s09e01 | Eugenics, and Other Heresies - with Jonathan Anomaly

0:00Hello and welcome to Comversations with the Voice of Reason. I'm your host, Benjamin Boyce, and today's Comversent is returning guest, Jonathan Anomaly. It's a very air-u-dyte, American academic, and he focuses on eugenics or rather genetic enhancement. He's been in the research aspect of this field for many years now, has lots of papers and books on this subject, and is working with the company to help parents to select what's best for their children. In this conversation, we talk about genetic inheritance and all of the baggage that that entails. It's very fascinating. He comes with a lot of resources and sources, and we have a great old time getting into the weeds of this very fiery topic. You can find links to his work linked in the description as well as links to support this channel. Yes, I just said links way too many times, but without further ado, here is Jonathan Anomaly. Speaking of how you are, how are you?

1:02I am doing very well. I'm quite happy. I'm about to spend a month surfing in El Salvador. Oh, right. For now, just hanging out in Austin, Texas, where I live. Yeah. Why are you surfing? Are you in a competition? No, I'm just... That's what I do for fun. Surfing and boxing. I'm from Hawaii, originally, in California, and it's kind of sad that I ended up in Austin Texas. I have a lot of good friends here. I like it. Yeah. We do lack in ocean and surfable waves. We do have surfable waves in Waco, Texas, actually. In Waco? In Waco, I don't know. Yeah. It's in the middle of nowhere, but it has one of the original wave pools, like serious waves. So, pros come from all over the world to train there, although it's not nearly as good as the one in Dubai or in California that Kelly Slater started. So, you were born in Hawaii or you grew up there? I was born in Hawaii in a Volkswagen and I'm Kalana on a holy highway.

2:07Yeah. It actually made strangely enough that the Honolulu star. I was in the newspaper because Volkswagen had a campaign about how spacious their new model was. Supposedly, so big, you could give birth in it. My mother did by accident. I'm away to the hospital. Oh, wow. And I got the savings bond. It was like a photo offer for Volkswagen. It was really strange. Wow. Yeah, the parents did the usual 80s thing, you know, divorced quickly and then I grew up in California. Okay. All right. And then did you split your time between California and Hawaii or? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Typical arrangement between parents of Lachke kids and 80s and babies. Yeah. Yeah. So, what part of your personality do you think derives from the Hawaiian Islands? Well, I'm genetically 0% Hawaiian. And so, well, we will talk about genetics in a bit, but like, let's go to the culture part. Yeah. Yeah. Now, just, I don't know. I'm probably a lot more neurotic than the average Hawaiian is, but I think that's good.

3:12You want to have a certain level of neuroticism where you're not driven to achieve anything great. Mm-hmm. Too much of it and you're crippled by whatever depression or an inability to actually get out of bed and do anything. Yeah. So, actually, it's one of those traits, you know, when we at the company I now work for, I can actually offer polygenic scores for personality traits. I think it's going to be super interesting what people want to select on. Yeah. You don't want no neuroticism. You don't want too much of it, but right there in the middle is not so bad. Neuroticism is that one of those big five traits? It is. Yeah. So, big five is ocean speaking of Hawaii. It's openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. So, it's that last one. Yeah. And those things sound like they have a moral valence, like neuroticism sounds bad. And it is when you have too much of it, but it's also bad when you have too little of it. There's a whole field. You should actually interview someone. I haven't been mind evolutionary psychopathology.

4:15Where do our character traits come from? To what extent are they heritable? And why is there this spectrum across these things? There must be a reason for it evolutionarily. And how does that actually apply to modern life? You know, the fact that something was adaptive in our past doesn't mean that that's exactly what you want now in terms of living a good life. That just means creatures that had that level of that thing tend to leave more copies of their genes. You know, so. I'm from there. And there are years. There's a distribution of genes. I interviewed Brett Weinstein for a while a long time ago. I was helping him with these YouTube channel before it went where it is now. But he would just do a little essays about evil bio stuff. And he talked about psychopathology or at least, uh, which one of those is like, like, sociopathy, I think, like a little bit of that in a tribe is good as long as it's directed out of the tribe or away from the tribe.

5:17Is it, you know, and that's why you'd have like CEOs or something like where it's actually a beneficial trait. If it's, it's deployed for your ends, it's actually very profitable in our schematic. That sounds entirely reasonable, although, you know, that's not his area of expertise. You know, you and I and him can speculate. There's a guy who wrote the Oxford Handbook of evolutionary psychopathology named Marco Delguidici. One of, you know, Jeffrey Miller, Dan O'Fly from one of their old friends, he now works back in Italy, wanted to pull his kids out of the kind of woke public schools in the Mexico City went. Yeah. And took a salary cut to work in Italy. But he wrote the most interesting book on this topic and he would be super interesting to interview. I'll have to. What's his name again? Marco Delguidici, I don't know, for now, it's a, we, Chi. Is it tell you names? D'Aquidici. Yeah, that's, it's funny. A handbook on evolutionary psychopathology. You just walk around.

6:18I turn as a handbook on everything. Okay. That's one of them. Yeah. And, you know, where do these things come from? Are they adaptive? For example, I mean, you can speculate about skits or frenion. It's not going to be adaptive to have like full blown hallucinations and slitting your wrists and, you know, wild conspiracy theories. But it could very well be adaptive to have some of the genes that tend to ward that. Maybe the, maybe the local shaman had some of that. There's, there's a small correlation positively between skits or frenion creativity. If you have skits or frenion, you're probably not very creative, but skits or frenics tend to have more family members in the creative professions, lending to the thesis that probably there's some adaptive value to some of this and not too much of it. And you can do that analysis across a pretty variety, a pretty big variety of personality trends. Somebody was talking, our post-suitive video that I saw on X today about the different generational, I guess, psychopathologies, like the lost generation coming out of World

7:22War I, where Shell shocked and withdrawn, maybe prone to alcoholism. The 80s was the, you kind of mentioned it with your parents, like the narcissistic me first kind of pathology. And right now we're the thesis of the short videos that were in an era of borderline personality disorder and the cluster B characteristics, narcissism, Machuvelianism, and it's facilitated by AI, which is, it's cool and interesting to see that in your environment, but one wonders if it's not a little, the word is adaptive to a certain environment, to be selfish, to be withdrawn, to be, I guess, narcissistic Machuvelian, the stuff that we see now. Yeah, that's great. I mean, all of these traits are partly genetic, partly environmental. That's obvious. You can't possibly be a genetic determinist about these when you see these wild fluctuations across time. But there are some genetic roots to them. And you're right. Some of these traits, narcissism now is not only quite adaptive, you're more likely to

8:23have more mating opportunities and so on if you combine that with some other traits and you become a content producer, not talking about you, Ben, but you know, talking about it. I wish if I was a little bit more narcissistic, I'd be a little bit better off. I'll tell you that much. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so I mean, and that just shows the thesis. Obviously that what's adaptive and what's good morally or what's good for society can be two different things. Sometimes they coalesce together, sometimes they come apart. Yeah. What is the intersection of that moral thing and then just the reality, just in terms of genetics? Nathan Kaufness is still doing the rounds right now. He's a very, you know, he got a lot of attention for exposing a fraudulent, uh, Cambridge professor who took his life, Arda did and then Nathan's just been going around and talking about his research into Arda, but also his research into human genetics. And it's very difficult to have this conversation because when we talk about race, people automatically

9:26assume that racism is going to be the result of talking about race, talking about genetic inheritance ability. IQ, it's fine that the MBA is like overrepresented with African Americans or just Africans or broadly, but it's not that comfortable to talk about the financial district being populated by, you know, Aryans, Anglos and Jews, right? Yeah. Yeah, sure. And I guess this is why you brought me on to talk about some of these issues and cooffness and and genetics and HBD and that sort of thing. So I mean, the first comment I have just to kind of clarify in your listener's minds, you know, Nathan Kaufness is not a biologist, although he does philosophy of biology and he's a very smart person, very competent at what he does. And if you just remove his writings on race and just look at some of his other writings, they're interesting and they're mainstream and people who dislike him would probably actually agree with a lot of it.

10:27So what is a philosopher's job in Western history? Well, we usually trace our lineage to Socrates and what was Socrates saying? Well, he was questioning the dogmas of his day and ultimately put on trial in Athens. And what was he killed for? Well, the two charges were blasphemy, you know, denying the gods of the state and corrupting the youth. And that's quite literally the same charges against Nathan Kaufness. And I said this on on X the other day, my favorite quotation from Nathan came from right after the first time he was being harassed. And this was an Oxford. And I had been at Oxford that year. So I visited him. And he said, you know, the Western intellectual tradition, the academic philosophy, the philosophers of which were apart claimed to trace their lineage to Socrates, but their real lineage goes to those who killed Socrates. And that was one of the most perfect things to say in the year 2020 because it was so true. Yeah, yeah. So that's the first point to make there is when you think about what are the big dogmas

11:31among progressive liberals, which obviously dominate the academy, I'm not saying that as a controversial statement, Eric Kaufman has done the surveys, it's very clear what the political landscape looks like in the modern Western academy in the UK, Canada, the US, it's all the same everywhere. And that is almost none of them are religious. Almost all of them are somewhere between progressive liberals, socialist and even communist, right? Openly. They're not ashamed about that. I'm just describing how they describe themselves. And given that, you know, we are a kind of religious political religious creature, you don't think of people like Jonathan Hight and political psychologists who have done experiments more or less showing this are our hardware. Our brains are basically pre-wired as height likes to say to absorb a kind of ideology. That's really adaptive. I mean, it would have made a lot of sense whether we're a small tribe and we worship a bunch of gods or a big tribe and we worship one God or a big tribe which as Nietzsche predicted,

12:34once we abandon the God of Christianity, well, probably we're just going to be even more fermentally defending the things we associate with that God, which is hyper egalitarianism and a set of other dogmas that flow from that, blanks, latism, etc. And so fast forward to your question, what's going on with cofness and with all the controversies on campus? You know, I'm not even going to register my own views just as a kind of observer, although I do have my views. Yeah. So cofness is threatening the master dogma of the modern academy and the academy is the thing. It's the cathedral as Curtis Yarvan calls it from which the monks get their stamp of approval and the monks are obviously journalists. Yeah. The monks, the producers, basically consensus making institutions. And so what cofness is doing is a full frontal assault on the fundamental dogma of the cathedral. Now I don't even think it's just race differences.

13:35If you want to move back a step and there's this term that you've mentioned and introduced, you know, it comes from Steve Seller on the right and then also from Jonathan Marks on the left in the 1990s. And that term is human biodiversity. And that term is interesting because it's deliberately vague. It doesn't necessarily refer to race differences, but it does refer to the fact that humans vary and they vary tremendously both in their physical form and in their psychology. This is a clear implication of Darwin's view of evolution by natural and sexual selection. It's the clearest of all views. In fact, it's what led Darwin to lose his faith in Christianity. This idea that there are these arbitrary forces like random mutation, environmental forces, these, etc. that lead to these different distributions of traits. And they succeed in some environments and not others, right? A thousand years ago in Norway, you would have had far more offspring if you were a mass

14:40murderer. A thousand years later, you have no problem. Well, not only would you have more offspring, but you would decrease the offspring of others. So it works in both directions. Yes. And in the world of Vikings, that's the best thing you could do is be physically strong and absolutely ruthless in your ability to rape, maim, and murder, especially when you're going outside of Norway, not inside. You might get some pushback if you're doing that to the neighboring tribe or your next door neighbor. But now in modern Norway, which was Christianized, what do you get rewarded for? Patients, academic success. This is human biodiversity. The recognition that different environments produce different genetic outcomes and you don't even talk about, have to talk about group differences or race differences, although that is one dimension of it that many people talk about. To understand this is both real and it's subversive of the master dog of the modern academy. Why? What are the acceptable explanations for human biodiversity among modern academics and

15:41journalists? Well, on the left, it's obvious. There's oppression, there's discrimination. There's this nebulist thing called privilege, which even if you grow up really rich, but you're a certain ethnic group, well, okay, but that's because you don't have privilege and therefore you don't have these outcomes. But what is it on the right? And this is something that Coffness has pointed out. Even guys like Thomas Sol, who I like a lot, you probably like, he's a hero. But what is his explanation for disparities? Not even just groups, but individuals. These things like educational opportunities, it's culture and it's never the sense that culture comes from somewhere that it's shaped by genetics. It's always like random cultural forces. And so, HBD really does challenge this modern dogma, either from the perspective of group differences or even the perspective of really big individual differences. You mentioned a professor or an academic from the 90s who was on the left who brought

16:44this up. What's the leftist explanation or justification or how do they accept this into the Marxist or I guess the radically egalitarian worldview? So I mentioned Jonathan Marx in the sense that he's a sociologist and so he's more interested in kind of debunking some of this stuff. But that's the first time we see the term human biodiversity. I think it's not an accident that it's coined both independently by someone on the left and the right. Guys like Edward Wilson, the great conservation biologist at Harvard recently passed away. He was talking about and they'd written a book on preserving biodiversity in the world and he meant it among humans, among animals, etc. But nevertheless, you're right that you could actually support pretty big differences at the individual level if you're on the left. People like Paige Harden right down the street from UT Austin, you know, she understands the heritability of IQ.

17:45She's not going to touch it from a group differences standpoint. She even denounces people who do. But she wants to say, well, we need to make for and also by the way, Robert Frank at Cornell, he talks about a Darwinian left and he wants to justify left wing politics, egalitarian politics, while recognizing there can be quite substantial individual genetic differences. Well, I guess from a leftist point of view and we'd have to define why what leftism means, but in this particular formulation I'm about to make, it means centralization of government. E-galitarianism by way of central planning. So the recognition that different groups are going to trend toward different capabilities as a central planner is going to empower you as long as you don't go full lysinco to manage and grease the wheels of society towards equal outcomes or whatever your desire to call this. I think that's right in a strange way that is much closer to Kaufness's view than it

18:46is to we can talk about some different camps. I actually wanted to talk about that maybe after this. What are the main camps in HBD? But Kaufness's view is not especially distant from someone like Paige Harden. Okay, she identifies way more on the left. Kaufness is a conservative, but Kaufness seems to think from what I've read and listened to on his recent spout of podcasts. Probably realistically, if we have a multicultural society, we do need a little bit of affirmative action. A lot of people on the right are not going to say that. He thinks that not because he supports it intrinsically, like, say, Paige Hardenwood, but rather because he thinks, right or wrong, that if you have this kind of society, if you had, let's say, 0% of one ethnic group represented in certain areas, it's a recipe for war. I don't really have a strong view on that, but that's Kaufness's view. So it's not that far. He just doesn't want to go fully gallitarian. Yeah. It's a distribution.

19:47You're going to have to deal with resentment. If there's a distribution of representation or a distribution of wealth in any regard, you're going to have to deal with that resentment. And there's different ways of doing the historical way. You could do a caste system, but we're not going to do that anymore. That's how we deal with the caste system is that we do DEI and we reverse the caste system. And if you do it just enough, it doesn't tick off the high performing people where they're okay with their resources going to. You come to human society somewhat, you know, exactly. I could even defend it. Let me go a step further. I don't want to do this, but I will. Robert Frank, you know, he's one of my favorite economists. And I used to teach his work all the time. He's written a lot of great books and articles. One of my favorite things that he's done is said, look, economics actually doesn't explain human behavior well when you take homoeconomicus as the model. This idea that we're just self-interested profit maximizers. It's a useful model in some context. But if you don't include the generous instincts we have or the moralistic attitudes we have.

20:47Or the tribalistic. Yeah. Pretty mysterious and tribalistic too. But what I wanted to bring up is actually his view is quite defensible that if there are big individual differences, let's just say that. And he's, he definitely believes that if not group differences, it can't actually lead to a toxic society not just in the way that you mentioned, which is the kind of cofnist view. If you try for a pure meritocracy, it actually can lead to runaway signaling. So his first great book on this topic was called the luxury fever and he was defending through an ingenious argument that conservatives would reject that you should tax the rich for their own benefit, not for the benefit of everyone else. Why? Because if you leave them to just make as much money as possible, well, they'll start playing all these signaling games. Like I'm going to have a slightly bigger yacht than you or I'll have two mansions and you have one. And actually that's not only a waste of resources from a social standpoint, he argues. It actually makes them worse off because there's no end to this pointless kind of status

21:52games of signaling. And so he has to feedback, I'm a medic feedback. Yeah, and so there are reasonable views here. I mean, it's not just pure meritocracy or wokeism. There's kind of interesting views and I'm not defending those. I'm just kind of saying there is room for some interesting disagreement here, even if you admit human biodiversity. The interesting kind of touch point is represented by these, I guess the classical liberal set. And I don't know how strong they are as a group, but there's some pretty strong signolars of this worldview that puts meritocracy first, just end all DEI, any sort of affirmative action and any governmental manner is basically a kind of communism. And we want to restrict that, but they have a problem with, well, what do you do with the course? What do you do with what do you do if, as Katna said, and was kind of attempted to be scraped

22:55over the coals by a very terrible journalist in Britain. He was quoting a Harvard study that if pure meritocracy was implemented at Harvard, only zero or 0.7 percent. 0.7 percent would be black. That's right. So what do you do about that? Yeah, which is fascinating because as you point out and Nathan keeps saying this, that was Harvard saying it, not him, he quoted Harvard saying, if we got rid of affirmative action, this is what it would look like. And now all these journalists who are dishonest are saying, coughness, controversially claims point X and then that goes into his Wikipedia article and then just gets repeated and obviously it's insane, but yeah, you're right. But it is an interesting issue. And let me use that as an opportunity to lay out the train here because I think that's really kind of interesting, maybe from the listener standpoint. Two's credit, coughness is going on some podcasts with people who are pretty hostile to them

23:57and he disagrees with. And I really like that about him. You know, he's got the right kind of autism, which is like, I'm just going to go, I'm just going to go ahead and head with these guys. Guys like Dave Green, who's like a right wing Catholic. That's not coughness, right? He has very different views, but it's kind of fun to listen to him just hash out what the differences are. So I wanted to kind of lay out a few differences to tease out the answer your question. Here are the main camps as I see it. There's the kind of normy, conservatives and liberals and that includes progressives and right wingers of all kinds. It includes Chomsky and even guys like Tom Sol or Centris, like Claire Lehman. Actually, let me get rid of Claire Lehman for the moment. Let's put in those other ones. Good Claire's got more complicated views. A lot of these people, they disagree about a lot of fundamental issues, but they're intellectuals. They're often academics. And the one thing they agree on is, yeah, we probably shouldn't talk too much about these issues. And if we do, we should revert to generally environmental explanations.

24:58Maybe there are some genetic ones, but it's sort of a sign of bad taste to even talk about these. Yeah. As Lindsey James Lindsey said, there's just too much baggage. Yeah. And that's one camp and that's fine. Okay. That's their view. There's another camp, which is I would just call them the Straussians and they can be both left and right wing. Leo Strauss was a conservative who is famous for saying, look, every age has its dogmas. And that's clearly true, right? I mean, when Oxford and Cambridge were born, they weren't woke in the modern sense, but they were religious institutions and you couldn't blaspheme. So I mean, they just have modern versions of blaspheme, but has to do with genetics and so on. Every institution, every epoch has had its dogmas. And so Strauss says, look, if you're reading historical texts or you're looking at the word world through clear eyes, you should always be aware of the background dogmas. And what are the things that people can't say and know that they can't say, but might have questions about and maybe sending signals to you that they do have those questions.

26:01So Socrates is the perfect case or Plato is the one who wrote down what Socrates said. Socrates wrote in dialogue for him. So did Galileo, so did a lot of people, so did David Hume. And it's usually pretty clear which character they're kind of endorsing, right? But a thoughtful person looks at the world that way. And similarly, modern Straussians, that might be Stephen Pinker, that might be Jonathan Height, it might be Strauss himself. They probably have some views about these topics. And if you read between the lines of their books, the blank slate, for example, the righteous mind, it doesn't even take reading too much between the lines to know what their views are. But those people also have very publicly said, hey, we shouldn't talk about these issues too much. You know, so why social strife or why I don't want to get fired, you know, between the lines there. But those are the Straussians. And that's one camp. And I think that's an interesting camp for various reasons. Two other camps that I want to mention.

27:02The two other camps are, let's call them the kind of race and IQ academics. They're a few in number and they're going to just get fewer in number, right? Because it's hard to hire these guys. I mean, you know, obviously they get filtered out in grad school if they speak up, if they happen to get a job and then speak up, they don't get tenure or they don't get whatever. These are guys like Bow Wine Guard, Nathan Coffness, Noah Carle. They've either been fired very publicly or don't have a future in academia. Bronze Age pervert, unkindly calls them the dork, right? And why does he call them that? Well, because he thinks they focus a little too much on race and IQ and even if you agree with them, well, it's just so obvious. There's no point in talking about it. But they disagree with them, right? So we got the first camp, the Straussians. The second camp is the race and IQ academics and that leads to the third camp, which is basically the vitalists, the Bronze Age perverts of the world. That includes, yeah, Bapid includes Kevin Deanna, people like this, who, yeah, maybe there's

28:07some differences between groups on IQ, but that's just this one dorky thing that can be easily measured and it measures for, you know, academic success. But what really matters, you know, for these guys is personality, creativity, bravery, physical strength, beauty. Yeah. And actually, some races probably have more of that than others and it's not going to be the same race that has all of those, those characteristics better than all others. Yeah. And moreover, there's going to be big individual differences in those things. And so, so they're just kind of like, what's even the point of talking about this? You're not going to convince very many people and there are other things that we should be spending our time on. So those, those are the three big ones. Straussians, the race and IQ academics and then the, the violence that you might call the Nechans, you know, so they all seem to be, you just describe the camp who want to avoid this conversation. But there are people who want to have the conversation. I guess the, the academic you brought up, but then they're, I mean, the low brow, what

29:08a coveness would call low IQ racists, right? Which are used by the Straussians or their ilk to stop the conversation because you don't want to empower. That's right. This race is being good. This race realism is just, you know, like 90% of race realists are actual racists. Like what does it even mean to be a racist? Like why does that even matter? Like it's just like that's the dogma we don't want to be a racist. I understand why it's functionally better in a liberal democracy to decrease racism, especially from the high performing classes and let the low performing classes be as racist as they want to be. Sam Hyde said something really funny on a J-Driker podcast a couple days ago. He's like, I'm about as racist as your average black man. I'm like, okay, well, what is that even mean? You know, that's a, that's a really interesting way to put it. But like there is, there's something wrong, morally wrong, and socially wrong about being a racist. And that is used to stop the conversation. I don't even know where that, why that's there.

30:10I mean, is it even interesting to talk about why it's there? If it's going to be an up and nice against white people, I mean, we have Jeremy Carl talking about how whites are the most slandered group in modern America. And that was called racist, even though it was just a basically almost an academic text, like if I'm describing all these instances and the power structures that be. Why can't white people be racist? Because they're power, because it's cringes, because it's socially, it'll put you outside of the social circles that you'd want to be in. If you want to have a high functioning, if you want to be a part of the high IQ circles, you just, you don't talk about it. That is right. And I think there's two observations that would have in relation to that. The first is if people want to know how racist different groups are, and by racist, I'm going to just define it as the classical definition, which is having a kind of in-group preference toward particular groups, or maybe you could also supplement that with hostility

31:14toward other groups, so that it's not necessarily there. There's no necessary connection. You may prefer, as we know, on dating apps, people do prefer certain groups, and usually it's their own, but sometimes it's not actually. It looks like there's a universal preference toward Asian women, but not toward Asian men on some of these dating apps. It's not my game. I'm not on dating apps, but when you look at the data, you're like, oh, that's interesting. I wonder why that is. But similarly, you've probably seen Zach Goldberg get some really interesting studies in the early 2020s, showing if you just want to see what in-group preference looks like, all groups have it. The only group but whites seem to have the least of it, especially Europeans, anglers, et cetera. They're the least racist objectively, just in terms of if you ask them, in-group preference. Moreover, the only group that actively has in-group hostility, the only group on earth that he's measured, is white leftists. People who identify as white progressive, at least say on surveys, they actively prefer.

32:17Other groups now, of course, that's pretty different than how they behave in their private life. These are some of the most coistered people. You look at average white progressive in San Francisco and look at their neighborhood composition versus other others in that group. But I think it is worth talking about. I actually wrote a paper I published it four years ago. It was one of my last academic articles called Race, Eugenics, and the Holocaust. What I did, as a kind of, I took the perspective of a kind of historian. My PhDs in philosophy, I studied philosophy and economics, game theory in particular. But I had gotten into some of these scandals, too. I'd written a lot on Eugenics. Obviously, people, if you endorse Eugenics, which is something like using genetic knowledge to improve the welfare of your children, then they immediately say, well, you're racist, even though that actually has literally nothing to do with it, but in their mind, it's the same thing. I've gotten involved in these controversies, and I wanted to explore, from a historical standpoint, how did World War II and the Holocaust in particular change the way that people talk

33:23about Eugenics and then B about race. I can assure you, and you can read the paper. I just quote a lot of these people. There's an absolute ground swell shift in how people talk post-World War II, and in particular, post-1950, and what happens is the United Nations is created, was the League of Nations before the war, and there are all these task forces. These task forces come out with a statement on race and racism and so on, and this is kind of a new thing. It's very clear that this was a diversity of people whose fundamental goal was to prevent anything like Japan and Germany ever using an ideology to displace and destroy and genocide anyone again. In the 1950s, UNESCO statement on race, you can just read it for yourself or read the quotes in my articles, open access. It's fascinating because you have guys like Dobjanski, Huxley, these guys who end up

34:26winning Nobel prizes, Herman Muller, and they have a lot of open disagreements. Some will say, look, I think race is actually quite real, and there are probably some pretty big differences between the races, but we need to learn to share the planet and in harmony and peace, and so I'm not going to go along with you guys that want to say there is no race or whatever, but I will go along with you that we need to create institutions to kind of minimize these mutually destructive wars. Then there are others who are just saying, look, there can be no race or there can be no human biodiversity. If there is, it's going to lead to these bad consequences. It just couldn't be clearer where the origin of all this is. I don't want to say it's exclusively with the war. That's overstating it. It is an overreaction to some of the crude races in the 1920s and 30s and then ultimately the war, and they did exist. The protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of the most bizarre books ever written, and

35:28it was believed by, I mean, this is the equivalent of Candace Owens, writing a book about how the Jews and the Egyptians came together to kill Charlie Kirk, even though it was this transgender dude who wrote on his bullets exactly why he killed him, announced it in his chapter, set it to his weird boyfriend. Hey, man, I just killed Charlie Kirk. What do I do? Yet we have these low IQ retards with millions of followers propagating this and that's exactly what was happening in the 20s and 30s, low IQ retards who would propagate things like the protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is purported to be written by the secret clan of Jews on how they're going to dominate the world. And I mean, this is very real and it's reactions against things like this that it actually does make some sense. I even have a little bit of sympathy even though I think it's wrong among these left wingers who are like, well, if you do acknowledge some realities, the low IQ and the population,

36:30probably are going to misuse it actually. They're not wrong about that. Yeah. It reminds me of the Catholic Church not allowing people to read the Bible because they may maybe read it wrong. Yeah, exactly. That's the crazy thing. It's just certain things that needs to be put behind the curtain. Now that's correct. The, I was listening to a video, some YouTube channel has stumbled upon and he casts the political landscape right now as a pitch battle between universalism and particularism. And what defines the right from my point of view? I mean, there's the conservatives who are basically liberals. They're all differences are cultural and we probably shouldn't even talk about them. The Buckleyites that want to keep the birch society at bay to use the historical reference. But what beyond them outside of that liberal domain, that liberal pocket and there's like, there's progressive liberals and there's conservative liberals and most conservative. But the majority in power is basically in the liberal world order, whether Neocon or

37:34Neolib. But outside of that, on the right, there is a yearning for particularity. Whether that be tradition, whether that be ethnicity, whether that be religion or whether it be, I guess there could be a market or the techno kind of yearning for uniqueness, exceptionality, something that above and beyond the flattening, gooey vacation of the world that liberalism seems to exert on everybody who is living in that multicultural environment that has to give up their culture in order to be a part of that. And certain cultures are more prone to giving up their particularity. And Kevin McDonald writes a lot about this and he's kind of on the, I don't know how far you think he is in the elder of Zion camp and stuff like that. But he's very strong with Northwestern Europeans are particularly anti-tribal. They marry outside of their clan, their exogamous, exophilic.

38:39They're where liberalism comes from because they're basically liberal in constitution. But they can be that liberal tendency can be overwritten or manipulated to make them behave against their own self-interest. Yeah. In fact, you don't need to step into this very controversial co-opness, McDonald debate, which is on the role of Jews and promoting liberalism and so on, to recognize that part of what you just said, the part that you attributed to McDonald on the uniqueness of Westerners, the so-called weird traits, Western educated industrialized rich democratic. The primary characteristic of which is really individualism, the willingness to tolerate very different worldviews and to trade with strangers, rather than just favoring kin and clan. Just to put a little footnote there, individualism actually is the ability to recognize that there is difference among people and being able to, it's not just a hyper individualistic

39:42Nietzsche and Ubermerge. That's right. It's actually commerce with among differences. I'm glad you clarified that and moreover, it involves things like the willingness to and the ability to defer to impartial systems of law. Yes. So do you, when you're in a jury, do you tend to uphold the rule of law above seeing group differences? And there are group differences in those attitudes. They're very clear. And Game Theory is the scenario close to my heart because I used to teach experimental game theory as part of my classes. And these observations are old and they come from, not just Kevin Donz, it's Joseph Henrich at Harvard who wrote the book, The Weirdest People in the World and actually way back in the early 2000s, co-authored some fascinating papers on how different groups play games like ultimatum games, how generous are their offers? Do they only make those offers to kin or do they make them to non-kin? And so this is an important point.

40:43This is an offer to how do you punish people that are in versus out of your group? Absolutely. And so there's, as far as I can tell, there's zero disagreement among those in the know, even just cultural anthropologists who tend to lean very far to the left. If you actually look at the observations, are Europeans extremely different than other groups? The answer is unequivocally yes. And they're the same way 500 years later, when they colonize New Zealand and Canada and the US, they act just like they did in Sweden and just like they did in the UK, etc. And that does, I'm not taking a stance on what explains that, but it's an interesting feature of reality. And if there's even the remotest bit of tie to genes there, if there is something like that, an henrich hints at it, because he talks about cousin marriage rates and bands on cousin marriage, I actually don't think that's the main explanation, but a thousand other factors on cousin marriage.

41:44What's up? What would be another factor? There can be evolved personality differences. I mean, the Greeks sure look a lot like modern Europeans too, even though they didn't have the Catholic Church banning cousin marriage and so on. So, you know, it's unclear what the explanations fully are, but it's clear that there are sets of explanations that are not considered okay, but people notice them and they read between the lines and they do infer things about genetics. I will say that the tie with liberalism is especially interesting, the final paper that I did publish, which was last year as an academic, it's called Cann liberalism laughs, demographics, or demographic demise. And the future of liberalism and we do make some of these notices where, you know, China, we quote some documents about China being just an explicitly racist, ethnocentric society and I'm not using that word as good or bad, but neutral. If you play that out over a thousand year period and you have something like an infinitely

42:46open society to cite, you know, Karl Popper, the open society and its enemies and you just have expanding amounts of empathy and, you know, whether you call it pathological altruism as Barbara Oakley did that's not from God's side, even though he claims credit. It's actually Barbara Oakley. I don't believe God's side would take credit for such a thing. He's okay, but he does like to take a lot of credit for things. Anyway, yeah, whatever the explanation is, like if you have a liberal society that just prizes toleration above everything else, you're seeing what's playing out in Spain right now. And then you have another society that's competing against it. Okay, maybe it doesn't destroy itself in 10 years or even two generations, although it might actually, but over 100 years, over 500 years, some form of tribalism will prevail because genetically societies do select over the long run for different kinds of traits and you're going to select over the long run within liberal societies for more tribal

43:47people. In fact, it's measurable. It's again, Dr. Jonathan Height. Yeah. You know, he's done studies. I mean, you can show across the world within countries, more conservative and reactionary people tend to have more children and between countries, more conservative, traditional, religious, tribalistic countries have more children. Over enough time, I think that does have consequences for culture. You're making me think that there's this critique of racism. Racism didn't even exist as a concept until X number of years, but it seems kind of... 100 years ago. Yeah, 100 years ago. But it seems like the way that a liberal Northwestern European would notice the differences between their race and another while still maintaining some sort of individualistic open kind of what we consider right now Christian empathy for all men creating equal, just saying there's a superiority between this type of person that it's like a broadening of that tribalism and then a projection of it onto society or using the Darwinian lens on these different

44:50lineages and stuff like that. I'm wondering, do you know much about the Indian caste system and it was that way to articulate these differences between groups or is that kind of just a different example of how just basically society is ordered or is there a racial component to in the articulation of masses amount of people at scale? I am going to defer to Reseeb Khan who lives down the street for me on this topic. You should have him on. He gets talks on this regularly. He studied it quite a bit and I'll just hint at his view which is this is a perfect case of what henrich and boy and others call gene culture co-evolution. So it almost certainly started out as a genetic caste system right. You've got these these Aryan invasions or migrations however you want to conceive of them somewhere through violence, somewhere slowly through trade and it's very clear that there was a genetic component to it but you know it doesn't have to be strictly you know you're

45:51this race I'm not race I mean that's not how race works anyway there's always some genetic overlap. Yeah. Well what happens is it gets reinforced through culture and then the culture creates more genetic differences potentially. And so yeah my view on that issue is well I'm not an expert but it looks like it's a case of gene culture co-evolution so even if it didn't start out as perfectly separate groups it starts to become that over time and Judaism is a lot like that. I'm half Jewish I'm you know mom's Ashkenazi dad is part Dutch part Irish and I really know interest I don't I'm not I didn't grow up religious I didn't know I was like half Jewish those at 13 you know mom told us so I have no special you know connection or whatever there but but it's interesting I mean looking at Judaism historically it's a perfect example of gene culture co-evolution it looks like the first mention of the Jews in Egypt is you know among the sea peoples you know who are after the Bronze Age collapse they're they're invading you know Egypt and there's some records of this group probably at the

46:55time was not especially significant like just a Semitic group among many and then they have a origin story you know a few hundred years later and probably a partly true origin story they flee Egypt and they they go over to this area that becomes Israel and it was called Israel back then these guys that say all that was owned up for 1948 have you read the Bible like of course they were bashing Philistines back then just like they were bashing the Philistines three thousand years ago right and and vice versa and fighting it out with them this is a perfect example of gene culture co-evolution can you start out as probably not especially genetically different from the other Semitic people then you have an origin story and make very clear I mean Judaism is super clear that these rules apply to the Jews and not the Gentiles yeah and that's a very adaptive approach by the way that's something that probably co-offness and McDonald can agree on yeah it is quite adaptive to have a kind of in-group preference that doesn't mean that you despise all out groups or anything like that automatically and it focuses your attention

47:59who do you cooperate with who do you trade with it's actually quite adaptive yeah yeah and then later you know it becomes much more universalistic but yeah that's a perfect example of you might call it a kind of genetic if not cast it kind of looks like that you you said that your paper was about can liberalism last yeah can can the people who are liberal last can the Northwestern Europeans is that what we're cut there's anxiety around whites having racial solidarity and also anxiety about the loss of racial identity from the right-wing groups that I see which was called racism but I think that there's a real anxiety there and that's why they kind of despise liberalism because they see liberalism not as a ideology that might be killing itself but an ideology that's killing the its host population that's original founders I'm wondering if that if there's some crossover about the anxiety about white identity and how do we manage that as a as a reality or as an

49:03ideology or to what degree I respect people feel that way I don't know how you'd ever like get out of the mess that we're in now by using that alone to promote your your cause but yeah I mean I'm not foolish enough to take a strong stance on this and go on record one way yeah yeah yeah yeah but I will say there that's one camp and then the other camp is an interesting one old colleague of mine at Duke University named Alan Buchanan it's quite a famous maybe the most famous living political philosopher um he's written a few dozen books and he's broadly speaking a libertarian but little leans a little bit to the left but not on all issues you know he's a gun owner he's uh you know he's kind of like liberal in immigration but he's also very right-wing on a lot of issues but let's just call him a left a left libertarian or a classical liberal or something like that he's written a couple of books now his last two books and he's at the end of his career here in his 70s and they're both about whether or not we can escape from tribalism and that's actually the title the one of those books

50:07okay yeah that's a very safe way of talking about what we're talking about and but he agrees with that he actually thinks so it's the opposite of this view that you just described which is he's really worried that liberalism is quite fragile and he goes through the history of it he's one of the experts in the world on the topic and he says it is fragile it it might not last actually and he even says I mean it only arises in certain conditions I mean you have this culture he would call it culture probably rather than genes where you've got some of these traits in Europe and you've got literacy and individualism and so on and then you get rich because of impersonal markets and when you're rich you can afford to treat strangers with kindness rather than hostility but cannot last forever well he's worried that the answer is no and so you could be on the one side like a white nationalist or you could be the most dedicated liberal in the world whose main goal is to preserve this and they actually agree to some extent on what the threats are to liberalism which is it's it only thrives under very unusual conditions and our founders said the same thing

51:12right yeah only in a virtuous high-trust society with with people who are more or less similar to one another um can it can it go beyond that it's like you can and hope so but doesn't necessarily think so well the state of modern Britain is case case day I always think uh in terms of these questions that we're talking about now you have Israel on one hand being very strong and it's will to survive and it's making lines and it's enforcing them whether or not you're for them or against them they are going to be around for another hundred years they're making sure that that's going to happen then you're the only yeah they're the only western country that has above for replacement fertility well yeah it's the only one yeah on that uh even on that front too um but then you have the UK it's like it's it's leadership class is literally selling out it's like here Starmer spent more time deriding his native people and lifting up foreigners than than the

52:14inverse at all and it's like this suicide pack that has with it seems like it I guess died in the world liberals would call that not liberalism they'd call it progressivism or something but you see the strains and the echoes of the liberal ideals like kind of coming to a conclusion and how do you advert that how do you go back from that yeah and I will okay let me steal man classical liberals for a minute so if you read John Stuart Mill who's the arca archetype of liberalism it's really John Locke and John Stuart Mill and everyone else is a footnote John Rawls lots of johns because they're British right but you know they're manglos certainly Locke would have never imagined you know mass migration and open borders he didn't think we should tolerate Muslims like at all they couldn't be trusted or atheists for that literally they or or atheists yeah then there's John Stuart Mill who's a little more part of the prime liberal on those issues but it's a feminist but he's not he's not liberal on on the border he's very clear actually that you have to have

53:14kind of national pride and and kind of civic you know education and so on and then James Buchanan the modern economist who's the great classical liberal even even Milton Friedman you know you can't have kind of open borders and a welfare state you can't have open borders and this you know this system of basically kind of anti-government checks and balances you know anti-government power so there's a way of course of defending liberalism while saying it relies on closed borders or relies on a homogenous culture or whatever the problem is and I say this in the paper it's not especially controversial in my view once you get this ideology especially post-war that what liberalism also is let's progressive liberalism is it's got this universal pretension like all cultures should be liberal democracies and it's got these treaties which are meant to prevent you know another holocaust are meant to prevent these these aggressive wars that are both self-defeating

54:15for Germany and Japan and other defeating right didn't make anyone better off it just made the world worse off how do we prevent that well if there's another holocaust or another situation like that let's have refugee treaties which is what those were born of right in those extreme cases next time let's just let people migrate and then we don't have a holocaust well what does that get turned into it gets turned into basically just infinite people from the third world just cross the border and we have a we have not just a right but an obligation to treat them is just like everyone else so so you could say that liberalism just happened to evolve this way and doesn't have to be this way I actually think that's wrong I've given it a still an encase for it but I think it's wrong I think there's a tendency toward universalism and again it has something to do with human psychology and it's going to be even worse if the weird traits are especially concentrated among Europeans and especially absent in certain other groups that would like to come to Europe

55:17or European countries is this where eugenics is at least at least at least at per per per or like the most uncomfortable time to bring it up why not yeah I mean I was thinking if you're weird and that's your value set it's it's one question about eugenics as a process of manipulating the traits of your kin so that they could perform better as you see it it's the kind of the same thing as reading history through your own lens like looking back at the past and judging the people for being let's just say racist though all these racist writers well that's your point of view being projected on the past isn't it something to be wary of that your point of view is being projected on the future through eugenics and if the weird traits you think of are adaptive to success are not going to be later on down the road like how do you how do you have these firm firm enough grounding morally and I guess realistically to be able to project into

56:21the future traits as good yep there are no guarantees and as I like to say because I'm usually interviewed on the eugenics topic or genetic enhancement topic because that's what my company does you know embryo selection using polygene scores we were the first to do IQ etc I'm often asked about that and and what this what the implications will be for the far future will it be good bad on that and what I usually say is technology is a tool and this is why culture matters and why institutions matter if people are selecting mates or selecting embryos or selecting gametes you know let's say you're an infertile couple and you have to have a sperm reg donor you know and you want to have kids and that's perfectly reasonable my friend has cancer right now and he froze a sperm because well if he doesn't want to have a kid later he's going to need to do that well once you freeze your sperm how about maybe sperm selection or you know you're going to have to go through IVF you know potentially if you freeze your eggs and what are you going to choose well as this technology

57:26gets better and better and we're moving toward gene editing of course and then eventually synthetic genomes that will come and that will be used by some segment of the population there's there's no doubt about that what do you mean by synthetic genomes that's craic ventures and inventions so venture was the first person he recently died actually is the first person to sequence the human genome in the year 2000 you might have remembered that he made the announcement with Bill Clinton right right before Clinton left office and and then in 2009 and 2015 he followed it up with creating the first synthetic genome where he had essentially as he put it this is the first form of life to have a computer as a parent he strung together amino acids which are the basis of DNA to create the minimal synthetic genome needed for a bacterium to survive and replicate and he did it and is it still around he just died recently I mean is that bacteria still around no no there yeah any

58:26any kind of synthetic biology like that they usually want to make sure that it doesn't you know go out into the wild not that there would have been a problem with it because all he was doing is taking the exact same genome of an existing bacterium and seeing whether you could create it day no which which he did if you can do it for bacteria you can do it for people and this is why I think a lot of the stuff that focuses on you know editing single genes or whatever like that's already been done and okay maybe it's a little clunky right now within 10 years it's going to be super easy the real game in town is embryos selection using polygamyx scores which is what we do you can get much bigger gains yeah or massive multiplex editing where editing lots of genes or synthetic genomes which is in some ways easier than multiplex editing anyway the reason that we mentioned this or that you mentioned I guess is look once this technology is viable and of course the one I just described already is we're offering polygamyx selection but let's go farther into the future where it's more powerful some people are going to use it and it raises an interesting

59:30question which is what traits will they select for I wrote a book on this topic called creating future people and yeah that was back when I was an academic I wrote it at Oxford in in 2019 2020 that's when I met Nathan who's a grad student Nathan Coffness and that book was just an exploration of like what will people choose actually what's the evidence and how will these individual choices maybe for you know will they choose personality intelligence height you know will that be good or bad from a social standpoint can you choose a mall no because I mean look if you create a synthetic genome well you can do whatever you want more or less right yeah you can wire in like the best in the worst of yourself or yourself and your partner there's all kinds of possibilities but right now for polygamyx selection you're just touching up the margins choosing your partners by far the best thing you can do you know so choose well but but you know there tends to be like let's say that you choose a bright partner and you're pretty bright well there's regression to the mean so if you just have sex normally well you know your kids will probably look more or less like you

1:00:35and your partner but they will tend to be a little closer to the mean with respect to whatever you care about because entropy is the norm that's the natural thing you're an outlier she's an outlier yeah the kids will probably be outliers but they're going to tend to be a little bit closer to the norm in the absence of selection or editing or whatever and over time that has huge consequences I mean this is something Daro and worried about if you if you have fewer and fewer children which we have in the world but it's pushing the west and we don't have war disease and famine because of antibiotics because of peacemaking institutions etc they're real benefits to that right we live long good lives that's for sure you know I don't want to give up my antibiotics or lack of war on the other hand you become not only potentially spiritually weak which I think is true we become mentally obese so to speak but given enough time and Daro was worried about this unfavorable mutations are going to tend to pile up so congenital blindness congenital short

1:01:36sightedness whatever you know some would say yeah whatever it is of course if you're saving every person and then they have children they're going to pass those things along in a way that war disease and famine would have prevented and so basically there's going to be a couple of ways out of this natural entropy one is ring those back the other is intentional selection partner selection embryo selection editing and well I think that's the more optimistic thing but I will say to follow up on that I mean the question you asked about is what traits will people select I think the preliminary evidence is pretty good they tend to select health and especially mental health traits over everything else okay then they look at intelligence or IQ and then they look at other things they don't tend to prioritize like height over you know mental health or something but it's going to get weird right it's going to get really weird in the future once you have good genome-wide association studies for personality traits and so on and what does the future look like

1:02:37the future as we know demographically is quite literally African like there's there's basically going to be no way around that if you just look at the demographic lines half of the world will be sub-Saharan Africa in our lifetimes not without re-China no China is dramatically falling their birth rates are so low that they've already peaked with their population level and it's just going to start falling really dramatically yeah even India is at peak fertility they've already hit that curve where they're starting to go below replacement sub-Saharan Africa is still exploding in population and yeah they're just going to be billions and billions of Africans maybe half a million Europeans maybe you know a few hundred million eight hundred to a billion uh you know Chinese and Indians etc so that is when these technologies will mature and that is an open question what kind of political societies these people will develop how they use the technology and my view is there are no guarantees again technology is a tool okay I think some people are

1:03:42going to use this really well yeah and some people are going to want to form authoritarian governments that control it and create complacent high IQ weirdos what's your desire of your fear if you take off your academic sciences that put on your speculative fiction hat that's my fear is that some people you know I'm going to split the difference between the kind of vitalists that I described earlier and and the kind of IQ academics I mean one reason some of these guys focus on IQ so much is it's easy to measure and it is positively correlated with a huge number of of good life outcomes but it isn't everything there is you know it doesn't IQ and bravery are not the same thing IQ and empathy IQ and weirdness are not the same things and one of the things the vitalist get right is overemphasizing IQ is not in my view taking my that this is both my academic view and my personal view it's not everything that it's cracked up to be

1:04:45it's an enabler but it's certainly not the whole story of what makes humans beautiful or interesting or creative and we should really focus on those especially when we're thinking about the long the long future and what traits really make a civilization go well not just what traits you want your kid to have in a particular moment in time you bring up mental health you brought mental health and people selecting for mental health what is that I guess is it kind of like a Aristotelian balance of a little bit of neuroticism a little bit of psychopathy a little bit of this a little bit of that yeah there's that but what I really meant is we have pretty good predictors for things like schizophrenia and okay so avoiding negative that's what I really blame yeah okay yeah yeah yeah like we've had just to take an example we have a customer now who's four months pregnant she came to us because I think believes she had two family members with schizophrenia and this was like really extreme like violent hallucinations where they had to be

1:05:46institutionalized and then other family members with bipolar some of whom had both and there is genetic overlap between those two things there's a common genetic architecture and I mean there's that's just unequivocally bad there's nothing good about having schizophrenia even if there probably is an advantage as I mentioned earlier to having at least some of the same genes that lead to that and that your point is we'll take in psychopathy is not an all or nothing trait these are these are not binary psychopathy is just a diagnosis you get if you score above a certain number on this on this diagnostic and it's very clear like those people that is very bad it's unequivocally bad for society and probably for themselves because they end up in prison but if you had little bits of that and other people have less of it that's probably a good thing you want some cognitive diversity in the world yeah some are more likely to be leaders and maybe manipulative in good ways and others will be manipulative in bad ways and we just let that kind of play out yeah and to go

1:06:47back to what you're talking about about culture and institutions that regulate and incentivize yes emphasize different traits yeah and like the cool thing about like let's say liberalism one thing probably everyone could agree on is liberalism does allow the most creative people to kind of do their thing which is very good right it's very good not only for the arts but especially for the sciences having true intellectual freedom to pursue weird ideas yeah and living in a society that's rich enough that you can afford to just subsidize people full-time to work on weird scientific projects it's not just liberalism or the money it's also the high-trust aspect of it yes something that is corroding and it does seem to be correlated with group solidarity or homogene I don't know to what extent liberalism or the past 60 years of the civil rights movement has gone to open keep the society open keep trust high in our society especially with mass immigration happening on I don't think there's any cultural institution that's going to be able to regulate it

1:07:52like the 90s halicon days of like everything was great wasn't there was tons of racism and stuff but I remember the television shows normalizing relationship between blacks and whites that I didn't even really think I was racist because there was nothing every piece of media that I saw said racism bad multiculturalism good but there was still not that big of a difference between the white American and the black American we're basically kind of all within the same culture but with this flood of Islam other people from other countries coming in like there's no regulation to make me feel the same I don't know that there was that super bowl half-time show this past year which was bad money I think and it was a totally different culture it was the totally good time no really there we go it was interesting it was like okay well that's a different culture than me how do we all get along I don't know but I guess the other Puerto Ricans were embarrassed but I pop our butts in the street yeah yeah right yeah by bad buddy but no that's right so a

1:08:58couple of comments on that I mean first of all you're right that there is a negative correlation between trust and diversity it's so bad that every academic study that has looked into it including the ones that want to find no relationship have found it now they'll argue their way around it you know you've heard of probably you know putnam study on this which he you know read a book about called bowling alone etc but 20 years later there was a meta study and I cite this we cite this in our paper can liberalism last just looking at every study that was published on the relationship between cultural diversity slash immigration and social trust in every single major study found a negative correlation that is pretty damning and this is why like some liberals are are rethinking these views on immigration can you actually turn that back unclear but but I don't think that's even a deniable point that's just social scientifically correct what

1:09:58you do with that information yeah is is an interesting and separate separate point well that I guess that that brings the conversation full circle because the the people who are willing to admit that there might be racial differences but come on there's too much baggage there and we can't go forward with our society it seems like it's gonna there's a reason it's coming up and yeah I see a lot of problems I don't know how to get out of the situation but what do you think that the proper way to approach the conversation to have the conversation to introduce the conversation is I guess maybe we were performing it this past hour and a half but yeah do you think that conversation is important how do we have the conversation and then what's the point of the conversation yeah good uh so clearly important or I wouldn't have taken time out of my day you wouldn't you wouldn't have taken time out of your so I think it was a great conversation and it needs to be had more um having said that I've lost my faith to some extent that and it was a faith that discussions

1:11:03like these have a big effect I think I think um they do on the margins so there are people who are just genuinely intellectually curious and open-minded and and they just want to kind of figure out yeah how do I make sense of the world and so I think you know identifying the different camps which I tried to do and and you're kind of figuring out which camp you're in and cough misses and I am you know I think that's important and kind of clarifying the issues but I doubt that this will have a huge change on things I think people are ideologically driven and the evolution of ideology is it's an emergent order to use a term from Darwin and Hayek in biology we're familiar with emergent orders that's what species are you know from a few simple laws and mutations and in economics prices are emergent orders and and and in politics you know part of there's a generation or components too yeah yeah so there are people who really push and they're more influential than others and actually hemorrhage's best book is not the the weird book it's the book

1:12:07called the secret of our success about how we've evolved to actually mimic the thoughts and actions of leaders we we mostly are NPCs we humans but we figure out ways to find people who are role models and then just copy them and so what's going to happen is the evolution of ideology is an emergent order but there are people who have more power more charisma than others they're not always academics in fact they almost never are and for better or worse it's it's people who are whether it's like what's his name Medi Hassan Hassan Piker I don't even follow these retards but you know him on the left or Fleth has on the right or whatever whatever your thoughts are and these are polar opposites right they have way more influence than you and I are ever gonna have right that and that's just predictable once you understand human psychology nevertheless I think it's worth having these conversations for people on the margins then and I'll offer my own little just my teaser of what I think would be better than what we have now politically and that was the follow-up to this paper

1:13:10can liberalism last my co-author and I wrote something called enlightened tribalism where we tried to say look we are tribal creatures some version of tribalism will prevail over liberalism on a long enough time scale and let's just identify what are the features of tribalism that can last for long periods of time give us the benefits of liberalism like reciprocity and trade with strangers which makes both richer yeah both parties better off and low corruption institutions and exactly but forming institutions that the leaders are self-consciously aware can be easily undermined by too much toleration too much diversity etc and so I think there can be a kind of enlightened tribalism that learns from the the terrible mistakes of World War II which is like pathological tribalism which literally made the tribe worse off right yeah our Germans better off or worse off because of World War II I mean is the UK worse off or better off exactly the losers and the winners

1:14:15every single one of them are worse off right okay so this is pathological tribalism can we have a kind of enlightened tribalism I think we can I made my gesture at that with the paper and light and tribalism so yeah what is the is there is there an ideological component like a story like is it Christian is like how would you communicate that to a four-year-old like through stories you know like the the bedrock it's yeah I mean it's it's that there's always going to be some preferred group a tribalism is natural to us our friends are a kind of tribe right you treat your friends better than you treat strangers you treat your community this is so so obvious right everyone takes it for granted you treat you treat your sports team better than you treat the other sports team tribalism is part of our nature it actually is good it gives our lives meaning it gives rise to the special relationships that are friendship and family and community but it can also be bad

1:15:18and it's bad when you when you unjustly let's just say tarnish the outgroup or have this kind of irrational hatred toward the outgroup rather than seeing outgroups as not you and maybe even being not as good as you on some level or something right there's always going to be show of it show of feminism among among groups but nevertheless not worthy of exterminating and possibly worthy of cooperating with on mutually beneficial terms but not on terms that are suicidal that exhibit suicidal compassion and again you can use the word suicidal empathy that's God said I think a much more interesting and nuanced term is pathological altruism from Barbara Oakley she wrote a book on that topic and I think it's a much better book actually than Sad's book hmm yeah so Jonathan if if somebody wants a better baby how do they how do they reach out to you well I think they should choose their partner mainly but yeah if you're interested

1:16:21what are you guys working on a dating app too like is that like a double business model we're not you know but what you can do I mean you can actually it's kind of wild nobody does this really but you can task potential partners we can do we can stimulate sorry stimulate we can stimulate sexual recombination stimulate sex now we can simulate sexual recombination by sequencing parents or prospective parents and then recombining those genes in a model you know 500 times that's what we do and then you can look at realistically what are your kids likely to exhibit and then when you go through IVF if you do it then of course you can get a reference range and then it's kind of like should we do another cycle or you know we good enough now but people could in principle do that for you know a dating app I think it's decidedly unromantic and I'm I'm not going to do it yeah right you know but yeah if they're interested in you know doing kind of IVF and embryos screening yeah they can come to my company is harisite after the goddess Hera

1:17:23you might recognize I'm obsessed with Greek mythology I think the Greeks are the high point of human civilization I have a Greek image on my book which is Hera and Zeus the goddess of fertility and family and I start every chapter of my book with a Greek parable if we could go back to the values of the Greeks but use and harness the technology from from Darwin and Mendel and Crick and Watson then I think we're in my my ideal world some call this archaofuturism just how I rate our our in love with the Odyssey Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey were you did you not see it and I don't plan on seeing it I'm more a guy that I'm a book reader and I think movies mostly spoil spoil the original I mean my favorite book for example is in terms of novels is Lilita I think it's the most evil beautiful dark poetic book written in the last 200 years

1:18:27and you can listen to it on audio because Jeremy Irons does the audio he has that sinister dark beautiful voice but if you watch the movie it just corrupts it and that's considered a good movie version of a novel it just goes down from there so I do not watch movies on the novels for the books that I really love well you're one of my favorite people to talk to where where do you host your content and I know you write books this is probably available on a link them but do you have like a a regular no just on my website everything pretty open access that's just Jonathan dash anomaly.com I I don't have a sub stack by design we I hope right the sub stack my company hasn't okay I'm of course now I'm writing academic papers on highly kind of scientific technical topics for the company because we have to publish on you know how do we develop polygenic scores how do we validate them yeah wow mostly engaged in that but yeah cutting and just a climb on the website well I had a terribly great time today with you and I hope that you have great time don't break

1:19:32any legs or limbs or lose your life surfing down south I will not and I love listening to your content too because you're you're so open-minded that you can have a good conversation even with people you disagree with and that's pretty rare because it's not especially profitable you're the anti-candace Owens and talk to the professor it gets me in trouble not because of what I think but because the with the people who I I listen to who you interview yeah that's a good trait out so I appreciate it yeah thank you my my parents combined in such a way to create me you have a great day and I'll talk to you later thanks you too bye bye