more families. If you did the same for women, I don't think you would. And so, yeah, I mean, there's something to just consider and think about.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, Elon's got 10 kids, but if AOC had 10 kids and Taylor Swift had 10 kids, and I don't know, you get enough representative sample of people who people really admire, perhaps that would move the needle.

Yeah, I mean, it seems like, I mean, like we talk about like society solving its own problems. I did look at the mom influencer. Like I did read this article on this recently in Vanity Fair or Harper's or one of these fancy magazines where they were complaining about it. And I looked in some of these accounts and they have, you know, ridiculous 6 or 7-figure follower count of these, like, you know, quote unquote tradwives. I don't think they call themselves tradwives. That's just like an internet thing, but they're just basically mom influencers. And yeah, I don't know, like maybe that'll be the thing and, you know, that'll, that'll, that'll shift us in the right direction.

Yeah. I want to segue into immigration. You wrote a blog post talking about diversity is our strength. As it relates to that, you had this great debate or discussion with Amy Wax a couple of years ago. where, where she was worried that immigrants won't assimilate. And you were saying, hey, perhaps they assimilate in some weird— you know, they're less woke than Americans. If you, if you care about that, maybe they assimilate even better to kind of the traditional American values that Amy holds dear. Yeah. I'm curious, when you trace a little bit your, your evolution on immigration and where you overlap or differ from someone like, you know, Bryan Caplan, for example, who's, you know, extreme open borders.

Yeah. Did you see this article that I just tweeted? But it's been out for a little while by Bronze Age Pervert called the the populist movement never happened. It's interesting, you know, Bapp is an interesting thinker. And, you know, this article is like, you know, it does— you know, I just was wondering if you were thinking about that because there was so much that I agreed with in the article, but it had sort of the standard almost Amy Wax view of immigration. Yeah, I mean, I used to, you know, I used to think that, like, first of all, I, you know, I think that, like, Sort of ethnic tension is like sort of natural in society. I don't necessarily think that anymore. You know, I came to see sort of the divisions between like all the different kinds of whites in this country and like Hispanics is very, very artificial and very, very dependent on government classification. And, you know, with migration, we're basically talking about Hispanics. I mean, like, you know, Italians and like to Guatemalan, that's, you know, that spectrum is not to me like so important, right? Like, like Not like— it's not like South Africa, right, where you have these Northern Europeans and these, you know, these Sub-Saharan Africans, right? That's not the immigration we're talking about. We're talking about a very mixed country taking in more mixed people, right, with like different, you know, different percentages of various ancestries. And so there's that. And then there's the idea that like, you know, they vote for the left, which is the other anti-immigration case. I mean, first of all, the pro-immigration case is just, you know, utilitarianism, pure economics. More people is good. More people getting out of poverty is good. More workers is good. You know, it's a very— it's a simple argument. So you have to— I think— I don't think you need, like, somebody who believes in, you know, free markets. I don't think you need to, like, sell the pluses. I think they're clear. Okay. So then you have this idea that, like, you know, you'll get societal tension because groups are different. I just— really, this was like a big source of contention with Amy Wax because Amy Wax is a conservative, and like all conservatives, they spend 95% of their focus on how much they hate white liberals born in America. There are very few— they complain very little about immigrants or the things that they do. And so it's like, you want this cultural unity where you hate half of— okay, maybe they don't hate their fellow half of Americans, but you're driven crazy by half of your fellow Americans. It's like, Are they going to be more culturally distant from you than like drag queen, you know, story hour or whatever? Like whatever's, you know, angering you about liberals the most? Probably not, right? And so, you know, it's so, you know, I don't think that that makes sense. You know, there's the idea, you know, that, yeah, so the attention idea doesn't make sense. The idea that they'll vote for the left, I just don't think it's like, yes, like by a little bit. But like you look at the polls now and Trump is like 40, 45%. 35% with Hispanics, you're going to project for the next 60 years or 50, 40 years or whatever that they're always going to be majority Democrat? No, these things shift pretty fast. So it's maybe a consideration and maybe you expect it's going to be like— maybe that's the best expected value for whatever they're voting now is what they're going to vote in the future. But it's really endogenous. I mean, how you treat immigration and how you approach the issue is obviously going to have an impact on that and everything else. And, you know, you want conservatives to do other things smartly that will win over whites, and hopefully that will win over other groups too. And so, yeah, I mean, you take all this and, you know, you end up in a place where, like, the arguments for immigration are strong, the arguments against are sort of lacking. And then, yeah, I mean, I'm pretty pro. I think America has, you know, the current immigration system. I think we can handle more people. I don't see any evidence that we're, you know, beyond, beyond whatever the ideal point of, uh, you know, beyond whatever the ideal numbers are, that we're anywhere past that curve.

You know, Balaji would say something like we should treat immigration the way a country, a company would treat immigration, which is let in people who make a positive difference or, you know, uplevel the talent base and not let in people who wouldn't fit the bar of your, of your company in the same way. Like, do you think a country should operate in the same way?

It's the analogy doesn't I mean, I don't know that, you know, it's like the people have this analogy that, you know, you put a fence on your country because, you know, you put a fence, uh, you know, you would put a fence on your home. And it's like, no, it's not the good analogy. Like, I can't— like, I don't put a TV up in, like, the, you know, the Rio Grande Valley and my couch and sit there. I mean, it's like, it's not the same thing. And, like, yeah, it's just a— it's just a weird— it's a facile ideology. Like, you could think of it as, like, a corporation. You could think of the country as a house, but it's And it's not either of those things. I don't think those like sort of metaphors really help.

Are you sympathetic with the idea that countries should have the right— should be thinking about their sort of demographics? Like, hey, if we're French and we're getting sort of— we have too big of a Muslim influence in our country, we should, you know, be able to— or Israel, or I don't know, name your country that is sensitive to maintaining a majority of sort of like natural French or whatever that means. Do you think that those countries are acting against their own interests? Or— and I'm curious how we should think about in the US.

I think there is a— I think there is an aesthetic component of like, I'd like knowing that something like Japan exists and something like France exists. And it's hard to balance against the economic and utility. I don't know how you input it. How do you balance these things? I mean, I don't know if anyone has a good answer to these things. In the American context though, I mean, when you're already, which I focus on mostly, when you're already sort of this very mixed country and your thing is being a global empire, there and being like the source of innovation and dynamism, right? And it's like, it makes less sense to me in that context, right? Because there's not much of a common culture. And to the extent that there is, it is like a freedom, classical liberalism, like dynamism, move towards the future, which like restricting immigration and trying to preserve the demographics is like not— that's not consistent with that. You're sort of acting against your you're sort of against your creator, your national identity. And I think I would say the same for like these, you know, nations like, you know, Canada, for example, you know, maybe the UK to a certain extent. I mean, like, you know, it's historically an empire. I mean, that's what it— that's why it's the United Kingdom. It's not just England. And so, yeah, I mean, maybe like a world, you know, like maybe a, you know, world where— yeah, I don't know. Like, and I do think that like these countries, like If there is a world where the UK and the US, now that I think about it, and Canada, they open up and France and Japan just close down, it's not going to be good for France and Japan in the long run. They're going to be stagnant. They're going to be poorer countries. We're seeing this to a certain extent. I mean, we're seeing— we are seeing this. And then are they poorer and happier? Are they poor and happier? I mean, I don't know. I sort of think maybe nations is too crude Like preserving cultures is fine, but a nation is probably too crude of a of a way to do that. Right? The scale is too large. Right? Freedom of association. You have an Amish culture in this country. We do have a Hindu culture and a Muslim culture and a Jewish culture. You know, a Japanese culture of some kind will will survive in Japan, and I would let it go like for like I would like allow like you know localities even. You know, we used to have like restrictive covenants, which of course are today you'll see this bad. Because you know they kept out people of a certain race. But like you know Jimmy Carter's latest Jimmy Carter, you know the Jimmy Carter when he was running for president said he wouldn't like interfere with attempts to like change the ethnic profile of a neighborhood. Like yeah, I'm for freedom. I mean people can do that if entire nations you know want to do that. Maybe I'm sort of skeptical that's like it's like a consensual thing with the entire nation. Usually it's just like one political movement or whatever. Yeah, I mean I do think we should be you know we should be thinking about sort of you know, more outside of the box of like, these are just nations and they're just going to stay the way they are forever. And then we're all going to just be happy being different. I don't think that's like good for dynamism or progress or growth. And I don't think it's, you know, the way humanity moves forward.

I'm curious, do you think countries should not care about their kind of Gini coefficient or sort of the inequality within countries? You know, Erik Weinstein or others would make the argument that when it gets gets, gets too big, then you have, you know, higher chance of, of violence or unrest. Is that a specious argument? Or what do you think is sort of the— like, should be a country's perspective to its own sort of wealth inequality? And, and if you defend some level of inequality, what's the, what's the best defense that would convince— that could convince someone who really cares about it?

Which I think really, it is like racial classification. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like a thing that if you think about a Like, does the average person have any way of knowing? Okay, so like, I've seen people say stuff like a CEO used to make, I don't know, some made-up number, 40 times more than an employee. Now he makes 300. Does a person in any way feel the difference between a 40x or 300? I can't imagine. Like, does he go into his house and says, okay, his TV is only this big, and like, you know, he's only eating this food, this fancy but not too fancy? It's just, you know, not really plausible, especially since most people are not associating much with people of other social classes, especially today. I mean, they're just getting ideas of the rich and whether they're justified or not justified. I mean, it's just a— they're getting it off TV or the newspaper or whatever, right? So it does strike me as a silly sort of a silly argument. And of course, there's people who claim to have data for this. One of them is Peter Turchin. I've had tweet threads and short parts of Substack posts, never done like a full takedown, But yeah, I'm not a fan of Church, and I think this is— I think he's pretty much a charlatan. I don't use that word often, but I mean, I think his data and his use of data is just terrible. And so yeah, it's one of those things I would prefer not to think about, and I prefer what others would not to think about. I think it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that that's a problem.

And with— yeah, with the— instead, we should be concerned about is, are poor people's lives better, basically? Like, is it getting better?

Yeah. Overall growth. Yeah, yeah, overall growth. I mean, and it's it's just a yeah, it's a weird it's a weird thing, right? It's like capitalism proved better than socialism, and then we came and then we said, okay, well, it's inequality. And it's like I don't see any evidence. Like yeah, like intellectuals, like certain intellectuals really really hate it. I don't see income inequality. Like I see passion for trans. I you know for and against trans. I see passion for You know, uh, of, you know, stopping the police or stopping crime, right? I don't see much passion for economic redistribution, but I think it's just these intellectuals, maybe some of these people who earn like $70,000 a year as assistant professors, like, not liking people in business earning a lot more money than them. I, I sort of look for the psychological explanation here.

What about Occupy? I mean, there have been some sort of, you know, popular stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it did sort of— yeah, you're right, it was, it was there for a while. It was weird because it was like it was because it was the news, you know, because of the the bank bailouts. And there was also the Tea Party. I mean, it also had that populist thing, which was just like don't care. You know, that was like that seemed to be like the businesses were the banks. It wasn't just the inequality; it was like people were hurting and they were getting bailed out and they were getting special privileges, right? So even that doesn't seem to be like caring about inequality. It's like the when the government. stepped in to really help these people and keep them afloat, uh, that's when it seems like people got really upset.

Yeah, I, um, I want to segue into, uh, talking about Curtis Yarvin briefly because you have an upcoming debate with him in Los Angeles. And I want to, uh, sort of share what I think are some of his bigger ideas and get your perspective not only on those ideas but just broadly where you overlap or differ from him. So one of the ideas which I know you, you know, you write about in your book that's a treatise against it is he believes detachment is the effective strategy until you have a way to win. So he thinks fighting back is not only futile but empowers the enemy unless you truly have a way to win. That sort of devils in the details there. So he's not a fan. So is that—

I want to be clear. I sometimes, I try to read Curtis and I talk to Curtis and I'm not always clear exactly. Exactly. You know, I think when people criticize me, but I think very, very rarely do people think I'm unclear about what I think or what people should do. So does he— does that mean he thinks like nobody should be in politics, nobody should vote, nobody should have a— should form a political action committee, nobody should comment on politics? Is that his view?

You'll find out when you debate him. That's a good question. I'm not sure exactly where he draws the line. thinks Christopher Rufo's actions are, are counterproductive. I wonder if he still thinks they're kind of counterproductive given that they've had—

Well, what does he think like a governor, like what does he think like somebody in DeSantis' position should do, if anything? Like, should he do nothing? What should he do?

Um, I'm not sure. I, I think where he would point to is he would point to, uh, Biden being empowered— like, he would point to Trump being worse for the right than Biden, uh, basically. Like, if you care about rightist um, sort of values or conservative values or policies or propos— like, he would maybe point that as an example.

Yeah, I think that's just wrong. I mean, if you care about abortion, yeah, abortion clinics are closing. You had lower taxes under Trump. Now you have the affirmative action ban. Yeah, it's like you could, you could talk about the backlash to Trump, but yeah, I think overall you still take it.

Yeah. Um, well, I know you disagree there. Let me share a couple of his other points. One is he thinks that, um, You know, he's a monarchist. He thinks that the most effective companies in the world or organizations in the world are run by a CEO. And he, uh, he's not suggesting that people don't vote anymore, but he's suggesting that whoever people vote for should have the control of the government the way that, uh, the CEO of Apple or Amazon has control of, of, of, of their organization. Um, he also believes that, uh, many right-wingers used to be left-wingers 10 years ago or 20 years ago, and that there tends to be kind of this this trend and that the right is kind of this, what he calls the pimple on the ass of the American left, kind of this controlled opposition that really is just tacking them along a little bit slower and that there's sort of this Whig history direction. I know you disagree a few points there. And then he also talks a lot about this idea of the cathedral or this sort of set of institutions that coordinate in a decentralized way, this kind of emergent collusion that kind of manufactures a consensus and that Yeah.

So there's, yeah, a lot there. I mean, I sort of have— I feel so boring to say that I believe elections matter. And if you want conservatives to win, you should vote for conservative politicians that do conservative things. And same if, you know, if you're a liberal. Yeah. You know, and the, you know, the idea that like you should run a country like a corporation, you know, it's like the, like, I've become much more bearish on China in the last few years, and I should write about this. It's like if it worked anywhere, it should have. And I think that Yarvin's answer to this, but bear with me, that it's like it should be like, because it's not a monarchy, maybe because Xi Jinping doesn't pass it on to his son, maybe that's the problem. But China in a way is like a very highly technocratic, based on merit without affirmative action or any kind of weird distortion. They have a bunch of smart guy engineers and I don't think they're doing too well. They're terrible on birth rates. They went crazy with COVID Their economic growth has slowed. I mean, they've done well economically over the decades, but they're East Asians and they haven't done that well for East Asians. They've done well compared to other third world countries. And so you have, I think you cannot answer these questions in the abstract, like, is democracy better than dictatorships? There are monarchies in the world that Curtis could point to and is free to argue that they're run better. North Korea, in theory, 3 generations should be the best-run country in the world, right, under Jarvanism. And I think historically, the idea that democracy is incompatible with freedom, I mean, compared to what? I mean, the Industrial Revolution, there's these places with democratic representation for their time, like the US and the UK. good representation for the time, and they had free markets and economic growth. And so, yeah, I want to sort of dig more into this monarchy idea and what his sort of reasoning is and how it incorporates the lessons of history.

Yeah. I think one other point he makes, and that dovetails with sort of this sort of Patrick Deneen or this sort of group of thinkers that's trying to figure out what's after liberalism. They say, hey, it's brought us this amazing growth, um, but also there's been sort of this like spiritual malaise, or, you know, we're sort of market— like, you know, the destruction of families, like people are less happy. There's, there's all sorts of like negative effects that have emerged as a corollary. And, and Curtis likes to bring the example of, hey, if you took the same technological and economic, um, sort situation that we have today and imposed it back onto the 1950s, but imposed sort of 1950s sort of state of the family and the community and the culture, which is a better place. And he says that we're too often long to think that things are always getting better. But what if outside of this, outside of economics and technology, they're getting worse? Is a part of you sympathetic to that or no? Because they're a package deal.

I mean, yeah. I mean, I do think that like, yeah, I do look back. I mean, I do look at like, so it's gonna sound like a stupid example, but I look at like athletes and they would talk in interviews, like thinking of basketball mostly, and like how they behaved compared to like the kids today, like Michael Jordan or Charles Barkley's confidence compared to like LeBron James or like Kobe Bryant, you know, when he was alive. And they just seem so much like more confident in themselves as men. I mean, it's hard to explain, but I do feel this like very strongly when I watch like people from the '80s and, you know, like I guess it starts to change in the '90s or early 2000s or so. And yeah, people just seemed better. And yeah, I mean, I do think like, you know, we, you know, have polls on like increasing happiness. I don't know if we can Buy them or not. I don't think they're you know they're that reliable. They tell us that much. But yeah, I'm open to the idea that like you know outside of technological growth and you know all all that other stuff which is good, you know maybe humans are you know not as happy as they were in the seventies and eighties. Maybe. I mean my presumption is against that just because there's there's some evidence that money is good with happiness and you just think you know common you know common sense. It's sort of intuitively correct. You know what this has to do with like dictatorship versus democracy? It wasn't like the U.S. in the 1950s. There was like, you know, I think I think I think Curtis does like like FDR sort of as his model for quote unquote monarchy. But like, you know, it's not like FDR planned like you know it was a historical event, right? It was like after World War II was like the times of like you know amazing economic growth, amazing technological growth, a lot of the low. Hanging fruit of air conditioning and refrigerating coming to fruition, the war being over, the existential stakes of Soviet Union before secularism, before these Marxists and civil rights and all this other stuff sort of sowed confusion and bad policy into public life. And it's not like this was like dictatorship or democracy or it was like somebody planning. It was like the good things about the previous generation, or we're sort of a historical a product. And I don't think it's like, oh, you have a tariff today, or like you have more religion in government, like you're going to move us back to the 1950s, right? If you think that that's good, like, you know, there's no— first, there's no going back because it's a technologically different world. You can't have the— you can't have that society with like new technology, whatever it looks like, whatever you like about that. Like, if we're going to bring that back, it's going to be given the technological constraints and reality. Of today's world, right? But it's not like necessarily like whatever economic policy or social policy you know that preceded it was like the cause of that. There was you know some other cause, and this is like historically sort of. I think looking I think looking to the past even for like guidance maybe is like good for like showing you what's possible and giving you ideas. But like when people start to think they can recreate it, you know I think that's where they go astray. I think that's where they adopt policies that are not conducive to the. Goals that they seek.

Yeah, it's well, and the question is: Do you recreate it on a policy level or on on a cultural level? And and if you try to do it culturally, there's also a question of like how much of these are a package deal? Like how how much of these sort of you know the technological and economic growth needed to come from sort of the liberal values? Yeah, but there's no recreation.

Even say recreate. There's no like a 1950s plus iPhones and YouTube, right? That just doesn't exist. It has to be. whatever you like from the 1950s, like, it has to be somehow consistent with, you know, whatever we have today.

Right, right. And, and this is— yeah, Aaron Sibarium has written about sort of this. Um, like, even if you did believe that sort of, you know, at least going back to the sort of dating and sex question, that these have led to, uh, that we should go revert back to traditional values or traditional norms around dating, like, it's too late. You can't.

Yeah, yeah. It'll be like, it'll be like mom— like, the next trad, if it exists, will Instagram influencers who instead of showing, you know, showing their breasts are going to be showing their kids off, right? And people are going to see that and think that's cool. It's not going to be like going to the arcade and like getting a Coca-Cola like in the 1950s, right? It's gonna, you know, whatever you like, it's gonna have to be sort of consistent with reality and sort of where society's going.

For the people who are thinking about like what's after liberalism, post-liberalism, do you think they're pretty confused and, and sort of this, the this is it, or slight moderation to it? Or how do you make sense of the post-liberalism conversation?

Yeah, I don't even— I mean, I don't like the— you know what I think they're doing? I'll give you my sort of feeling about this. I don't know what that means. I don't know what post-liberalism means. We still have democracy. We still have capitalism. These things are not going away. We still have— we're not on a verge of a great awakening. Great awakening. Forget a great We're not on the cusp of some kind of religious revival. So whatever you want to call liberalism, it seems to be continuing and it seems to be here to stay. I think a lot of these post-liberals are just religious and they're like, they can't just directly— I'm not going to say about their intentions, but my impression of what's psychologically driving them is they're just religious and don't like secularism and don't like trans and so on and so forth.

I think that's a big part of it, but I also think there are modern non-religious people who just say, hey, this is a death cult. Like, this is— we're just, as you mentioned, once it hits modernity, the people start having less kids and this just can't hold. And maybe making the individual—

But a lot of those people do like, like, they do like Japan or they do like these South Korea or these countries with like worse fertility rate than us. So if it's like, if it's like the deathbed, like, no, America's not the worst or like close to the worst. I think that it seems that they, what they dislike is is too much license, especially sexual freedom and secularism. So you have to sort of look at what gets people angry and what doesn't get people angry. So if it's like, yeah, it's just about kids, well, America's not that bad. There's a lot of countries that are much worse. But if you sort of like the low fertility countries a little bit better and you're posting memes of Greek and Italian villages where there's no young people left and the TFR in those countries is like 1.2, Then it's, you know, it's not about, you know, that seems to be like putting a utilitarian, you know, gloss over what are different concerns.

Do you think underpopulation is one of the biggest sort of issues that the world is facing? And like, should people be spending more time, you know, focused on that or caring about that or, or not really?

Yeah, no, I love kids and I love people having kids. And I think they, I think they should. And I think especially you know, well-off people who can afford it, I think, should have kids. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's good. I mean, there's like, you know, the population growth in and of itself, all else being equal, people sometimes have this like Malthusian views. But, you know, I think Julian Simon, you know, old economist who wrote, you know, these great, these great books on this topic, I think he's absolutely correct. And it is, you know, it is something worth Thinking about, you know, and I don't think we've even like begun to like scratch the surface of like, you know, treating this like like a problem, right? It's sort of it's very sort of right coded, but not even like it's not even like that right coded because it's like it doesn't it doesn't register and like the you know it's not one of the top fifty things like you know Republicans talk about definitely not something Democrats talk about. So there is like a cultural sort of consensus that like we don't worry about fertility or we don't worry we just talk in the language of individual rights. and don't worry about fertility or future generations. And I think that's like, that's the thing that needs to change. Um, I see, you know, hints of it, like you see like Elon Musk and other people talking about it, but we're a long way from this being a mainstream concern.

You wrote in a post, um, once that American politics over the next decades will to a large extent be shaped by what the tech right does. Talk about why you think the, the tech right, which seems pretty small today, Um, will have such, um, outsized impact.

Yeah, I mean, because, you know, they're just— they're the people with a lot of prestige and a lot of resources. I mean, Elon Musk, we talked about him buying Twitter. This is just one man making one decision, right? I think it's clearly changed the political culture. It's going to change it in unpredictable ways. It might be bad for conservatives because they become too online and they can't win elections. I think there might— there's a side we might be— they might win the boycott, they might win the war of target LGBT And the war of Dylan Mulvaney and lose the U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court, which would be a pretty funny, pretty funny outcome. So it's going to be unpredictable. But yeah, I mean, if one tech entrepreneur can buy a company and just change sort of the state of debate, I think that's an indication that, you know, money still— money matters, resources matter. You know, Substack is smaller than Elon Musk, but, you know, it's had a big impact. And, you know, there's like people who are like sort of putting their nose to the, you know, nose to Yeah. Doing things that are less flashy, but like what Joe Lonsdale is doing with the Cicero Institute, having really, you know, having some policy successes. I think like there's not only going to be so many Elon Musks or, you know, Andreessen or Peter Thiels. I think that like the idea of like people like Lonsdale, like doing what he's doing on issues they care about, going a little bit under the radar and not getting that much attention, I think it's going to be important in our policy.

Yeah, that makes sense. And it is interesting, you know, Balaji has this idea of the gray tribe, like there does seem to be this desire to create sort of its— this like class consciousness around tech people that is not left, but not exactly right. They're, you know, they're pro-choice, they're pro-gay marriage, and they're not proles. And so, It's an interesting question as to whether they should just like join the right or take over the right, or sort of— certainly politically they should, but even like aesthetically or culturally, should they lean into this idea of the, of the gray tribe where you sort of put together this hodgepodge of sort of independent groups? Um, or if you just say, hey, we're, we're taking over the right?

You know, I really like the idea of like, you know, there's really not that many huge issues, right? There's like You're gonna like I like prediction markets. I like reforming the FDA. I like getting rid of civil rights law. I like cutting taxes, which Republicans will do anyway anytime they have power. You know, that's that that's one. And so, like you don't need you know you don't need that much. You know, I think that like if you focus on like those four things and maybe one or two other things I'm forgetting, you could have a major outsized influence and and change the country. And then like. You know, the politicians are going to do what the politicians do. They're going to have to speak to the people, you know, to the concerns of like rural West Virginians and so forth. They're going to have to talk like them and look like them and act like them, not like Silicon Valley tycoons. But yeah, but they should like keep doing like podcasts like this one and speaking out on social media and like changing the culture and like talking about fertility and these things that have a cultural influence. I think that's like— I think like policy should probably be more Uh, narrowly focused, and then like, you know, room for, you know, sort of big picture conversations, cultural shifting like we're doing here.

Yeah, totally. Um, and, and speaking of people who've done that in a, in a big way, uh, Vivek, uh, you, you were early on, on, on Vivek, Vivek mania. Um, any reflections on, on Vivek as time has passed, or do you think in this sort of post-Trump era, which as you mentioned could be 10 to 20 years from now but could also be much sooner, If something happens to him, do you think Vivek is here to stay? Do you think he has long-term potential, or at least his ideas? Or what do you predict is the post-Trump future?

I think he personally is here to stay. I think Trump is, you know, he probably has a position in a Trump administration. I mean, he's been like— Trump seems to like him more than anyone else who's running for presidency. Trump seems to be the most friendly to him. And so, yeah, I mean, he has it. I mean, he has the charisma, he has the appeal to voters to come from, you know, to be like tied with DeSantis. DeSantis has such a big profile being the governor of Florida and having all these accomplishments. And for Vic to be like just behind him, like by not that much after all of this, I mean, is an incredible just accomplishment. I mean, it shows incredible political talent. Forget like whether you think he like seems likable or whatever. You know, he's obviously got—he's obviously got the skill. And so, yeah, I think Vivek is—I think Vivek is here for the long run. There's not a natural place for him to like go. Like he could run for Senate, but they have well—the Senate—you know, J.D. Vance is there; he's gonna block him. And then you have one more senator. I think there's a twenty—there's a Sherrod Brown, but it's too late. So whoever's good, there's gonna be a 2024. There won't be another Senate—you know—a seat in Ohio open until 2030. And if the Republican wins. It's going to be a Republican incumbent. So he doesn't have a natural place to go. Senate is sort of where you might go. Governor, like, to become a governor is sort of different. It's like a, you know, it's a state-level thing. It's a very parochial thing, I think. But like, I think like, as like an idea leader and like a person who could be a vice president or work in like a cabinet agency, yeah, I think he has the potential to do something like that.

Yeah. And gearing towards closing here, The book is Origins of Woke. Highly recommend people read it. What are you hoping is the legacy or impact of this book? There's a beautiful book cover.

We didn't talk much about the book, Erik, but that's okay. I appreciate it because I've been doing— I've probably done 15 podcasts and shows on this. So yeah, this is the book. So yeah, I'm glad we got to talk about some other issues. Yeah, I recommend people buy it. I'm hoping that people just look at it, that I hope that people, you know, it's a very specific book. Not many books are like this. Not many books have an entire chapter. If you're, you know, a judge, if you're a legislator, if you're going to be the next president or advising the next president, right, or you're assistant to any of these people, this is exactly what you do. And this will, you know, change the law and potentially, you know, it's going to change the culture. So, yeah, I think it's like, you know, one of the, you know, not mysterious or sort of hidden And like what I hope the goal of the book is going to accomplish. I quote Hayek. I love Hayek. Road to Serfdom. At the beginning of the book, he says, this is a political book. I think if you write a political book, you should just say so. Mine is a political book and it's also a work of sort of history and social science. And yeah, it's all there in chapter 6 or 7, whichever is the chapter where I tell people exactly what I want them to do.

Well, that's a perfect way to wrap. We're right at time. I highly recommend people buy it. Also listen to our first interview in Upstream. as well, um, where we go into some of the ideas. And then, yeah, Richard's been on a podcast tour where he goes even deeper, so highly recommend checking those out too.

Uh, Richard, thanks as always.

Thank you, Erik.