Red Scare - Sailer Socialism w/ Steve Sailer
Episode Date: May 7, 2024America's most unpopular pundit Steve Sailer stops by the pod to talk about his new anthology Noticing....
Transcript
Discussion (0)
We're back.
We have a very special guest today, all the way from his impeccably manicured golf course
lawn in SoCal.
It's Steve Saylor.
Congratulations on your anthology noticing.
Well, thank you.
Thank you very much.
It's great to be here.
Steve, you're like our candy man. We, we said your name so many times on the
podcast that you finally showed up.
It's kind of surreal, honestly.
I'm here. Yes.
How do you feel after your whirlwind tour?
Yeah, it's a, this book tour of Los Angeles, Austin, Miami,
West Virginia, New York.
It's been great.
I recommend to everybody if you get a chance to do a book
tour on your publisher's dime, jump at it.
It's very enjoyable.
Yeah.
And what are your impressions of my neighborhood,
which you've been to now twice in one week?
Is the human biodiversity up to snuff?
Oh, yeah, it's fascinating.
Yeah, I did a dinner at an extremely formal uptown
urban club on the Upper East Side on Wednesday night and then last night, Friday night,
we went to a basement in Chinatown
that was packed standing room only,
extremely downtown experience.
So yeah, it's been wonderful to see
two different sides of New York.
Yeah, you're taking it in all of that. That's a great city has to offer.
Um, my first question, well, for people who don't, well, you've been a
journalist for decades and this, um, anthology of your work is particularly remarkable because you're
sort of have been for a while kind of persona non grata in liberal media circles.
Yeah. Not sure why exactly, but that's definitely true.
Well, my question sort of, yeah, that kind of is what it is, but Anna has been a fan of yours much longer than me.
I was not super familiar with your work,
but like vaguely associate, you know,
I was like, is a white supremacist guy?
And then a couple of years ago, I saw a video of you talking and I was struck by your like
calm humane, like you weren't even even bigger. And you seemed very like innocent
and curious and and so then that's how I started to read your work.
Yeah, I'm in person definitely more agreeable and cheerful and not quite as sardonic as
I am in writing. And that throws a lot of people off. But yeah, for about 10 years, 2013 to middle of 2023, I basically did zero public appearances
because anyone that I got signed up for, then about a month later or so I get a message,
well, the hotel canceled our reservations for the conference cause I got some warnings from Antifa that they would come and
demonstrate and maybe smash up the place.
So, uh, yeah, so we're going to sue them and try to win us some
damages for canceling our conference.
But I go, okay, well, we'll try again another time.
Uh, but yeah, this here in 2024, I've done eight appearances
and they've all gone over tremendously well
with real polite, cheerful, enthusiastic audiences
and no trouble.
So, knock on wood that it can continue.
So yeah, I think there's kind of two sides,
the Jekyll and Hyde side, I'm sorry if in writing,
I may push a little too hard for the punchline
to come across as avuncularly as I do in person.
Yeah, what's the word that you like, ornery?
But are you on the radar of like the
ADL or the SPLC as a hated person?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, you know, but the Southern Poverty Law Center that for many years now
has been wiping out the last vestiges of Southern poverty
in its inner circles lifestyles.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has piled up
an endowment of $600 million on the back
of their genius founder, Morris Dees,
who's a member of the junk mail hall of fame
and just a wonderful fundraiser
until he got cancelled for various racist and sexist allegations a few years ago.
Anyway, they've usually if my name comes up the first thing on Wikipedia or
somewhere else like that is SP SPLC know like him,
and a lot of people take the SPLC seriously.
I consider them America's most lucrative hate organization
because they're really good at hating people like me.
Yeah.
But,
a lot of people think they're great
and don't pay any attention to their manifold scandals
over the decades that have been documented thoroughly by objective journalists.
So you get a reputation and it's hard to shake, especially if you're not allowed to appear
in public.
We'll see if anything changes.
Well, I was very touched by the fact that a lot of these guys at the dinner and the book
signing were lining up to say that, you know, they've been reading your work for like 15,
25 years.
Yeah, we're relatively new to it.
I started reading it during the pandemic because it was the pandemic.
I was pregnant and bored and I really relate to you as a person who everyone thinks is like evil and monstrous
on the internet, but is actually like quite agreeable and mild mannered in real life.
And I was going to ask you this question last, but I may as well just ask it now.
How do you feel about your new found popularity?
And especially, how do you feel about the fact that you have been effectively adopted by or
identified with the hard right? Well, I very much appreciate my new popularity with a new generation,
the new generation. Because my assumption had been that, oh, my readers are probably around my age or older. And as the years go by, more and more of them are going to drop
dead. And that's going to be a natural fading away of my fan base. you know what can I possibly do about that well I didn't do
anything about it but thanks to you all I have this new generation of fans and
including like last night at the event are we allowed to say the name of the
place I can't yeah it's called it's called Sovereign House,
which is like a basement downtown.
And so we have standing room only crowd
of 200 or something just packed in.
And everybody's young.
And for the first time I've ever made a speech,
it's like beautiful women,
dressed up in big night on the town dresses,
like no jeans, and I'm kind of a gog.
So it's a fascinating scene.
Generally, speeches I give across the rest of the country, it's a lot
of guys come up and, and maybe there'll be maybe 5% of the attendees will be their very
pretty girlfriends.
But, you know, last night I have all these beautiful young women coming up and saying
they always wanted to meet me and so forth.
So
Wow.
Amazing. saying they always wanted to meet me and so forth. So, yeah, that's totally a totally novel experience
in my 65 years.
Must be nice.
Well, Dasha made that great point at the dinner
that she asked about the demographic breakdown
of your readership by sex.
Yeah, because there were no women present at the dinner,
which was a smaller
Yeah, yeah makes which makes sense. I was at the the uptown
Very formal club where you know as soon as you walk in the door the doorman demands that you tighten
Your your necktie before you can take one step further into the inner sanctum
And that was that was fun, too. It was Extrem inner sanctum. Yeah. And that was fun too.
It was extremely uptown.
Yeah, kind of a different vibe than SovHouse.
Well, you mentioned 2013, you refer to this era
as sort of the beginning of the great awakening.
Yeah.
What do you think has shifted, I guess, in this, I guess it's been a decade of?
Yeah, I think I first noticed that there was a definite change toward more hysteria, more
censorship probably in the winter of 2013. It might have been that I've been, I was expecting it because
the other book I wrote was kind of a literary biography of Barack Obama in 2008, kind of
a reader's guide to his book, Dreams from My Father. And so I'd sort of read it very carefully along the lines
he recommended in a subtitle,
a story of race and inheritance.
And it was wildly unpopular at the time
to analyze Obama in his own terms
as a story of race and inheritance.
But the prediction I made at the end was, yeah, actually, I think Obama will get elected
in 2008 and I think his first term will be pretty moderate and pretty constructive because
he wants to be reelected.
But once he's reelected lame duck after 2012, then watch out. He's not going to restrain his staff from
carrying out their ideas about how to reorder American life. And pretty much right after the
election, you started seeing all sorts of stuff going on across the country and the kind of a ratcheting up of hysteria with huge increases in hate
hoaxes and so forth and just new causes.
Gay marriage had been sold as sort of a conservative traditionalist project to expand the purview
of the tradition of marriage.
But once that was clearly a sure thing in 2013, then suddenly the New York Times is
promoting the right of transgender X-Men MMA fighters like Fallon Fox to beat up women for money.
That it's a national crisis that, that Ms.
Fox is being prevented from fighting women in the MMA spring.
And that seemed kind of nuts in 2013, but by 2015 and
Keelan Jenner and everything, everybody thought, oh yes, of course this is the big thing, it's a crisis.
So lately, yeah, lately it seems like people are
calming down a little from the peak around 2020.
Do you think they're just exhausted?
Yeah, I mean, just kind of the manifold absurdities
of things, the boys and men in dresses trying
to take over women's sports and just knock girls and women
around on the rugby field or whatever.
It's just amazingly obnoxious.
And yet the Biden administration
is still backing them strongly.
And that's people are like wondering,
you know, what's going on?
We didn't really sign up for this.
Well, you attribute also some of the stigma
associated with you with your promotion of the book, the boy who would be
queen. What's,
Oh yeah. The J. Michael Bailey. Yeah. That you were,
you interviewed J. Michael Bailey who at the time was also like a person who was
noticing things about autogynophiles that you weren't supposed to say.
You were like the sort of the first to, to, um,
notice to call attention to the theories of Ray Blanchard and J. Michael Bailey And you were like sort of the first to notice,
to call attention to the theories of Ray Blanchard
and J. Michael Bailey on auto-gynophilia, right?
As a category distinct from homosexual, transsexuals.
Right, I mean, there are multiple categories
of people who are currently defining themselves as transgender.
An important one because the ones who tend to be prominent in some field before they
just decide that they're actually a woman, what I call the X-Men, tend to be the late onset
male to female transgenders.
And they're very interesting.
They tend to be high IQ.
I've seen one study, or Scott Alexander cited it
on his prominent blog,
suggesting IQs in the mid- 120s, which is very high.
They tend to be energetic, motivated, kind of ruthless.
So back in 2003, okay, but we're not supposed
to talk about them.
We're supposed to go with the
party line that they always felt like a little girl on the inside, even when they were a Navy Seal,
an Air Force pilot, military chopper pilot, like, you know, the most ruthless pilot in the in the nightcrawler era loss of local news in the 1990s the guy who who filmed from from his helicopter the whole OJ Simpson white
bronco chase and just got all in the it was the dominant news chopper pilot. That guy transitioned? Yeah. Well, okay. I have a question about the transgender issue because the,
it seems like the other two prominent camps of transgender are gay boys who
really do feel like women on the inside and want to be with straight men and
then like confused teenage girls.
And the AGPs have like effectively installed themselves as like the
spokespersons of the movement.
For instance, like we were talking about
on an earlier episode about an article
that this ex-man Andrea Long Chiu wrote about
kind of the moral case for unlimited transitions
for children.
And in it, she makes this claim that like,
well, transgender people are vulnerable,
they're marginalized, they're more likely to be raped.
And that's not exactly true.
It's true in the case of those two latter groups
that I cited, but it's not true in the case
of like the Caitlyn Jenner's or Jennifer Pritzker's
of the world.
And I think they have a very strategic desire
to collapse those categories.
But I guess the question that I have is like,
is this model due for an update to account
for yet a new category of like leftist new males
who transition basically for professional clout
and sexual access as far as I understand
it but are different from the autogynaphiles in that they while they're straight they don't
have any of the other markers like they're not older they're not richer they don't tend
to be married they're not high IQ they're not high IQ. They're not high achieving
They're just looking to be different and
Yeah, then there
You know there are
Constantly creating new categories
But they're they're kind of past my time. So yeah, your initial three category model is the one I'm familiar with.
The autogynophile fetishists who I call X-Men, you know, like I knew one at MBA school in 1981 and he was probably the smartest and
also the most arrogant fellow in the UCLA MBA program.
But yeah, he was basically a character out of a Robert Heinlein science fiction novel.
He explained to me, Steve, I am going to make my fortune in outer
space. I'm going to shoot rockets into orbit and do amazing things. It'll make me rich. And I'm like,
oh, that's great. But I, you know, it was 1981. I was like, nobody that's like a 1940s science
fiction book. The government owns all the rockets,
you can't do that, but I didn't tell him.
And so he went on to pretty much invent satellite radio,
and I ended up sending him a check for $25 a month,
and so forth.
But yeah, he was not, who knew him at NBA school ever saw him as having any feminine
characteristics at all and
But you know in a lot of ways he is kind of a hindline hero
One of the several children he fathered came down with a rare disease
he dropped everything in everything in his first career
and read medical textbooks and worked out a better treatment
for children with that and made a second fortune off that.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's very impressive.
Yeah, I do wanna make the caveat
that I'm not like being a hater
and some of these fellas are really like talented remarkable
Impressive individuals. They just happen to have a
sexual pair of
Yeah, and aggressive and antagonistic attitude to society
Yeah, so I mean the concern I have is you know, if they were just doing it on their own
God bless them, but the concern I have is that
they're so good at, I mean, I call them kind of
the Seal Team Six of cancel culture.
Because I saw this, you know, going back to the publication
of Professor Bailey of Northwestern's book,
The Man Who Would Be Queen about a little over 20 years ago.
And some prominent people, a leading economic historian
and a leading computer scientist teamed up with Morris Dees
of the Southern Poverty Law Center
to try to get Bailey and his academic colleague, Ray Blanchard of the University
of Toronto, canceled.
It was actually one of the few failures of Morris D's storied career because Morris
could see that this transgender stuff was going to be a huge moneymaker in the future, but for once in his life,
he got too far ahead.
If he'd run his campaign 10 years later,
he would've made a fortune off it,
but in 2003, 2005, people went, huh, what?
I don't know, this guy was, is this a man or a woman?
What are we talking about?
So, you know, poor Morris,
even Morris Dees can't get out ahead of the zeitgeist.
All right, but my complaint with the AGPs
is they've covered up the truth about themselves,
and that really helps confuse confused and depressed adolescent girls who are looking
around.
Nobody ever tells them, oh yeah, these prominent men who are cited as examples of transgenderism.
No, they weren't assigned the wrong gender at birth.
They don't have anything feminine about them.
They just have this sex fetish that some men have, but no females ever have.
And you know, don't pay any attention to them.
And yeah, sure, sure, you're a little worried about puberty and becoming a woman is a scary thing.
But lots of girls have done it before. You don't have to take these pills and
have surgery just because you're a little worried about it.
Sorry. Another question I have, there's an essay in Noticing from 2003, I think, about why lesbians aren't gay, that I found very enjoyable.
It's a very comprehensive taxonomy of male homosexual and lesbian behavior and the ways
in which they differ mainly.
But it's my impression that one of the categories
of transgendered people is our women who previously
would have just been like butch lesbians
and sort of had, you know, like, my question is,
I guess, are lesbians becoming irrelevant or in danger?
Are they going to stay?
Yeah, there's, somebody did like a count of lesbian bars
in the United States and a number of lesbian bars
has dropped to between one and two dozen
in the entire country.
That's crazy.
Yeah, there's really none in New York,
but could that also be because lesbians
are kind of home bodies?
Yeah, absolutely. There is one in...
And they're not big dancers and so forth.
I mean, that was one of the examples was gay bar activity
in my article, Why Lesbians Aren't Gay.
Gay men dance, lesbians shoot pool.
Lesbians play softball in the park, gay men sunbathe.
So yeah, lesbians aren't as motivated to get out,
meet strangers in bars and so forth.
So the age of virtuality fits them well.
But yeah, a lot of college campus.
What kind of lesbians that you describe, yeah.
There's a whole bunch of kind of feminine,
at women's colleges today,
there's a whole bunch of feminine looking people,
but with beards, wandering around,
who would have been prominent lesbians 20 years ago,
and now they're on hormones to grow beards.
It's pretty weird.
And the lesbians always did pretty well in leadership position because that's kind of
a, you know, feminine traits generally aren't conducive to high degrees of leadership.
But now lesbians would have naturally been a leadership class at a Smith College or somewhere like that,
a huge fraction of them are on testosterone now,
and they're growing beards, and their voices are getting deeper.
And of course, the regular women on campus
sort of respond to that, these kind of pseudo alpha male
traits that the ex-lesbians are developing in front of their eyes.
The extinction of lesbians is bizarre,
and I think we'll miss them when they're gone.
I sure will.
I went to a women's college in 2009,
and there was not, the ideology had yet to sort of infiltrate.
It was very much like a lesbian school.
It was the only school that ever reversed a co-edification
because there were so many lesbians that they were like,
we don't want to go to school with that.
Yeah.
So it's, I mean, you know, I mean,
there's a constant battle to get at the top of the pyramid of victimization.
And the transgenders, especially the X-Men, have been extremely dynamic at elbowing their
way to the very top along with the blacks and the lesbians have kind of been pushed aside you know
as well you're you know you may be kind of aggressive for a woman but ha ha ha
good luck compete good luck competing with fighter pile ex fighter pilots I
have a kind of a basic question about, so like you, you really like treat everything
from like golf course architecture to interracial marriage as like a metaphor or microcosm for
larger social trends, society at large.
I was really surprised and excited when reading your book to see references from everything from
like waiting to exhale you mentioned to Komar and Melamed and I'm curious where you think that comes TLDR of your origin story? Yeah, I mean, my personality or my approach worldview kind of grows out of the fact that I'm not particularly a contrarian. I look around constantly to see what smart, well-cultured
people are thinking about things. And even if I don't get it at first, I'll probably
assume that there's probably a point to what they like and I should probably assume, I assume that, you know, there's probably a point to what they like
and I should probably make an effort to figure it out.
So, but of course then I sort of, you know,
go back to my own private obsessions
like golf course architecture and baseball statistics
and stuff like that and try to tie everything together. So
Like the
Kola mid or what was the name again? Melomar?
Okay, so those are two artists who
Did a survey focus groups of what people in different countries want in a painting, what's their favorite
painting would look like.
And most of the ones, I mean, the Dutch went for something extremely abstract, but like
12 out of 15 countries, people wanted some kind of landscape with maybe a big body of water somewhere in the picture, maybe grasslands, some trees
but not a dense forest, some grassland flowing through several trees down to a lake or the
ocean.
And, yeah, I went and said, oh oh yeah, that's basically what people want
is something that looks like a golf course.
And that helps explain why a huge fraction
of the United States, something like the size,
size of the state of Delaware has been terraformed
into golf courses.
We have like 12,000 golf courses in the country.
If you look out the window of an airplane as it's landing in a big city, you can count
12, 15 golf courses on your flight path. You call it in your essay the great wasp art form.
Yeah, so it's probably some kind of evolutionary imprinting that what people like is grasslands,
but kind of at the edge of a forest where they can retreat to the forest if they need
to, but if they come out on the grassland
to like hunt for deer or something like that. I mean, there's a good scene in the movie Bambi,
where Bambi's mother takes him out to the great meadow
for the first time, where there's grass growing.
But it's dangerous because predators, like men,
can see them out there, so they have to be ready to flee back into the trees.
So this is just.
And then Bambi's mother is killed by a hunter, right?
Yeah.
But you mentioned in that essay,
I think that people enjoy something
that's like beautifully pastoral,
but has like a tinge, the threat of some sublime danger.
Yeah, I mean, Edmund Burke's dichotomy
from the beginning of the Romantic era in the 1750s
was there's the beautiful and the sublime
and at that point, coming out of the Age of Reason,
the beautiful would be a place extremely conducive to human habitation.
You know, the farm country of the Netherlands, something like that.
That, oh, we can grow a lot of food here, life will be productive and fairly easy.
And just in the mid 1700s, as you're switching from the age of reason to the age of romanticism,
there's a growth of interest in the sublime,
like the Alps or giant cliffs along the ocean
with huge waves where it's,
where basically if one bad step and it can kill you,
and Westerners really didn't have much interest in places that could kill you. And Westerners really didn't have much interest
in places that could kill them
until suddenly in the age of romanticism,
17 something through the 19th century,
all of a sudden they became obsessed with mountain climbing
and touring the highlands of Scotland,
which had been considered considered barbaric wasteland
until not that long before.
So a lot of the great golf courses,
the most famous ones like Pebble Beach and Cypress Point
are built along oceans with huge waves smashing into rocks
and you have this kind of pseudo sublime
where you you
risk not so much your own life as your as the life of your golf ball hitting it
across the ocean and that's considered the the peak of the golf experience can
I ask what the golf course is in your profile picture yeah it's that's um it's
the 18th hole at Cypress Point
on the Monterey Peninsula, south of San Francisco,
about a mile from Pebble Beach.
And no, I've never played Cypress Point.
Cypress Point is a ridiculously exclusive course club.
To join it really helps to be a secretary of state
in a Republican administration, like George Shultz
or Condi Rice.
Bob Hope said about it that they just finished
a successful membership drive at Cypress Point.
They drove out 40 members.
But I did sneak onto it when I was a teenager,
so I have fond memories. Very cool.
Well, maybe you will now.
Yeah, well.
You're on the open up.
You have prominence.
Yeah.
Okay, well, Condi, if you're out there,
give me a call.
Condi, if you're listening.
I think you'll get there.
Okay, I have a question about the elephant in the room race. Is race real? I tend to
think of race as you do as like an extended family that's somewhat inbred and gets blurry
on the margins. I think I said this on the pod years ago did not go over well. Yeah,
many people would probably say we're racist for thinking about race that way. I guess the real question that I have is how would you explain this all to a
person who believes who's convinced that race is not real and merely a social
construct?
Yeah.
The, the notion that race does not exist biologically,
even though, yeah, you can see it with your own eyes and you can
categorize people pretty well just by looking at them.
Your guesses usually tie up pretty well with their ancestry. This conventional wisdom probably goes back to the year 2000 when Bill Clinton
hosted a ceremony at the Rose Garden, the White House, for the Human Genome Project.
And one of the guest speakers was an entrepreneur who had done great work in speeding up the analyzing
of the first ever human genome, and his name was Craig Venter. And Mr. Venter is a great
salesman and he made a speech that told the public exactly what they wanted to hear at
that point in history, even though they hadn't really thought about it, which was, okay, we've done the human genome project. We've analyzed one genome, which was basically
Craig's, and we didn't find any evidence of race. Race does not exist in the human genome.
People just ate it up, and it just became a meme that swept through society,
even though you could ask questions like,
well Craig, basically most of the analysis
was of your genome, so how can you tell
that there's no such thing as racial differences
genetically when you just looked at your
highly white genome?
It's like sample size of wine.
Yeah.
Can you clean for me?
But Bill Clinton kind of ran with it.
Clinton wasn't the worst at it,
but it was really ventures, salesmanship.
And so people have totally gone with this
as a simplifying statement.
It sounds iconoclastic.
It sounds fresh and new.
It's kind of silly.
Ever since then, we've had genetics companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe, who have made
for at least a while now good living off of telling you what your racial ancestry is,
you know, down to a couple of decimal points.
You know, the founder of 23andMe,
she has her ancestry listed as,
it's basically 50.2 percent northwest European Gentile, 49.8
percent Ashkenazi Jew. That's you know well that's quite technically feasible these days But that reality and the Venter dogma about race does not exist genetically seem to co-exist
in people's minds just fine.
But on the other hand, old fashioned 20th century ideas of like, well, races are subspecies and so forth.
How useful is that?
I don't know.
I think the most useful way to think about it is think about families.
Think about your family tree.
Think about your relatives, you'll notice just,
you know, with you and your siblings,
there's probably quite a lot of diversity
between you and a brother or sister,
but you also have a lot in common.
With your first cousins, you don't have that much
in common genetically, but you probably got some traits
that definitely show up.
And if you meet a second cousin,
that's gonna be pretty distant,
but you're not hugely distant.
And all that can be done in numbers.
Over the course of the 20th century,
they figured out genetic relatedness in numbers, you know, over the course of the 20th century,
they figured out genetic relatedness
at various degrees of a relationship.
But, so what I think of as a racial group
is an extended family like that.
But it's a special kind of extended family, one where the family tree,
as you go back up in history through your ancestors, it undergrows what genealogists
call pedigree collapse, which is kind of an inevitable mathematical requirement.
So say there's a generation is 300 years.
So you have, so 300 years ago,
you had about 1024 open spots on your family tree,
1024 ancestors living 10 generations ago.
20 generations ago were 600 years you had a million, 900
years ago a billion, and 1200 years ago you have a trillion open slots on your family
tree. Now, were there a trillion people alive in Charlemagne's time? No. In fact, you're probably descended from Charlemagne
by multiple pathways.
Charlemagne did real well for himself, genetically speaking.
And so he probably pops up as an ancestor of yours
by a huge number of pathways, assuming, say,
that you're from Europe.
And so, there's this kind of pedigree collapse
where the number of unique ancestors you have
probably is maximized somewhere between 500 and 1000
years ago, and then beyond that,
it starts getting a smaller group.
But that's how racial groups can stay
somewhat coherent and distinct because they're partly inbred. Now Americans
naturally when they hear the word inbred they go yuck I want to think about that
that's horrible that's like Kentucky hillbillies. That's for Iraqis. Yeah, so yeah and now it actually turns out that you know large parts of
the world like Iraq have much higher rates of cousin marriage than we ever
saw in the United States. That was very interesting. Yeah, that has a lot to do
with the the political culture of Iraq. I wrote in 2003 just before the war
started that you that the Bush administration
says they're gonna nation build in Iraq,
they're gonna go in there and they're gonna turn them
around into a nice modern democracy like Germany and Japan
after World War II, and I said, nah, there's just problems
with that that Americans have never thought about,
like 40 or 50 percent
of Iraqis or couples are married to their first or second cousins.
And that creates really cohesive extended families.
You know, if your son marries your brother's daughter, then you and your brother will have a grandchild in common who
you can agree that that grandson can inherit the entire family herd of goats and there's
no need for fighting over it.
So that really builds cohesion in Iraqi society at the family level and kind of destroys it
at the national level of, okay, let's.
Citizenship, right?
Yeah, that's like the idea you have about
citizenism and like concentric loyalties.
That's the reason we have the culture that we do
in America is because we're able to build loyalties
through like
not interbreeding so much.
Right.
Coalition of the fringes.
It reminds me of that line,
I forgot who said it originally,
I've heard you say it,
I've heard Taleb say it,
it's me against my brother,
my brother and I against my cousin,
my cousin and I against the world.
That's kind of how I think of race relations
and family relations everywhere else.
Yeah, and the more you're actually related genetically
to your relatives, your closer relatives
by multiple pathways due to cousin marriage and a degree of inbreeding,
the more logical sense that makes
in terms of what William D. Hamilton in the 60s
called inclusive fitness.
That was an idea put forward by Haldane
as a pub quip in the 50s.
People would ask him, Professor Haldane, you're a great biologist, would you lay down your
life for your brother?
And he said, well, no, but maybe for two brothers or eight first cousins or 64 second cousins.
That would be about equal in terms of genetic relatedness to myself.
But when you start doing a lot of cousin marriage, you end up, those calculations get skewed.
And then it's like, well, sure, I've laid down my life for my brother or my especially my
cousins my fourth cousins and we're not that related to them the the citizenship
of this nation come on I don't share much with them in general have you ever
done a 23andMe yourself yeah um. Yeah. Okay. And just recently. Are you allowed to divulge it? Oh,
it came out what I figured. I, you know, I've always was told from a very early age that I
was adopted by my parents, my adoptive parents, but my parents parents. Wait, what? Yeah, I was adopted in 1958.
Wait, we know this.
No, I know.
Okay, yeah, so you're, yeah, I'm sorry.
I thought you meant that your adoptive parents
were your real parents.
No.
I was like, did they lie to you?
No.
Yeah.
No, they told.
Okay, sorry, I'm following now.
They were told, okay, you should tell your child
that he was adopted from very early on,
so like from age three.
And so I always grew up knowing that,
and kind of me being me, I always sort of thought to myself,
oh, that sounds reasonable.
You know, that seems like the best for all concerned.
Totally lacking in kind of the emotionally troubled, you know, undercurrents that you normally hear
about in interesting stories about people who find out they're adopted and
then immediately set out on a national quest to find their true parents, et cetera.
To me, it was kind of like, oh, okay, well, all right, my biological parents, they couldn't really make it work,
so they decided it would be best to give me up for adoption
to a nice couple who couldn't have children of their own.
So here I am, and, well, I'm an only child
during the baby boom, and I get more toys at Christmas than all my classmates.
So what did your 23 and me tell you?
I'm dying to know.
I'm I'm not going to go into that in particular because it's kind of tied into other people in my life.
Okay.
But yeah, it's basically what I've assumed since I was in high school or something and worked out.
The implications of, alright, why did my biological parents decide that this wasn't gonna work and so forth.
Your dad was black.
And no, but yeah, so then I go, oh,
well that's reasonable.
And yeah, it came out what I figured out
about age 15 or so, 50 years later.
Do you feel that your proclivity for noticing
has anything to do with
being adopted? Because I think like Dasha and I are both also noticeors in our own
way, which is why we gravitated toward your work. And I have to assume it has
something to do with like being immigrants.
Yeah, I think I think being adopted, you know, makes the Galtonian distinction between nature and nurture obvious
to me that all my life it's like, oh, okay, well, I have all this very nice nurture from
my parents, my adoptive parents, but I also have
some kind of genetic nature from my biological parents.
And so thinking in terms of nature and nurture
and all the interesting ways they can intertwine
is second nature to me.
I don't see it as kind of a strongly driving emotional
engine mostly because I don't,
I'm not, I don't really have all that many profound emotions
that deep down drive me.
I'm just, I'm kind of this surface level guy who's like,
oh, that's interesting, let's think about why that is.
But yeah, a lot of people don't like to think
in terms of nature and nurture and the balance
between them, but yeah, I'm constantly looking for
kind of the complicated ways that one
reinforces the other works against the other. Um, so yeah,
that's just, uh, that's just how I am.
And that probably added a lot to it.
Well, just, yeah, circle back to race.
One of the, um,
taboo ideas that you had the audacity to point out was that there
are IQ differentials and there's a very good article in your book, there's a
couple that deal with this, but about the moral responsibility that we have to the
left half of the bell curve.
Yeah, that was a really beautiful phrase.
And I thought, yeah, that that was a really
interesting way to articulate something that,
you know, people who would call you racist
would struggle, I think, to reckon with.
And it's sort of like how you said that
like women are able to opine against beauty standards,
but like when men take up heightism,
they're like kind of seen as like a laughing stock.
It's like, it's hard to,
well, it's hard to advocate for yourself
for a lot of reasons if you're on the left
of the bell curve.
But it is this sort of like,
in the left-hand of the bell curve.
But it is this sort of like,
liberals are more racist because they think that high IQ
is like inherently ontologically like good or something.
And so they it's seen as like rude or-
They like tell on themselves. Yeah, but of course there are acute differentials
and of course there are like racial gaps.
Yeah, so liberal intellectuals tend to conceive
of themselves as superior to the average American
because A, they believe that it's extremely racist and
discriminatory to think that there are any genetic influences on things like IQ
and B they think they're superior because they personally have higher IQs and the average dummy out there
So, you know, I'm not a big
ideologue, but
You know one thing that I've kind of
Moved toward over the over the decades from being kind of a smug run-of-the-mill Reaganite conservative
in the 80s is, yeah, here, you know, we have a whole lot of American citizens and on average
they're of average intelligence, which means that half of them are below average intelligence.
And those of us who are above average intelligence, we really do have sort of a national duty
to not exploit or just callously treat our fellow American citizens who are on the left
half of the bell curve. We need to be thinking about how to mold society
in such a way that they can live strong, fulfilling lives
without having three digit IQs.
It's kind of pushed me in sort of a John Rawlsian
veil of ignorance direction.
But like Rawls, it's also very hard to extend
that kind of thinking about, well, we do need welfare
state provisions and so forth to the entire world.
Rawls came back 20 years after his book, The Theory of Justice, that made
a huge splash and said in the law of peoples, well, you know, of course you can't have open
borders. You have to have limited immigration or, you know, people from countries that aren't
doing a good job of running their own countries are going to
just flood into the responsible countries.
So yeah, we need to have policies of solidarity and protection and welfare state for our own
people.
And toward the rest of the world, we need to respect their general rights and not constantly be
invading them and bombing them and so forth.
But we don't have to take in everybody abroad who wants to move to America.
There is no civil right, there is no zeroth amendment that says that the huddled masses
poem on the Statue of Liberty overrules the rest of the Constitution
and that we have to take in the wretched refuse of the entire world because they have a civil
right to move to America. So yeah, that's kind of the evolution of my thinking over
the decades.
I have a question that's sort of related. You once wrote that, quote, as legal and social
discrimination has lessened, natural inequalities have asserted themselves. I think you were
talking there about racial differences, but it also applies to sex differences. And of
course, those are always explained away by like ever more confected theories of like
systemic or structural oppression.
So what do you think explains the gap between, quote,
what we think we see with our lying eyes, as you say,
and what we believe we believe?
It feels, especially lately, like the more true and obvious
and accurate an observation is, the more people
feel the urge to deny reality.
I also really like that you inserted
that George Orwell quote,
to see what's in front of one's nose
requires a constant struggle.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts
on the kind of cultural, psychological mechanism
that makes it a requirement to deny reality
for most people.
To not know this, yeah.
Yeah.
Or at least most elites.
I mean, a basic reality in the United States is that different groups that are categorized
by the government as racial groups or ethnic groups that have somewhat different ancestry.
So using the government's categories, which is how a colossal amount of social science
data has been collected since, say, 1970, yeah, we do see differences in average cognitive
ability. The most notorious is the gap of about 15, 14 IQ points between
the average white person and the average black person in America. But keep in mind that that's
not a universal gap. What that says is, if you do the arithmetic,
it says that one out of six African Americans
is smarter than the average white American.
So that's-
That's like overlapping bell curves, right?
Yeah, that's like seven million people out there.
So do not assume that this applies to everybody. On the other hand, I have read
over my long career reading newspapers, probably 1000 articles about local school boards are
having a crisis over the fact that in their school district, blacks
don't score as high as whites on school tests.
And what kind of horrible racist thing are we doing that's causing that?
Well, you know, the reality is that Sean Reardon at the Stanford Education School looked at every school district in the country
and looked at the 2,000 biggest school districts
in the country and every one of them,
whites outscored blacks on average
for school achievement test scores.
So schools shouldn't go into crisis mode
I'm just I'm reviewing a book right now called disillusioned that among other things
tracks how the
Evanston
Public schools in Evanston, Illinois the home of Northwestern University
Have been melting down in one crisis after another since about 2016 or the fact that
The white students at Evanston outscore the black students
Well, the white students at Evanston are probably the smartest whites in the country
They have like the highest test scores for whites because most of them are the children of Northwestern University
professors who are really smart.
And the blacks are actually less middle class than the most suburban districts
because Evanston has both a black middle class,
people who've moved in over the last 50 years,
but also like 100 years ago, the upper crust of Evanston
who live in those magnificent mansions along the lakefront they they organized basically
this micro ghetto for the for their servants to live in and so there's like
this there's like this micro hood in the middle of Evanston,
it's like four blocks long
and it kind of looks like East St. Louis.
I've talked to middle class black parents in Evanston
and they go, ah yeah, we send our kids to Catholic schools.
The professors, the white professors' kids,
they can go to the public schools
because the underclass black kids behavior isn't
going to rub off on them, but it might be attractive to our children.
So we shell out a lot of money to send them to Catholic schools.
We have to do that here in Evanston.
All right.
All across the country, school boards have gone through contortions.
They've switched to, you know, let's have courses
that teach the wisdom of Ibram X.
Kendi and Robin D'Angelo and just a lot of nonsense
like that because it's easy to get them to feel guilty.
Why is there a gap between whites and blacks?
Well, there is everywhere.
There's usually bigger gaps between,
but other questions don't come up like,
why is there a gap between the Asians and the whites?
Why is the Asian test score, at least on the SAT,
just going through the roof in the 21st century?
The Asians have been pulling away from all the other races
on the SAT college admissions test,
like Secretariat winning the Belmont in 1973 by 31 lengths.
That's a real interesting phenomenon,
and I don't know exactly why it's happening.
It may not be happening to the same extent on the ACT.
Another one that people get concerned by
is why do Ashkenazi Jews outscore Gentile whites on average?
So there's all sorts of interesting things like that.
But you flip it around in
sports, why the black kids are probably going to play tailback on the Evanston football
team. They're going to play cornerback. They're going to be better at basketball. They seem
to be able to jump a little higher on average. There's all sorts of diversity out there,
both cultural and biological.
Yeah, but it seems like the kind of policies that liberals, that Democrats adopt actually
make the situation much worse. They make society much more racist and much more fractious. I mean, you've had a lot of great insights over the years
and a lot of great coinages,
Saylor's law of mass shootings,
Saylor's law of female journalism.
My favorite one is invade the world,
invite the world and so on.
But I think one of the best insights that you had,
which is actually very unpleasant and unsexy,
was that after 2020, Summer of Floyd,
the racial reckoning, you discovered
that the left policy of defunding the police
actually contributed not only to a huge spike
in black murder fatalities,
but also in black traffic fatalities.
He said something to the tune of 40% in each case.
And I know that you say that you really don't like talking about policy or
issuing predictions,
but I was reading the essay that you recommended that we read. Um,
what if I'm right? And it occurred to me that, you know,
the real title of that essay is I'm right now what you're sort of like the king of a porous. So what is to it's like
that famous Russian essay studio, what is to be done in a situation like that where
American leadership is reneging on its responsibility to black Americans
and has not in fact made them safer or better off
and in fact has shown that black lives don't matter.
Yeah, I mean, Will Rogers is back in the 1920s,
radio raconteur had a line of wisdom
which was that if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.
And in 2020, after George Floyd's demise, the American establishment just dug itself
a much bigger hole, especially a
dug it for black Americans by taking Black Lives Matter's
obsessions at face value and running with them and telling
the police to back off that you shouldn't be pulling over black
drivers for speeding as much or having an unsafe car
or making an illegal turn or something like that.
Because that could lead to you finding out that they have outstanding warrants for crimes
and maybe they're packing an illegal handgun
and then those are all crimes that you can get sent
to jail for and we don't want to do that.
We don't want to put black men in jail as much.
So the cops went, okay, so basically you want us
to retreat to the donut shop and not be out there policing
and they're like, yeah, that's what we want.
So America got de-policed very rapidly
over during the mostly peaceful protests
and the ongoing racial reckoning.
You know, I didn't make up the term racial reckoning.
It appeared hundreds of times in the New York Times
and Washington Post
from George Floyd's death until about a few months
before the 2022 election when I sort of think
the Biden administration woke up and said,
oh, wait a minute, this doesn't really pull well,
let's back off.
And then the front pages of the newspapers
stopped talking about the racial reckoning,
although the back pages, the cultural sections,
that kind of turned slower.
They didn't get the memos, so they're always talking about,
well, the Whitney exhibition in 2024
is part of the racial reckoning in the art world.
It's still, yeah.
All right, what did happen?
Well, immediately within the first three days
after George Floyd's death,
black homicide deaths as reported by
the Center for Disease Control shot upwards.
The deadliest, the most murderous single day in
Chicago history and the long storied account of people shooting each other in
Chicago was Sunday May 31st 2020 with 18 murders. And so the murder rate stayed high.
And by second week in June, the, uh,
trap black traffic fatality rate went through the roof and it stayed high into
2023 and started to drop over the last year, year and a half. Finally,
uh, both went up roughly 40% versus in 2029 versus 2019.
That sounds astronomical. Yeah, that's just huge for murdering people
or getting driving into a bridge of butt med at high speed.
Those tend to be deeply personal idiosyncratic decisions
and generally they fall out pretty randomly
with just some seasonal variation
where people get themselves killed
in these what I call deaths of exuberance
in summer than in winter.
But no, there was just a phase change
in late May, 2020.
And the total incremental deaths of black people
versus the trend line before that point,
before the racial reckoning are in the tens of thousands now.
And that's probably double that
for the general American population. So tens of thousands of extra deaths due to the establishment taking Black Lives Matter,
Black Lives, BLM's demands really seriously.
But and virtually nobody knows about the correlation between the homicide rate and the car crash death
rate.
Well, I think you were the only one who noticed the traffic fatalities.
What inspired you?
Where did you get that idea from?
I'd seen it during the Ferguson effect that followed the Michael Brown police shooting in 2014 that St. Louis police chief reported
late 2014 there seemed to be a Ferguson effect going on with a lot more shootings in the
St. Louis area. And then you could see the Ferguson effect in shootings pop up in Baltimore after BLM won a huge triumph
after the death of Freddie Gray.
And then in Chicago, the mayor had to release
the really horrifying video of the shooting
in the back of Laquan McDonald by a cop.
And, you know, BLM and the ACLU would come in and get all
sorts of orders on restricting the cops and the shootings would go up like crazy
during the Ferguson effect and in especially in those cities most affected
but I did see a couple of reports in 2016 like wow here in St. Louis we're
having a lot more traffic accidents
since about 2014. And so I asked about it then. But then the Trump administration came
in and they tried to like calm things down. And you didn't hear that much about skyrocketing getting homicide rates and traffic fatality rates again for a few years and then 2020,
yeah, it seems to be people are getting killed more in these kind of knuckleheaded ways
and everybody attributes it to COVID and you could see it maybe with the car crashes, but finally in 2021, I was reading a national
highway traffic safety administration report and it was breaking out and it's like, well,
traffic deaths were up surprisingly in 2020, even though number of miles drove went way
down.
And most interesting, what went up the most among blacks.
And so then I got my hands on the CDC data
and holy cow, you can track it week by week
and it just shoots up right after George Floyd.
It's much less than the COVID lockdowns
or anything like that, although they probably played a role.
lockdowns or anything like that, although they probably played a role.
Yeah.
Well, so, um, yeah, it's clear that decriminalizing crime is not a good
ineffective way of helping the left half of the bell curve.
Yeah. One problem. Yes. Um, yeah. So we've had this,
this big growth in deaths of exuberance in 2020 and 2021. It
spread to Hispanics. They'd actually made a lot of progress over the course of the 21st century
in reducing their deaths by homicide, reducing their deaths by traffic fatalities. They were
looking good. And then around 2021, they started to notice like, you know, the cops aren't
around as much anymore. We can drink and drive. You know, we can pack pistols. So some regression at that point as well.
The problem is, as the first person to notice
the correlation during the decade of the Great Awakening
between homicides and traffic fatalities,
when I'm calling deaths of exuberance,
in contrast to Angus' Deden and and Case's acquaintance of deaths
of despair among the white working class in the early 21st century. The problem with me
noticing first the deaths of exuberance is that I really want other people to take my
idea and run with it and they don't have
to credit me for it. If that might be bad for their career, just go ahead. Go with it.
But the problem is I now have a lot of fans who are like proprietary toward me. So if
somebody runs an article and says, Oh, look at this correlation and we really need to
be aware of this, then they're going to write and go, well, look at this correlation, and we really need to be aware of this,
then they're gonna write and go,
wow, why didn't you mention Sailor's name?
You just got that from Sailor.
You should credit Sailor.
And people, don't worry about it.
These are tens of thousands of people are dying.
That's very noble of you.
Just so you know, I do be fully stealing your ideas
and using them on feminist panels
and podcasts where I cannot say your name.
But I love to go into those type of arenas
and say like, you should pay attention
to what you see with your own eyes
because the reality usually conforms to what you're observing.
Well, Ana, you have my blessing. The reality usually conforms to what you observe.
Well, you, well, Ana, you have my blessing. Thank you.
I have a question.
So yeah, in this piece about the bell curve,
you talk about sort of the ineffective ways
that people have tried to address the IQ disparities,
like with racial quotas and stuff like this.
And you talk about the moral harm of welfare
for single mothers and that this was something
that was like sort of the welfare state
was sort of in and sexual politics in the 60s
were imported from Sweden
and then had kind of catastrophic effects here.
My like,
while I can't understand what you're saying, it's hard for me.
I feel such a moral impulse that, and I know that these are not like the circumstances of single mothers necessarily,
but like widows and orphans, we have like a
absolutely like a moral responsibility to as a culture to take care of.
So how, even if it has like morally harmful repercussions,
like it's hard to make the case
that you should withhold welfare from single mothers.
Yeah, I mean, this is an old question
that came up during the New Deal.
The FDR's administration came up with the program
called Aid for Families with Dependent Children, AFDC.
aid for families with dependent children, AFDC.
And it went up to Roosevelt's desk, and the president said,
okay, this is for widows, right?
And it's not for single moms, you know?
And they went, well, actually, we were gonna like,
I mean, there aren't very many single moms.
And then you go, no, no, look, if you were gonna like, I mean, there aren't very many single moms.
And then you go, no, no, look,
if you start subsidizing the single moms,
yeah, there'll be a lot more of them.
So, you know, I want this focused on widows with children.
And so that was the standard.
It was, you know, a harsh standard.
And then over the course of the 1960s,
it started to be liberalized
and and the feeling was among white scholars and bureaucratic leaders and so
forth was I mean let's look at Sweden this you know they've had this kind of
welfare policy in Sweden now for a couple decades and
The fabric of Swedish life has not been destroyed
People still form families and that are reasonably stable even if they are getting some help from the government
So let's do this here and in the more enlightened states of the United States. New York raised its AFDC payments in 1961.
Did it destroy the population of New York?
Well, it kind of attracted a new population
from the South of black women
who were like, yeah, let's get out of Jim Crow South.
And the impact on African American populations
appears to have been much more immediate.
The sub-Saharan world has sort of a different default set
of family structure arrangements that has to do with probably on average with agricultural
technology in the sub-saharan world it's in Europe the soil tends to be heavy and rich and the way you
kill weeds is by plowing and plows are heavy and handling huge oxygen and so the farmers doing the most intense work are
the husbands in Europe and in East Asia and so forth. In Africa the
soil tends to be lighter and weeding is typically done with iron hoes
that most of Africa was an iron age agricultural population.
And it was typically women's work
to get out with a lightweight hoe
and weed the cassava patch and so forth.
And so women brought home the bacon
more in a higher proportion than in Europe.
And that gave them more choice among men.
And men had fewer responsibilities for earning an income
to support their children and so forth.
So women got more choice.
Women had more selection as to like, you know, which men entertain them,
which men do they find sexy and so forth. Because it wasn't that crucial for the men to be a good
responsible provider. And they put up with some boring, some boredom from their man, if, you know,
he really got out there and buckle down and plowed the fields every day so
This this kind of welfare program
Worked pretty well with
with
white women and was kind of an immediate disaster over the course of the
1960s
When it was subsidizing single black women
That that's very interesting because I think among leftists and liberals you always hear that the crisis of the black family was of course
precipitated solely and strictly by
the legacy of slavery when of course it just doesn't fit the normative Western standards and that's kind of one of the
challenges of integration period whether you're talking about race or gender,
but this actually leads into my next two questions.
The first one is how much of what you call
a quote human biodiversity is due to
brute physical circumstances like geography and climate?
Yeah, there has to be quite a bit of influence, quite a bit
of selection for different cultural patterns based on the brute facts of local geography.
I mean, to take a few not all that controversial examples,
there's a tribal population in the islands of Southeast Asia
who dive for shellfish and so forth.
And I think they're called Bajua.
And they've evolved a bigger spleen.
And they can just stay underwater picking up nice stuff
from the bottom of the sea much longer than the average human.
Conversely, at high altitudes, you see the Sherpas who lived in the Mount Everest area,
they're Tibetans, and they've evolved adaptations that make them deal real well with high altitude. And over the course of the 20th century, they got these novel jobs as
porters and then as guides for Mount Everest climbers. And they're really, really good
at climbing Mount Everest, going back to Tenzing Norgay with Edmund Hillary in 1953. So we
see all these differences around the world. Within Ethiopia, a lot of
people are farmers living at high altitudes like 10,000 feet and in the second half of the 20th
century they tried Olympic distance running and have won a huge number of gold medals in that
field ever since. So we do see a lot of this kind of selection
at different population levels.
And it intertwines with things like culture
that Sherpas did not climb mountains.
That's kind of a Western romantic innovation,
the idea that I'm gonna go climb this thing that could probably kill me
at any point, that was kind of made up by romantic Europeans
around 1800 or so.
But when these romantic Europeans,
like George Mallory showed up there and said,
okay, we'll pay you a lot of money to carry all our stuff up that mountain. They're like, oh and said, okay, we'll pay a lot of money to carry our stuff
up that mountain. And they're like, oh, sure. Okay, no problem. So that's changes culture,
but it's sort of in directions that nature had already slightly selected them for.
And so my second question is, in that vein, is can you comment on the similarities between Russian culture
and African-American culture? This is something that I've talked about with Thomas Chatterton
Williams who's like a good friend of mine, not really a big fan of yours though I think if you
ever met you guys would really get along. But in Russia we have, we, they, have a lot of the same kind of like cultural features and social problems.
The culture is very flamboyant, displays a lot of like bravado and machismo, highly materialistic,
they like gold and furs and crevasse. There's a lot of like paternal absenteeism in Russia. That's
a huge, huge problem as it is in like African American culture in America
And I think like both are in a way like unwitting matriarchies
Unlike let's say like Jewish culture, which is like a voluntary matriarchy
And I'm curious What you think that's all about?
Yeah, that's a fascinating observation
I've been I haven't thought that much about it.
So I'm not, I don't think I can,
I can't really add that much on the Russian
versus African-American insight.
Something I have thought about is sort of a parallel
between Russians and Mexicans and Latin Americans
in general.
Interesting.
How so?
Sort of, I think things like accident rates,
preventative maintenance,
taking chances that might get people killed.
Neither one is like super high priority
to Russians or Mexicans compared to say
the really Germanic peoples who were obsessed with worrying about
what could go wrong.
Low risk aversion.
My father worked for Lockheed for 40 years as a stress engineer.
Lockheed had a bunch of glamorous airplane designers.
My dad was not one of them.
My dad's job was to stare at microscopic photographs
of tiny cracks in the wings of airplanes
and worry about whether those cracks would get bigger
and the whole wing would fall off.
And if the wing did fall off,
they put him on the first airplane at 6 a.m
The next morning to the crash site and then he'd spend a month
Walking up and down the crash site because airplanes when they hit the ground at 500 miles an hour
They spread out for about a mile picking up pieces of the airplane and presumably although he never told me those pieces of the passengers
and told me those pieces of the passengers and then they take the pieces of the
airplane to a hanger and they try to make basically a jigsaw puzzle out of
the whole airplane to figure out what went wrong and who to blame which which
engineer it screwed up in the in inspecting it and so forth. So yeah, it was a stressful job,
but air travel's gotten a whole lot safer
until very recently.
And then Boeing has not carried on the grand tradition
of the 20th century in making things safer, making it so much safer to fly.
That was a triumph of a huge number of guys like my dad
who really worried about stuff all the time.
You had a question?
I'm surprised that we haven't been going for so long
because this episode has been so packed with information
that I feel like it's been, it feels like hours.
I guess I'll ask like a fun and lightweight question first
and then I'll ask my creepy and weird
interracial marriage question later.
I'm like a pig in shit,
cause this is really my wheelhouse. Anna loves science. I'm like a pig in shit, because this is really my wheelhouse.
Anna loves real science.
I'm like an amateur noticer,
but I lack the math and stats background.
So it's good to have someone
who can actually crunch the numbers for you.
I enjoy your writing because yeah,
my eyes to be honest like glaze over
when I look at a chart,
unless it's like
super straightforward like the one of the Somali migrants that's like
skyrocketing up but yeah but then you're able to like interpret and write in a
very entertaining way that makes the ideas accessible. So those of us on the
left side of the film. You come for the race science and stay for the pro styling
and vivid storytelling.
OK, so one of your best bits is the coinage men
with gold chains to describe the newcomers to the valley
from the three defunct empires, Persian, Ottoman, Soviet.
And also, you made the great distinction between IAN and YAN Armenians.
Oh, you came up with that?
No, I didn't come up with it.
Oh, I thought you did.
It's a fellow I know, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, who he's
his last name ends I a n
So he's told me 20 years ago
So he has strong opinions on this. I actually don't but he says
most Dave if
If you're an Armenian in the United States and your name ends an I-A-N, that means you're a respectable
American like me, whose ancestors probably immigrated
to Fresno to escape the Armenian Holocaust of 1915
and we're extremely well assimilated
and we're highly respectable people in California.
I go, yeah, yeah, okay.
But if your name ends in Y-A-N, that probably means you're an Eastern
Armenian from mountains and you lived under the Soviet Union for decades.
And the Soviets didn't do any good for people.
And so yeah, you're, you're probably, you know, keeping up. Well, Steve, just let me tell you,
keep an eye on people whose names end in Y a. So my apologies.
No, no, no, no.
My apologies. No, no, no.
No.
But.
My name got transliterated wrongly in immigration
so I'm both an I and Y, A, N.
The best of both worlds.
But yeah, essentially like Y, A, N's are attractive,
rich, have white teeth, run successful,
respectable businesses, Y, A, N's are scowling,
unattractive, have bad teeth, poor skin,
and are known for like Medicare fraud. But I'm curious if you've noticed like living over there
long enough whether there's any kind of meaningful significant divergence in their political beliefs?
Because I would bet on the whole, I actually don't know much about Armenians because I grew up in like
a very Russian culture family, but I would bet that they're generally
conservative probably a lot of Trump supporters but I'm curious if there is
much of a difference yeah I think what what you see in Los Angeles it's in the
San Fernando Valley the huge suburb of 1.8 million people to the
northwest of downtown Los Angeles, it's within the city limits.
If you go back 30, 40 years, you would have probably said, okay, the valley is going to
eventually tip all Latino. And but instead what's happened, especially after the end of the Cold War,
is that Latinos have gotten a huge amount of competition and basically been stopped
in the valley by a new influx of people who, at least in past censuses, were listed as Caucasian
Censuses were listed as Caucasian
from Yeah, I was I call it the three defunct empires the Russian the Ottoman and the Persian empires
Generally with Armenians as as kind of the the leaders the pioneers moving into
Pasadena and to Glendale and to the San Burbank and to the rest of the San Fernando Valley, Valley Glenn and so forth.
And you know that's that's done the
valley quite a bit of good but you know
that there are some cultural issues you
know that kind of the new Armenians and
all the other people who are following
them from Central Asia, from the Middle East and so forth,
a lot of Israelis, a lot of people from Russia,
Russians and Ukrainians, a lot of people
who are Russian Jews, other people who are kind of vague,
they're one quarter Jewish, one quarter Armenian.
Ukrainian and Russian.
They look like me for real.
Yeah.
And they're, so they've done the San Fernando Valley
a lot of good, but yeah, it's kind of a different culture.
It's one that's a little flashier.
The cars, you know, a lot of white BMW speeding around at midnight and so forth.
I've taken to wearing a yellow construction workers reflective vest
whenever I'm walking the dog at night because stepping off the curb is
has become somewhat concerning.
I noticed that you were wearing the vest when you met Alec, a friend of the pod.
Yeah, I did a podcast with Alec's, the filthy Armenian and my dog.
And yeah, wearing this big vest because, I don't know, there's a lot of guys driving around real fast now. Yeah
I once spent a night in the in a hospital for observation and I got fascinated by the TV channel in the hospital from
Armenia and about 50% of the content
Appeared to have to have to do with cars.
Yeah.
Well, there's also like pretty high criminality, right?
There are like, there's mob activity amongst the Armenians.
Yeah, this restaurant my dad went to once
that served what's called general Armenian food.
He said he was the only customer in lunch,
but all sorts of people were coming in and out
delivering paper bags and my dad being a paranoid 90 year old
was like, oh, I think that it's a drug delivery spot.
And I was like, no, come on.
And then about a month later, just headline,
four people shot in back room.
Yeah.
Yeah. Armenian restaurant.
It's literally like a plot line on the shield.
Yeah, exactly.
But I was thinking,
I was in Mexico City a couple of weeks ago.
Getting near a very heavy ashtray.
Huh?
Getting the very heavy ashtray.
Yeah, it's right there, yeah.
And I noticed that there was...
Oh my.
That would put me over the cost me $100 to carry back and overweight fees
Yeah, I just I just like wrapped it in a diaper and put it in my bag
But I noticed that in Mexico City as you mentioned Latin culture. There's a lot of like potholes and other
just like daily
pedestrian hazards and there's a new
influx of Russian and Ukrainian people coming over, Ukrainians fleeing the war in Ukraine
and Russians of kind of like liberal sensibility, liberal mindset, fleeing their government
in protest. And I was, it's going to be interesting how that shapes up because again, like low risk aversion.
Well, I was saying while you were in the bathroom that I don't really like the Latin cult, like
siesta culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Neither do I. Like you'd like to think that you would like it
because it's like a breath of fresh air from our highly efficient. I'm too edgy and like cerebral
and like from my ancestral, like, I don't know. Yeah, when edgy and cerebral and from my ancestral,
I don't know.
Yeah, when you actually experience it,
you're like, wait, this sucks,
I can't get lunch or go shopping.
Yeah, I wake up.
I feel triggered when people take a nap.
I have abandonment issues.
On this book tour I'm doing,
the publishers sent us to four cities to do both a private dinner
for a few dozen readers and then a public speaking event for 100 plus people. We had
like 200 last night at Sovereign House. The one, and so they picked out cities that tech guys from the Bay Area have been trying
out lately as new possible replacements for the San Francisco Bay Area.
And Austin, Texas, and that worked really well.
About 150 people came to the public event.
And then Miami, we had a great dinner for about two dozen guys, almost all of them tech bros
from the Bay Area, but the public event,
nah, they didn't sell enough tickets
because people in Miami don't really read books.
I didn't read any, I spent two days there
wandering around looking at all the buildings going up,
the beautiful women, eating Cuban food,
and felt zero desire to read a book while I was there.
So I might have seen that one coming,
but yeah, it's a different lifestyle.
Miami is definitely better organized. I hadn't seen that one coming, but yeah, it's a different lifestyle.
Miami is definitely better organized, Miami Beach,
and get really to Miami than most places in Mexico. I have this suspicion that some of Mexican culture
is kind of driven by Mexican elites' worries that they're so,
as the saying goes, they're so far from God,
so close to the United States,
and they kind of feel like they'd get inundated by Americans,
especially like American retirees and so forth,
because Mexico's a great piece of geography
if
They kind of fixed up their country and filled in the potholes and put in more stoplights so that crossing the street
Wasn't you taking your life in your hands? But the kind of mexican elites have sort of encouraged
As a kind of a passive aggressive response to potential American dominance
they're gonna they're gonna keep Mexico kind of weird a little shoddy and
the place where
Americans and other people of kind of northern European orientation are gonna feel a little
people of kind of Northern European orientation are gonna feel a little concerned
and not that much at home to keep 10 million Americans
from moving there and then slowly taking over.
They don't want the migrants.
They do have possibly, I don't know if it's a problem,
but an issue with the reverse immigration
because the real estate price is there fairly low
and you can get a very nice apartment
in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City,
which is like the Williamsburg.
And why not?
It's like an investment, you can have a pedetere.
So I don't know if that's.
Yeah, I mean, to be in the top stratum in Mexico
is a pretty good bit of luck
in terms of where you're gonna spend your life.
Being a rich Mexican is nice.
There are basically no rich Mexicans in Los Angeles
other than a handful from the entertainment industry,
Academy Award winning directors.
Rich Mexicans tend to go to Miami
if they go to the United States or go to San Antonio.
They avoid Los Angeles, there's too many poor Mexicans
in Los Angeles for them.
But yeah, the notion that, holy cow,
we're living this nice life in Mexico City,
but there's zillions of people in America
who could move to Mexico and just price us out
of the good life in Mexico is,
I think that's an underexplored issue
of why Mexico tends to stay Mexican all the time
in terms of potholes.
Underdeveloped.
You know, lack of guard rails on mountain roads
and all that kind of stuff.
Interesting.
Do you think being tall has given you
good and sort of benevolent vantage point
from which to notice?
That's a good question.
Yeah.
How tall are you?
I'm six foot four.
I think I'm still six foot four.
I'm probably reaching the point where I'll be shrinking.
Congratulations.
So, yeah, it's, yeah, being,
not being able to see over people
has never really been an issue.
So, yeah, I'm happy to stand in the back,
or I don't feel that much of an urge
to elbow my weight at the
front.
You know, it has its advantages.
My wife likes that I'm tall.
It has its disadvantages as well.
Come on.
Yeah.
No.
I mean, it increases your chances of cancer, for example. If I've got a large torso and probably two or three,
maybe three standard deviations above the mean
in terms of torso length, and that probably coincides
with about a 50% higher chance of various kinds of cancer.
And more cells to go wrong.
More cells to go wrong.
Yeah, it's a, it takes more to sustain the metabolism.
That's another thing that I've noticed.
There is a lot of,
it's like the Randy Newman song about short people.
People sort of frown upon them, look down on them.
It's easier to be a short woman than a short man for sure.
But they tend to live longer.
They're like small yappy dogs. They can go on forever, which is I guess
A benefit but I don't know if it is if if you're like of the kind of cynical
nihilistic persuasion as I am then maybe you don't want to live longer, but
But certainly there are um challenges to being tall but speaking of standing in the back
something that people may not know about you
is that you're a huge music and movie buff.
Well, I was.
You're a rock critic, right?
A long, long time ago.
I mean, yeah, I had about 18 months
in which I was cool in Houston around 1979 and that was totally,
I was a student at Rice University.
I lived in, I spent my summers at home in San Fernando Valley, you know, and so Los Angeles, you know, in the New Wave punk era was like nine months ahead of music
trends in Houston.
So I'd go home for the summer and listen to K-Rock radio and then I'd come back and tell
everybody at Rice, oh, you know, you know this band that's going to be big.
There's a band playing for three bucks in a bar on Thursday night and they're gonna be huge. They're called the police
All right, so just I got a bunch of like totally obvious things like that, right and
People in Houston were like wow Steve. You're really cool. You know, you figured out the police are gonna be big.
That's amazing.
No, that's just, I just listened to the radio in LA.
That was a period when record companies
would heavily subsidize tours across the country.
So, and Houston was always a destination,
but you know, there was like 150 people in Houston who were interested in music.
So you could see, I saw Talking Heads for $2, Elvis Costello for $3.
And you said that was your favorite concert in 1983?
Probably Talking Heads with the English Beat opening in 1980.
The Talking Heads was the big African band
with nine musicians and three backup singers.
They were kind of erratic, but every so often
they'd hit in a perfect groove in this show
I saw in Hollywood in 1980.
It was their night.
It was as good as the one that's on YouTube of
Their concert in Rome the same year, which is kind of a classic as well. So yeah, it was a superb night for dancing
Did you?
This is tangential to the Los Angeles kind of punk. Did you ever encounter?
KK Barrett He's a production designer, but he was in like the screamers. of punk. Did you ever encounter KK Barrett?
He's a production designer, but he was in like the Screamers, he's older than you,
but he was in like the Screamers and like
Black Randy and the Metro Squad,
I don't know if you ever go into that.
I'm trying to remember.
It was kind of more like.
Yeah, I saw some of the bands, but like,
I didn't really see the local punk bands
that much, like my son is highly disappointed
that I never saw Black Flag.
I mean, yeah.
I did have the Black Flag single of them screaming
Louie Louie.
Yeah.
So he gives me like three points out of 10 for that.
But no, I never saw them.
They were like, the Orange County scene and so forth
was just a little past my time.
Got it.
I mean, so I was more into like,
what I was really into was like bands that are new and cheap
but girls would like as well. I was really into was like bands that are new and cheap,
but girls would like as well. So girls might wanna go, if I go,
there's this new band playing, it's called U2.
And then like, what's that?
Well, just trust me, come on, let's go to the show.
Okay.
Yeah, you don't wanna meet Girls with the Black Flag.
That's a different demo.
They might have hairy armpits.
Do you have a favorite band?
Well, like, okay, Desert Island, like one album.
Probably my favorite band at the time was The Clash.
The London Calling album was the best to my mind.
But maybe it's, in the long run,
it's kind of highly reflective of late 70s trends
toward getting playing faster and faster,
kind of ridiculously fast,
which had a lot to do with the drugs and so forth. I mean
It was kind of the the British punks were kind of driven by they were taking a lot of amphetamines
Habit they'd inherited from their fathers who had been in World War two and the RAF had handed out huge amounts of amphetamines and then
the British kids kind of carried it on as a as a performance enhancing drug on Friday night you take a lot of
amphetamines and dance till five o'clock in the morning yeah just made him better
dancers than Americans and faded out in most of America I feel like the Velvet
Underground was a very speedy yeah to. New York had certainly still thought it was a big Amphetamine cancer problem.
Yeah, so yeah, the moans and so forth.
Then when the bands got successful and switched to cocaine,
then things fell apart really, really fast.
Do you have any thoughts on Morrissey?
I know you mentioned him in your book
because you were grouped together with him
and others as bad racist men.
But are you familiar with his
discovery and his myths?
I mean, Morrissey's a wonderful personality.
The one time I saw him, he was not having a good night
in terms of getting in sync with the rhythm.
So that set me off against him for a while,
but over the years,
you just have to respect this huge career
and his independence of thought
and all the weird stuff about him like LA Chicanos
absolutely love the guy.
Yeah.
Shotgun to the head,
do you have a favorite director and a favorite film?
Favorite director,
it might be John Huston.
Made great movies like The Maltese Falcon in the 40s
with Bogart and then he kinda screwed up his life
by basically by getting totally into blood sports
in Ireland, fox hunting and things like that
and made lousy movies in the middle of his career
when he should have been making his best movies.
But unlike his idol, Ernest Hemingway,
who lived this real rugged life
and was constantly giving himself concussions
and that seemed to lead to depression and suicide,
Houston just lived this extremely lucky life
where despite all the chances he took,
he never got into accidents and never got hurt bad
and then was able to come back in his 70s
and make similarly great movies
like The Man Who Would Be King
and lived on to direct into his 80s.
So it's a real charmed life and, you know,
lots of great anecdotes about him.
I have no idea how many of them are true.
You know, there are a lot of great stories
that come out of Hollywood, but you gotta remember
they're being told by the best storytellers in the world.
So take them for what they're worth.
Hannah, do you wanna ask your creepy question?
Yeah.
About my interracial marriage question?
I can ask it, but I can also not ask it.
It's up to you.
I'm curious.
Go for it.
I'm just not going to be able to answer it
as well as I should.
But you can give us some reason tips.
I need to research this topic more.
So my question is about interracial marriage
and mixed race offspring.
You had a really good essay on interracial marriage
and how Americans experienced like a stunning about face
and their attitudes toward what was previously called
miscegenation and it was an essay about basically
how black women and Asian men are the ones
who are left behind.
But do you think that your mother versus your father being of the minority race or ethnicity,
like for instance, mom versus dad being black or Jewish has any impact on life outcomes? I can imagine
that there's probably some at least socioeconomic effects. Yeah, there's, it's definitely true. It's
It's definitely true. Unfortunately, I'm not up to date on any studies that have looked at these questions with a
large sample size.
So there's two, kind of, there's the nature side and the nurture side.
How much does,
how much do you inherit some things particularly from your father and others from your mother?
And yeah, there are sex chromosomes.
But how much of the genome is distinct and are there patterns? I don't know. I take
a lot of lead in this from my friend Gregory Cochran, a physicist turned evolutionary theorist. He's generally, he'll point out, well, you know, in some species like a mule is the offspring
of a, the father is a donkey, the mother a horse.
If you get, if the father's a horse and the mother's a donkey, then you get a hinny and
you never hear about hinnies because while mules are extremely useful
and will do a lot of work,
you can't get any work out of a hinny,
so you just don't see them.
But those are big differences between mules
and between horses and donkeys.
Humans are a lot closer together.
Cochrane in general has a model that if it's not purely 50-50 inheritance from mothers
and fathers, it's 49-51 and doesn't see that much difference.
But I could imagine it.
I should do more research. Then there's the nurture side, which is
who do you take after?
You're probably, you know,
are you more in touch with your mother or your mother's parents
the way like Barack Obama was raised by his
maternal grandparents in Honolulu?
raised by his maternal grandparents in Honolulu.
But, and then there's the further complication of sons versus daughters and so forth and so on.
But I'm thinking even just setting aside
like any of those factors, like the kind of obvious example
which I don't know if it would pan out in reality is like
if you are the product of say a white mom and a black dad probably there's a higher chance that
you're going to be like low income the child of a single mom that sort of thing whereas if you're
the product of like a black mom and a white dad. I mean, we're talking about men maybe who are wealthier
with more evolved, elite boutique tastes in women,
like Lenny Kravitz or something like that.
But I don't know if that effect
would actually be significant enough.
My feeling is that white father, black mother
is such a rare pairing
that the black mom would have to be sort of so exceptional.
Has to be like an outlier basically
in the way that people's sexual preferences are distributed.
Yeah, like a supermodel or a news anchor.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'll give an example of
kind of an outlier
figure
With a white father and a black mother and that's the the black
NASCAR driver
Bubba Wallace
All right. So he's he's the great black hope of NASCAR as they
attempt to diversify their appeal and you know get credit for
having a black driver. But his father, but to become a NASCAR driver, yeah you
basically have to start driving go-karts and miniature cars at like age seven
or something and compete on these youth circuits.
It's extremely expensive.
Yeah, it turns out his dad is a well-to-do white man who's devoted huge amounts of money to giving him the opportunity to compete at the highest
levels at age seven, eight, nine, ten in kids race car driving.
So he's an example of somebody who has the advantages of a wealthy white father and the
social advantages of being part black in the 2020s.
So he's got Michael Jordan back funding his NASCAR team and so forth at this point.
But I haven't done the research to find a good study that tries to look at these questions
with a sufficient sample size to say anything in particular.
But yeah, there will be definitely interesting outlier cases.
Right.
Well, we've done about two hours.
Yeah, I think we can wrap it up.
Dasha, do you have any last questions? Let me see.
I don't think so.
I'll ask one more question, sorry, short and sweet.
Noticing, can it be taught or is it something like writing
where it can be improved upon,
but it's either have it or you don't I
I think you can definitely get rid of negative impediments
You can you can let yourself
You can allow yourself
to notice things
and not
And then try not to kick in automatically what Orwell
called crime stop or protective stupidity that just you know give
yourself give yourself the right to go look, that's an interesting pattern.
And a lot of people assume that if they take one step toward it, they'll be damned and
they'll soon turn into a raving racist.
A Nazi.
They'll be subsumed by genocidal fantasy.
So they're terrified of allowing themselves
to take one step, but the thing to do then
is take a second step and go, oh.
But on the other hand, X tends to be Y,
but X also, if Y, then X also, sometimes you see
a lot of Z, which is different from Y.
the next also sometimes you see a lot of Z which is different from Y. Yeah, it's you can get a much more nuanced view but you have to also notice the big things
first. You hear a lot of criticism of like well is this racist sailor doesn't
have a nuanced view. I've got I've got more nuances than you've ever conceived of.
But, well, let's see, what else could you do?
Oh, I've got an idea.
You could buy my book, it's called Noticing.
And as it says on your book,
I think the biggest impediment to noticing
is political correctness.
Yeah, that, yeah, it's, I mean, the biggest impediment to noticing is political correctness.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a, I mean, a fair number of well-known comedians follow my stuff because I don't
give them good punchlines.
Every so often I get a check for 50 bucks from a well-known, very famous stand-up comedian.
It turns out, my wife pointed out watching a special on TV, oh yeah, every few years
he steals one of my punchlines and $50 is a traditional payment.
But it's not like he's stealing my punchline stealing my punchline to get a little laugh
To set up his gigantic laugh punchline that only he could come up with so
God bless him. So yeah, it's you know the comedians
You know like kind of my insights and so forth and you can you can see some influence on comedians
Certainly plus racism is quite funny and so forth and you can see some influence on comedians.
Certainly, yeah.
Plus racism is quite funny, unfortunately.
That's something I've noticed about it.
It's unfortunately probably the funniest thing ever.
Is that it makes you laugh
and then that makes you also a bad person, I guess.
Yeah, there's a real war on laughter
that's been going on for a decade now.
I'm in favor of laughing.
Call me an extremist.
Well thank you Steve.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Bye as much as you're noticing.
See you in hell.
See you in hell. You