The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Richard Hanania Talks Wokeness, Palestine and Other Matters

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

Richard Hanania is a writer on social science and geopolitics. He's the author of The Origins of Woke and publishes articles at richardhanania.com, where you can subscribe to his newsletter.

This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world-famous comedy cellar, coming at you on SiriusXM 99, raw comedy, formerly Raw Dog. I am joining, oh, by the way, we also are available as a podcast and on YouTube if you want to see our pretty faces. Some of them are prettier than others, but I'll leave that to you to decide. I'm coming at you from the miracle of teleconferencing from Aruba in the Caribbean, about 20 miles north of Venezuela. I am with Noam Dorman, the owner of the world-famous comedy cellar, coming at you live in studio, along with Periel Ashenbrand. Also remotely,

we're being joined by Richard Hanania. How far north of Venezuela am I, Dan? I'm not sure. Okay, go ahead. Sorry, I stepped on joined by Richard Hanania. How far north of Venezuela am I, Dan? I'm not sure. Okay, go ahead. Sorry, I stepped on your intro. Go ahead. Richard Hanania is a writer on social science and geopolitics, the author of The Origins of Woke, and publishes articles at richardhanania.com, where you can subscribe to his newsletter. Thank you for joining us, Richard. How are you today?

Doing good. Thanks for having me. Did you mention his book, Dan? This is the bio that Periel sent me. All right. So, listen, I met you once years ago, but you've blown up since then. Yeah, I was on the show before, right. You're a fascinating figure. You write so many things that I find really compelling and original. And so you have this recent, first of all, I'm reading your book. Your book is fantastic.

So, I mean, let me just talk a little bit. So Yasha Monk wrote a book. Yasha is a friend of mine. He wrote a book with his version of how wokeness erupted. And you have your own version of how it erupted that I want to get to later in the interview. But anybody who's read Yasha's book should also read Richard's book.

Richard does not agree with Yasha, I think it's fair to say. Or he pooh-poohs some of the importance of some of the things that Yasha says. But I find your description of wokeness and how it was kind of dribbled down from legal laws and stuff like that to be really unbelievably fascinating. I was gripped by it last night reading it. Thank you. But let me get to one other thing first.

I want to get out of the way. You have an article here, Shut Up About Race and IQ, which is a position I've come to also. And one quote here, it says, while all kinds of individuals accept group differences, in my experience, it's very easy to predict the political views and normative commitments of those who want to talk about them, which casts doubt on the idea that they are animated by passion for scientific inquiry. So I want to start right now with the toughest question, because I have to ask you, I want to ask you about a controversial tweet that you had on the subject of race. Tell me how to explain it and the context of it. I don't want to ambush you with it but i i it disturbed me

i i you're obviously a complex person i don't know what the explanation is but it would be wrong to discuss all this outside the context of your own remark if that's okay with you oh sure okay so you had tweeted this was about um jordan neely who was the uh kind of homeless guy who was killed on the subway by the Marine who acted preemptively, who was then indicted. You wrote, Daniel Penny getting charged. These people are animals, whether they're harassing people in subways or walking around in suits. Now, to most people, that seems like a comment about black people. What was that all about? Okay. So I have, uh, yeah, something like 50,000 tweets. Um, I was not making a comment about black people. I was making a comment on people who commit crimes and people who, people who either don't charge the people who commit crimes or charge people who

are good Samaritans. So it was in the moment i was really upset i couldn't believe daniel penny got charged i thought he believed i thought he behaved heroically and it was just like these leftists you know the people who commit crimes the people who are you know do are part of the system they're bad now i know like you can i i get it i i get like how it looks um but yeah people i mean, people who do bad things who I dislike. I mean, if it was a black prosecutor who had not charged Daniel Petty, obviously I would have said something different. I was upset about the context of what was happening there. Yeah. I wondered if that was what you would say. And I don't mean that to say I don't believe you, that it was people on both sides

it's complicated by the fact that is it the the guy who charged him is black um and um of course we can talk about other stuff but uh people have to make their own decision there was this go ahead i mean look yeah i mean obviously my problem with the prosecutor i don't like left-wing prosecutors who charge good samaritans and don't charge criminals whatever color they are right i mean i'm obviously upset about and i understand you can see it as a as a code for black people or something like when you write 50 000 tweets there's going to be a few who are yeah i'm not like i didn't do i apologize or delete it or anything um but yeah i mean it was about basically the the what was going on i don't

call people animals i mean i have 50 000 tweets again if i was in the habit of calling people animals based on race um there'd be stronger evidence yeah there was a similar incident with the representative mike collins uh i think he's from georgia where he tweeted at somebody called garbage human about this woman and it was jewish in the post that um wrote that article about uh what was it about crime or something yeah how about how like you shouldn't punish criminals or something like that and someone said every single time and i think it was an anti-semitic thing yeah it's like a nazi twitter said it is it there it's got to be one and then she said well he says was there ever any doubt? Which sounds like, was it a Jew?

And that is what the tweet meant. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt because he was extremely pro-Israel. And who would be self-destructive like that? That's really, I mean... Yeah, I mean, I don't know exactly what his meaning was, but I said there's, you know, I said probably he doesn't. He thought, he says that

and by the way this is the way i read the tweet at first too not knowing it was from a nazi that she was a garbage human for making this argument that that's how he and he interpreted it well that's how he claims to interpret all right i don't i don't want to uh so so having said that so that so that um everybody can make other, tell us why you think we should shut up about race and IQ, which is a really serious issue. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's sort of a paradox. I tell people to shut up about it.

It's a thing we talk about. But there's a meta discussion about the discussion i mean there is you know like there are there is data out there on like standardized tests and like some groups do better than others um there's tests on you know tests of cognitive ability i don't think you should care about that unless you are in the habit of seeing people uh you know seeing people as based on their group identity and trying to achieve equal representation uh between people if you if you are not interested in that um you are interested in creating people as individuals and there's really not a reason to emphasize this stuff now most of the people who do emphasize it you know they are they're basically they're white nationals they usually have some

kind of racialist agenda they want to restrict. They want whites to have like a kind of identity politics. And so like, and sometimes what they'll say is, well, the leftists, they find disparate outcomes between groups, so you have to have an answer to it. And I don't buy that. I don't think things are like that logical. I mean, I think you can either emphasize sort of ideas and people and what people can do,

or you can emphasize group differences and as long as you got people thinking um if you got people sort of in the mode of thinking about group differences and sort of representation i think that's your problem i think you're always going to have a problem there and so i think people should be focused more on the kind of world they want to create not necessarily the cause of group disparities yeah i very much agree with you i mean know, so when I was a kid in college, I wasn't about race, but I wrote an essay about how I thought that everything was genetic.

And I didn't talk about, I talked about IQ, but I was talking about things like the conscience, like that, you know, everything had to have an evolutionary purpose. And obviously everything was a physiological manifestation of the brain. And we know we can breed animals for any particular trait. And why would we ever expect

that intelligence of various kinds wouldn't be? So I've always, I was always open. This is before the bell curve came out. I always seemed self-evident that among different gene pools, and by the way, gene pool is not the same as race. I have no, we do a very gross division of people into races without knowing

whether they represent gene pools. For instance, Ashkenazi Jews don't seem to be the same gene pool as other white people. And I can only imagine how people of every race break down into different gene pools, but we expect differences in gene pools. But, um, as you say, it's, it's become such an ugly thing that even the smartest people are not able to understand or put in perspective. And, um, But there is one thing about it which in a way might be worth embracing,

which is if you, except for the sake of argument, the disparity in the bell curve that Asians are 15 points smarter than whites or whites are 15 points smarter than blacks, something like that. The overlap is so enormous, it can't even begin to explain. Like, for instance, in Illinois, there was a headline, not a single child tested proficient

in math in 67 Illinois schools, and for reading, it's only 32 schools. Now, there is no interpretation of the worst, as far as I understand it, of the worst studies about IQ which could begin to predict that not a single child would test proficient in math in Illinois schools of any race. So what that means is we are utterly, as a patriotic American,

this proves that we are utterly failing our citizens utterly failing them am i wrong uh yeah i mean i think you're yeah yeah i think i've seen these statistics about uh like inner city chicago um and you know some people could say i mean if you just want to think about you know the uh sort of accuses well you have a selection thing where it's like even you know even the inner city ghetto, the smart people left, and you could left behind a not very smart population. You could argue something like that. It shouldn't be zero.

No way. No way. That's still a deep cultural problem. But, yeah, I mean, I think we need to have sort of discussions about stuff like, what is school for? Why do we have – our gene pool didn't change in the 1960s, right? I mean, there was a crime explosion, sort of a lot of the dysfunction didn't really exist decades past. It goes up and down, you know, by decades. We had a super high violent crime rate in the late 80s,

early 90s, went down for a while, it's popped back up the last three or four years. Yeah, these questions are things that are worth talking about. And like, you know, if you get the if you if you deal with the crime problem, you don't have to worry about like, you know, differences in crime rate, right? I mean, if it's if you get to the level where, you know, you have safe streets, and you have safe cities, and you know, this exists in every continent. So every group is potentially capable of it. If one group still has a little bit less performance than others, that doesn't matter.

I mean, we should be trying to build a society here that helps as many people as possible. Well, look, having a particular life experience that we're exposed to an awful lot of Black people and Hispanic people in my life, I can tell you, I guarantee you, being proficient in basic math and reading is not possibly something we'd have to worry about. And there is something that really disturbs me on the left and on the right, that they back into

arguments which essentially say, we don't believe they can do it. On the right, they're going to point to, you know, race and IQ. And on the left, they're going to point to systemic racism. And, you know, we're going to get rid of standardized tests. Why do you get rid of standardized tests? Because we don't believe we can educate them to do well on the standardized tests. So let's just get rid of the test altogether. And if I were a parent of a person of color, I would be infuriated by this. You forced me to send my kid to these schools. I demand that you teach my kid to read and do math. And by the way, I believe if we could, and I believe it's our only problem. I think if we could get every American child basically on par grade level in the sixth grade, all our other problems would disappear.

That's true, but I don't think I'm as optimistic as you about the idea that everyone could learn basic algebra. I'm not sure that that's true. I mean, I'm sure that a lot of people can if they applied themselves. But I think smart people tend to assume that there's a book by Charles Murray called Real Education. He said, you know, smart people,

they set these standards and they assume what, you know, you or I could do, anyone else could do. I don't know if that's true. I mean, I think we should have a society which understands that maybe some people aren't the best, you know, in school. That doesn't mean that racism did something to them.

That doesn't mean they're inferior and they can't contribute anything to society. I mean, I think we need better models of sort of childhood. And I think there's some states that have been doing some stuff with school choice where they give you vouchers and the parents can decide to send them to a private school or homeschool them or whatever, or send them to an apprentice program or whatever. I think we need to just like accept there's sort of variation there and not a one-size-fits-all approach so i i don't know like i think that like i think this sort of thing of like okay there's school there's standards we just gotta use the government schools to get everyone up to the standards i i i i'm sympathetic to the idea that that really hasn't worked richard in your article on substack about this topic, I think you said something which sort of encapsulates

your reasoning as to why we shouldn't discuss this at all. You said that those who would want to discuss it do so on the basis of convincing the other side that indeed disparities are not due to racism. And you said something like where there's a woke agenda, will find a way I forgot the exact quote but but your basic notion was is that no matter what you say the people that are convinced that racism is the reason for disparity will always be convinced of it and people that are convinced that genetics are the basis of disparity will always be

convinced of that there's no changing anybody's mind on it yeah it's even it's even harder than that because even if you could even somehow you got leftist to say like it's it's genetic it's not racist they'll just go to indigenous ways of knowing i mean that there is like a you know there is there's all this like science itself measurement itself i mean if they want to be left-wing if they want to be woke they'll find a way it doesn't depend on uh sort of your scientific assumptions or scientific findings at all so we'll leave this in a second so getting back to your initial point that um really that these arguments are made by people who have another agenda i read charles murray book charles murray's

book um uh facing reality i don't know if you read that book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it really angered me. I really felt he had let the mask down and he was really into a full-blown, I thought, anti-black argument, essentially blaming genetics for crime. Even the title, Face Reality. It's like, face reality, Mrs. Dorman,

your child will never walk. And then he went on Andrew Sullivan's podcast Even the title, Face Reality. It's like, face reality, Mrs. Dorman, your child will never walk. You know, it's like, you know. And then he went on Andrew Sullivan's podcast and he said, I just found this in an email. Andrew, if I had to say there's one concept that's really simple that people cannot get through their heads, it's the concept of different means but overlapping distributions, which would be the idea that, you know,

even if the average IQ is different among populations, that 90 or 95% of them are indistinguishable. So he acknowledges that this is an idea that people can't get through their heads. And yet he's hammering it home. He wants to unleash this on the entire population so they will have the confirmation bias that every time they see somebody underperforming,

they're going to think it's because they just face reality. They just can't do it. This is not the act of a patriot. I really, I really think it's not, unless there's something you think good is going to come from it. What are you doing? And he won't, he won't stop this thing. I mean, he's been doing it for 20 years already. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm more on your side that obviously I wrote that article that, you know, it's probably just best not to talk about this stuff.

At the same time, I get a little more understanding of sort of where Charles is coming from on this. He thinks it's an answer to the left. He's thinking, like, I'm not going to get it into your head that blacks are this or Hispanics are that. reasoning is that leftists think and their entire justification for what they do is that there's disparate outcomes therefore uh structural racism therefore we have to get rid of algebra therefore the schools are screwed up therefore the cops are racist the cops arrest one group over the other um that means you know that means we have to sort of refix society so he thinks he sees this as sort of a left-wing agenda um i get the argument i mean it's not it's not a crazy argument so his argument would be

um let's like tell people that there are group differences but you know don't don't go and assume you know every person who's of a certain race uh is a criminal or can't do you know homework or or something like that you know and then my and then i think what you're saying is you're you're asking too much you're asking You want to say face reality. Races are very different. It's very important. Now, keep in mind, it's too complicated. People just think of these sort of very simplistic terms.

That itself is something he has to accept. There's a real psychology. We're all human. So it's a story by analogy. I have a friend of mine whose son was evaluated to have a very low IQ and with all kinds of other, you know, things, conditions that have acronyms. And his parents were warned to, you know, have very low expectations for this child. And the father being more rational, I think had come to grips with that. And the mother being more feminine, wouldn't accept it. And the end of the story is that child is at Dartmouth

University now. Not with any kind of special programming, actually, is at Dartmouth University. The mother never gave up. And there's a powerful lesson there. You don't know, but just because somebody says it doesn't make it true about your child. You know, when I was in high school, my freshman year, I never tested low IQ or anything like that, but I was like class rank 390 out of 410. My GPA was like 0.5. And it's not like I couldn't do the work. I was just stupid. I. And it's not like I couldn't do the work. I was just stupid. I wouldn't go to class. I wouldn't do the homework. You probably would have been very unlikely that I'd be writing popular articles as an adult. You're right. I think there is a look on average,

you have a group of kids who test low IQ and a group of kids who test high IQ. The kids who test high IQ will do much, much better. Of course. Of course. On average. At the same time, there is, I think, probably, you know, it's better to be, where there's so much uncertainty in the world, it's just better to be, you're going to be irrational no matter what. It's better to be on the side of, I think, irrational confidence, exuberance, optimism, rather than the opposite. Because you're going to be irrational no matter what, because you're not smart enough to sort of, you know, calculate the odds precisely. And I think that's sort of what that story, look, 99 times out of 10, that kid wouldn't have gotten to be honest, but what time out of 10 he did, and maybe having that belief is adaptive.

Right. All right. And it just, it's a, I just feel America, it just can't, it just can't chalk off its citizens this way, especially when we know that we, like an elite person, would never in a million years allow my child to be sent to a school on the order of the way these children are going to school. This whole thing where you have rights to have children

because they can't do it, it's too narrow. You have these illegal Mexicans coming from Mexico, people coming from Central America, and they're probably not they don't have much of an education they probably can't you know they probably won't do great in the classroom but those people are productive i mean they're working you know they're working they're building things you're seeing them in service jobs you're seeing them doing something valuable for society they're happy i mean compared to their living standards in mexico and honduras they're living a great life too um and so yeah i

think we should like we put too much emphasis on yeah we put too much emphasis on school even this conversation like oh some people can't do it therefore they suck and they can't do it look i know people who are very good in school as in academia they're wasting their lives they're sitting there you've seen some of the crap that comes out of academia they're using their big brains to just produce drivel that they put on a page the world is not better off they're living off you know these uh over overpriced tuition um and uh yeah i think that just like we we value school learning too much so no go ahead dad well just in keeping with your uh this notion we shouldn't write off our citizens are we not writing off our citizens to some extent when we argue that immigration is good because we need doctors, we need engineers?

You know, you hear sometimes this argument that the native born are not sufficiently, you know, adept at science. Well, I don't think it's zero sum. I don't think there's like, you know, 10,000 science jobs a year or something like that. Right. It's a growing population. I mean, it's, you know, there's innovation, there's different things that you have, you know, low wage immigration, they're going to need to do jobs for someone else. I don't think it's necessarily writing off citizens to be to have an open immigration policy. Some people might talk like that, but I don't think that's the best justification for it. And don't get me wrong, we're probably kindred spirits in the following way. When I know that the thing I'm not allowed to say would expose the fact that the other side is full of shit and hypocritical, it's very difficult to not be attracted to that. So like, for instance, you know, we have a situation where Jews are very successful, right? They're overrepresented in science and blah, blah, blah. And you have two possible explanations, genetics or culture. I don't think there's any other. And both those explanations are verboten.

So when you know that both explanations are verboten, you understand that what's being suppressed here is any intelligent conversation of things. And by the way, if it's cultural, maybe you didn't want to make the argument that oppression is a boost for performance. But anyway, so it is very upsetting that you can't talk about it so i i i like that you talk about it and i and i i i would never fault anybody for talking

about it but when i sniff that agenda and that agenda not only seems cruel but actually anti-american it just i get i get quite turned off and yeah there's nothing wrong with sort of i mean, there are people who should just be out there and just be telling the truth of whatever they think is the best explanation of what we see in the world. But your instinct that you're choosing to highlight something, so there's probably a reason for it, and people should just be honest about these things. I think that instinct is absolutely correct. Now, when you were younger, you were in the thrall of some of these horrible people, right? Yeah, that's why I know. I speak from some experience. Can you tell us a little bit about that insight?

So, yeah, I mean, I wrote some articles anonymously for some far-right websites. It was, you know, people can look it up if they like. But, you know, I was coming from an unhappy place. I mean, I wrote about sort of where I was. And I think that like, you know, we don't like to, I think, admit that how much sort of our personal feelings and our sort of what we're going through in life sort of influences our politics. But I've always thought these things were sort of intertwined. And I think there's just like, you know, realizing that and then realizing like, look, there's, you don't write people off. Like you said, you don't write people off just because

you think, you know, some group doesn't, you know, might not be have a per capita basis might not become doctors as much as the other group. I think there are sort of positive things we can be thinking about that we can help all people in the country. And, you know, that's what I'd like to focus on instead. So, you know, if people are having trouble deciding whether, you know, how they feel about that tweet I mentioned, I would tell them to read up, read this article, Shut Up About Race and IQ. It's so detailed. It's so compelling. And you'd have to be some to come up with all these insightful arguments for the other side when actually secretly you feel the way the tweet indicates. So, you know, for that reason, I find it hard to believe that you're not being straight with us. So where are you on immigration? I'm pro a pretty accepting immigration policy.

I think that, you know, I believe the standard economic argument that more people is better. I mean, there's just more workers. You know, you stimulate demand, you do all that all that i mean there's just a very basic sort of economic argument i think the cultural arguments that people worried about i think they're overrated even i've traveled in europe um met foreigners and i'm amazed sort of like how american even like people in foreign countries are and so the idea that like you know mexicans in america are like not going to assimilate into culture i think that's uh i think that's hard to

believe i mean you see how sort of you see see even people worry about politics, like it's a permanent, you know, Elon Musk says this sometimes, they're permanent Democratic voters. Not really. I mean, the last few polls, you know, Trump is winning Hispanics over Biden. Who would have predicted this, right, four years ago, that going with Trump would be the thing that balanced out Hispanics between Republicans and Democrats. And so a lot of things people worry about, I don't think are that big of a deal. You might worry about, okay, it's sort of disorderly, the, you know, illegal immigration. You know, in practical terms, there's no sort of like negotiation on the table that's going to increase immigration.

And so, yeah, I mean, I'm just not worried about it as far as a big problem for society. So in an interview you did with Amy Wax, who, let me tell you, we did an interview with Amy Wax years ago and she was so. She's got, yeah, she's got, she's got something. Yeah. This was in the height of wokeness and she, and she was so jarring in the things she was saying, not necessarily what she was saying, but the unapologetic, like in your face that I actually didn't.

She's the belly of the beast. I mean, she's a, she's a top law school. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't run the podcast. I don't know if you even know, because I just thought it was just going to, what's that? Was it like summer 2020 when everyone, everyone was sort of freaking out? It was even prior to that. It was when the first, the thing at Penn first broke.

I still have it somewhere. I just couldn't believe that she didn't have the, just the, the, the sense to couch her statements and disclaimers like any rational person does. Anyway, but she said in a podcast with you, which is really good, and her podcast with Glenn Lowry, I mean, you're talking about good, I mean, really provocative in terms of having to weigh the idea that, well, if something is true, is that an absolute defense to be to being able to say it and these are this is a very i'm

still struggling with that but she said that um american or western culture is liberty oriented and asian culture is conformist and she worried that there was a critical mass where if you bring too many people of a different culture that you then change our culture in a way which we wouldn't want to, or we would certainly never vote to do. What did you make of that argument? Yeah. So me and Amy have had a few podcasts on this and we've gone back and forth on it. I've always sort of thought that the horse is already out of the barn. I mean, if you're worried about new groups in America changing the culture, look, I mean, if you look at like, you know, children being born today, only something like half are white, maybe a slight majority.

And the white population is everything from Jews to Sicilians to Russians to Swedes to Arabs are considered white in this country, everything in between. And so like the idea, so like we're there. If you don't like multiculturalism, if you don't like multilingualism, if you don't want multiracial society, we are there. Just the kids being born today, whites are going to be a minority. I mean that's just happening. And whites is already a huge category that includes a lot of people. And so we are not in a situation where we're choosing now between homogeneity and diversity.

We're already in diversity. And so the question becomes how do diverse groups learn to live with each other? Now I have another article where I said diversity really is our strength where I argue that actually you get a freer society when you have these different cultural groups because often it's cultural solidarity that gets you a big welfare state. Everyone sympathizes with the poor. Everyone trusts the government. These Scandinavian countries, they've traditionally been homogenous, they have high levels of trust, they have giant

welfare states, and they're poor relative to the United States. I don't think the welfare state is a good thing. And so, yeah, I think that Amy is, I don't think we have a choice at this point how diverse we're going to be, and I think we just got to make the best of it. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I understand the argument. Like, for instance, I'm Jewish. I'm very thankful that America is so kind to Hasidic Jews and they live their lives with liberty. But I certainly do understand that it's some critical mass. That's her phrase. I've used that phrase too. And some critical mass America might say, listen, we can't have 30 million Hasidic Jews here because it's just going to drastically change the way we live. Now, they're an extreme example because they live so something, that could potentially be a problem because it's a different culture and it's such big numbers. We're sort of lucky in that it's very widely distributed.

It's all kinds of, you've got liberal cultures and you've got conservative cultures. And nobody is going to have a demographic dominance in this country. So what's the worry? Also, people love to be American. And diversity, you in your book describe how the concept of diversity was basically invented out of whole cloth in the, the backy decision by Powell,

I guess it was, um, how that was like the compromise decision. Nobody really even talked about diversity prior to that, but be that as it may, he is right. He didn't say diversity, but diversity. I mean, I sometimes, so I'm in New York and I'm conservative about a lot of things. And I'll look at my restaurant and you have gay people and straight people and Chinese people and Indian people and black people and everybody. And not just tables, but all at mixed tables of mixed people and whatever. And everybody's socializing and having a great time. I'll be without any scarcity or anything to bring out the worst in them. And it could bring tears to your eyes.

Nobody can say that a diverse culture can't work. We can say there's challenges to making it work, but clearly it can work. I think one thing is true is when white people are a minority, I expect there to be less sort of allegiance to the founders of this country. The founding fathers, I think, are going to find themselves having a less prominent place in the sort of the national the national civic religion. I don't know how much longer they can last. We did a podcast home recently with a woman who was Asian, and she didn't want her child to dress up as Martha Washington because Martha Washington was a white woman. And she wanted her child to dress up as an Asian American of prominence.

And you took her to task saying, well, no, Martha Washington is part of the American mythology, and we should all embrace. I said I found it. I found it painful that she felt that way. But what do you think, say, Richard? Yeah, I mean, you know, there is a sort of human nature and like you look at the founders and, you know, they don't look like you and maybe you feel less of a connection to that. You know, at the same time, I mean, like humans can get over this. I mean, like basketball, like basketball, like professional, like American basketball is like, from what I hear, huge in like China. And like Kim Jong Un, like loves Michael Jordan, right?

Dennis Rodman visited. He was a big thing. So people obviously do have a capacity to associate with people who who don't look like them and to identify with them and to even, you know, to see them heroically, I mean, look at white kids look up to black rappers and so forth.

And so, yeah, I think this could be overcome. I mean, I think we have a problem where we're sort of, I mean, I don't know if this is like a problem with immigrants. I mean, I think that the younger generations are sort of getting away from American ideals anyway, but I think the immigrants are probably going to assimilate into what the dominant culture tells about the founders.

You go to a public school, they're not exactly instilling the idea that American history is all that great. Yeah. Well, I mean, I have two experiences with this. So one was, well, the first one was I used to have a Korean girlfriend. She was off the boat, Korean and her family. And I remember it was November and she invited me over to her house for Thanksgiving. And I said, your parents celebrate Thanksgiving beautiful is it that, they don't even speak English. They're Koreans. They come here and they want to be American. And, you know, Thanksgiving is, but then this fast forward to a much more elite Asian. She was a therapist. And it's like talking about the metastasizing of stupid thinking.

She, her argument, it just came back to me, was, well, you know, it's like blackface. And I'm like, no, it's not like blackface. Blackface was when white people were mocking black people. It was cruel and mocking. This would be your Asian daughter dressing up as a white person because she's a hero or, you know, a founding figure. It has nothing to do with blackface, but they superimpose some semblance so they don't think it through. It sounds kind of familiar. And then anybody dressing up as anybody now is an insult, right? It's crazy. Yeah. I mean, America is the most successful country in human, the most powerful, successful country in human history. I think people naturally want to identify with that. And you sort of have to sort of have this kind of liberal BS. You have to send them to college, you know, in order for them to feel the other way. So, yeah, I mean, I think if we had confidence in ourselves, I don't think this would be much of a problem. Confidence yourselves are interesting because when I was in

Korea, this was again in the 90s, but I noticed that literally there was no time of day where either by turning on the radio or turning on the TV or just going to a restaurant where you didn't hear Western classical music. And I thought to myself at the time, what a confident culture to so embrace the music of another culture as the highest form of music. Like you do that with confidence,

you know? And it was very, I find that very beautiful. Yeah. But you look at how, I mean, look at how like business attire, right. They weren't all wearing suits and ties in Korea a hundred years ago. I mean, the fact that they even adopted sort of the way Westerners dresses dress is interesting yeah um next question um israel now now your arabic descent from the name i don't think about your bio yeah my dad's a palestinian christian and my mom is a jordanian yeah jordanian also christian yeah of course i mean the arabs you would not find a muslim christian you would maybe occasionally but maybe a muslim husband but if my dad was christian my mom would have to be christian it wouldn't be a christian man with them i know a palestinian israeli who married a jewish girl anyway but you're right it's on you so the girl

the girl is fine the girl will take after the husband i think that is the point so it has to be muslim man with other not not other way around yeah i think that think that's right. So you're quite pro-Israel, and you wrote a column, I forget the name of it, essentially putting forward the idea, it's kind of like Jabotinsky's Iron Wall essay, which had motivated Netanyahu through his entire career, that the Palestinians won't make peace until they feel they have no choice. Is that correct? Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I mean, I think the Hamas strategy is, and this has always been Palestinian strategy to some extent,

is to rely on global opinion to sort of pressure Israel into behaving differently. And, you know, and so as long as there is sort of a hope out there that the, and, you know, you have to ask what are sort of the Palestinian goals? I think Hamas, I mean, I think it's clearly, you know, there's not a positive sort of spin you could put on what they actually want. They don't really, they don't really hide it. And so as long as you have this sort of equilibrium where, you know, they can attack, then they can hide behind civilians and you really can't root them out and you can't really take the fight to them.

That's just going to be a sort of a permanent festering wound. And down the line, I mean, it's going to become harder and harder. Hamas is going to build up more capabilities. They're going to be able to better prepare for next time. And if you're not willing to sort of fight this war i mean eventually it is it's not a sustainable situation i think october 7th uh showed us that um so yeah my view is israel has to win the war i mean this is at least as important to them as uh much more important to them that world war ii was to us um and you know we don't beat ourselves we don't flog ourselves over world war ii even though we flog ourselves over a lot of other things um and uh yeah i think israel has to win i think it

should have the full support from the us i mean go ahead dan sorry you made the point in your article you you um took to task those who say that israel's treatment of the palestinians is simply going to create more terrorists because for each terrorist killed five terrorists that are their their relatives and their friends are going five palestinians that are their relatives and friends of those killed will become terrorists but you made the point that palestinians hatred of israel is already maxed out there's no way to make them hate israel more so don't worry about it i i think i i think that's rough yes that's what he said yeah yeah i mean yeah I mean, yeah. I mean, you do get to the point where, like, okay, you have a complete societal consensus.

I mean, you look at the approval rating for, like, October 7th, and you look at, you know, other things like this. You can't really make them hate you that much. They're sort of maxed out on it. And it's not because, like, Israel has not killed until this war. I mean, by like world standards, Israel has not killed as many Palestinian people as they, as they could have, or as many other countries do when they're in a war situation. If you look at, you know, Syria, if you're like what the Chinese did to the Uyghurs, you know, I think that people don't

like to admit it, but it's, it's pure antisemitism. They don't like a Jewish state. It's a religious motivation. And so this goes against the idea that it's like, you know, you turn down the oppression, you give them, you know, you give them more rights, they're going to somehow come to the peace table. Like, no, I think that Palestinian societies mobilize and Hamas and the leadership especially to win, to kick the Jews out and to have the land, to bring the land under Islamic control. I don't think that there's any reason to think that's not the case. You know, maybe the reason I find you smart is because you say things that I think. But I had a similar conversation with David Rothkopf, the foreign foreign user,

foreign policy magazine. And I asked him, is Israel more or less existentially threatened by Hamas than we were by the Japanese? And he said, oh no, we were more threatened by the Japanese, which I thought was crazy. But then I said to him on this issue of creating more terrorists, I think it was to him, that fine. But, you know, I said, I put it this way. I said, so maybe Hamas goes to 11 you know that's all I think this one goes to 11 because it really seems like their their hatred of Israel has been at a 9 or 10 for a long time but maybe it goes to 11 but does anybody ever stop and think about the fact that Israel used to be at a 1 like you're all worried about the psychology of what's being created in Hamas what about the psychology that's being created in Hamas. What about the psychology that's being

created in the Israelis? There was never hundreds of thousands of Palestinians marching for peace now. There was an entire left-wing peace movement that was destroyed psychologically, and nobody ever makes that argument against the Arabic behavior. I don't understand that. Yeah, I mean, you're right. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a, I don't know, it's sort of like Israel is considered sort of a civilized country. Therefore, you can appeal to their better angels. So like they're having a democratic debate. You can hope to influence them.

While Palestinians are just, if you're a dissident under Hamas, you know, you get thrown in a dungeon somewhere. I think that's the sort of the psychology, but the right response. So maybe it's rational, like you can influence Israel in the West, but we can't influence the Palestinians. But the lesson of that isn't just you nag Israel, the Palestinians do what you want. It's like, there's a serious problem with the Palestinians. And this is a, you know, this is a many ways a broken kind of society. And yeah, Israel has to live next to them, and they have to figure out what to do about it. They should make a sympathetic to Israel's case, the fact that Palestinians are not amenable to reason. Let me issue a few disclaimers that are not just pro forma, because I believe them. And I know that it's very cruel to live, even in the West Bank.

It's very cruel to live, even in the West Bank, it's very harsh. And with our regard to how that situation is brought about by the ridiculous policies of the leadership, I know people who, you know, I know people who tell me stories that I believe of really arrogant and horrible treatment under the yoke of the Israeli occupation, and it fills them with anger in the same way, and maybe more severely as many black Americans are filled with anger at the police, not because they shoot innocent people, but because of the arrogant way they're treated day to day. One can only imagine what the people of Gaza are going through. And I actually, I'm ready to sign on the dotted line that Israel is absolutely correct for its aim to get rid of Hamas. I don't think they have any choice.

I'm not ready to sign on the dotted line that the way they're conducting the war is with the least brutality that's possible. I hope it is. I don't think that it's not, at least not, I'm sure in certain cases, in certain decisions, but in the overall, I don't think they're faking it when they say they're trying to reduce civilian casualties, if only for their own self-interest and to keep their relationship with Washington well. But we won't know that until later. I wonder, so Nicholas Kristof and other people have made the argument, listen, I don't know what they should be doing differently, but I know this is not okay. I know that 30,000 people is not okay. What do you answer to that argument?

Yeah, I mean, it's so easy. I mean, to say this is, I have no alternative, but, you know, this is not okay. I mean, it's not every choice is easy I mean not every sort of you know sometimes you have unacceptable sort of differences and I don't think you know that's crazy I mean that the rough cop told you that the Japanese threatened the US in 1940s more than the Palestinians or Hamas threatens Israel today I mean they're firing rockets at their cities I mean they they Japanese couldn't do a raid

and, you know, kidnap women in America and take them to Japan. I mean, they had an attack on Hawaii, you know, in the middle of the Pacific. Oh, it's crazy. And 150,000 rockets in the north and Iran in the east. I mean, it's crazy to think that.

You can't compare. Absolutely can't compare. Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, completely. I mean, and then you have just the, you know, they don't quite, Japan is on the other side of the world. The Palestinians are right there. And so, yeah, I mean, countries have to survive. I mean, I don't think that like,

look, I don't think if you had this, if you look, if you had a blanket rule, then you can never kill Palestinian civilians. It's terrible to say, but I think that would be then I think that would be the end of Israel because Hamas would know forever. All they have to do is hide behind civilians no matter how many rockets they lob at Israel, no matter how many October 7th, do a raid and take some women back every few years. They'll never – they'll say Nicholas Kristof of the world will come and say you can't kill children. It's a terrible situation, but I'm convinced that it will be the end of Israel. So I think they have to sort of be able to fight this war. in bomb shelters and has its army reservists call up indefinitely at the whim of a gang that can press a button and that is an existential threat to the way any country would ever live. It doesn't mean they're all going to die or there's no more country, but no country can

live that way um as for christoph's argument i i i have made the argument in certain you know situations in my own life where i said listen i don't know how you fix this problem but i know this can't be the right answer and it's like well these customers are unhappy yeah boss but you have said they had to be because i said listen i don't want to hear it customers are unhappy. Yeah, boss, but you have to say they had to be because I said, listen, I don't want to hear it. Customers are unhappy. So you better figure it out. So I don't have I don't totally disrespect. I don't have total disrespect for that way of thinking, kind of working backwards from a from a facially unacceptable outcome to say, listen, you got to come up with a better way.

But we're months into this war. Basically, any expert in the world will pick up the phone when Nicholas Kristof calls and he's a journalist. By this point, he should have done the due diligence to be able to say, listen, I looked into this and actually there are certain alternatives that they could be doing. Four months into whatever it is to simply saying, oh, I don't know, but they shouldn't be doing if four months into whatever it is to simply saying oh they should i don't know but they shouldn't be doing this at at some point it it becomes unserious i don't want to call him anti-semitic i don't think he's anti-semitic but it's i don't know what you call it but maybe he shouldn't be writing for the times anymore it's just not a serious person yeah yeah i i agree with you i do think that there is you know you can't say you know you i mean, everything is unacceptable.

Everything sounds terrible because Israel is in a terrible situation. So, yes, that I think does put the burden on you. And obviously, if you have the resources and time to look into it, yeah, to have another solution. I don't think you just say we can't. Richard, can I ask you, as somebody who may or may not have their ear to the ground regarding the Arab American community, how many Arab Americans or Arabs in general or Arab Christians are of your opinion regarding this conflict? You know, Arab Christians are sort of, you know, I think Arab Muslims are probably, you know, completely with the Palestinians. Arab Christians, some of them are not big fans of Muslims, to be frank.

A lot of them came from Muslim countries and, and, and are probably not sympathetic to the Palestinians at all. So like, yeah, even in my family, there's there's the entire spectrum of opinions on the Israeli Palestinian question, it's pretty closely divided. You want to you want to give us a little overview, you have a nutshell version of it, of how wokeness came to be and whether you think we're past peak woke. Your book was written before the Supreme Court outlawed racial preferences in colleges. I don't know, but your new edition might have something to say about that. So, you know, however you want to address that issue.

Yeah. I mean, so my book, you know, in a nutshell, I hope people get it. And because it's, it's, it's, it's tough to do justice, you know, just quickly. But yeah, the idea is that a lot of the stuff that we think of as wokeness that we think is cultural, has a legal basis, that if you run a business in this country, if you're a college, you've had the government breathing down your neck for a really long time, you to classify your employees your students whatever uh by race by sex uh to to cure any imbalances to not give tests if one group does better than the other this is so baked into american governance it came from executive orders it came from uh interpretations of the civil rights act i'd say well this stuff is

usually is not actually in the text of civil rights Rights Act, but it's been read that way, and some of the civil rights laws that came later. And, you know, the corollary to that is that you can actually fix a lot of this through policy. So the Supreme Court decision from the Harvard decision over the summer, I mean, that that is a good first step. There was just just the other day there was a decision out of a court in Texas that got rid of a minority business set aside. So basically the government for 55 years have said, if you're a minority, small business government can do special favors for you, can give you special contracts, can help you in ways that they don't help

other businesses. And a lot of this stuff is I mean, I do think we are getting past that. First, there's a few things going on. First of all, there's the legal stuff. I mean, the stuff that Chris Ruffo is doing, my book, the ideas that are out there, just the Trump appointments on the Supreme Court, conservatives having a lot of power in the judiciary. So there's the legal aspect of this. I think probably just as big is Elon Musk buying Twitter. Twitter sort of, you know, it's not perfect. I mean, all the Nazis and a lot of porn, a lot of pussy and bio. I mean, it's probably the most common phrase on Twitter these days. But still, I mean, there's more of a

sort of, there's a sort of more parity between the two sides. So these conservative boycotts of like Bud Light and Target, they suddenly started working when there was new management at Twitter. And my own account, I feel more free. And I think a lot of people feel that way too. And just because this stuff goes in cycles anyway, because you try wokeness. I mean, we try the idea of criminals are actually innocent victims of society and let's toss out all standards. And it doesn't go well. I mean, we had that big crime wave that really went from the 60s all the way to the late 1980s. We started clamping down on crime in the 1990s. We forgot those lessons. Then came, you know, BLM and George Floyd and all of that. So yeah, for now, I think we're going in the right direction. I think that changing the law is potentially help is a way to potentially

get us out of the cycle. So it doesn't, you know, 10, 15 years, we're not the same place we started at, by the way, the Ivy league university is getting back to the they're bringing back the SAT. That's right. Just Brown university. I think Dartmouth did it. And Yale. MIT did it before that. And then I think there's one other. I think Yale, I think Yale. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, so they're not, you know, this shows,

they're not as crazy as you might think they are. Yeah. So, so they're not, you know, this shows they're not as crazy as you might think. They are, they are crazy, but they're, they're not going to flush their credibility down the toilet. They're, they're self-interested enough to, to remain credible institutions. Yeah. Well, one painful thing, it's very painful to see the pendulum swing into absurdum, but then of course people live in absurdum for a while and inevitably they're like, what the fuck is this? You know, it's amazing how quickly they re-embrace the SATs. It must have been a five alarm fire.

Yeah, I was talking to somebody at Penn, actually, who took a leave of absence, came back and said there was something different about the students. I mean, they were not, it was noticeable to this person because standardized tests are the only way, you know, everyone gets a 4.0 these days. You don't have standardized tests, you don't really have have standards it's the only way to judge people fairly of course i mean it was it was madness so a few things in your book you just reverberated with me first of all as a business owner the stats on how basically every fortune 500 company has been sued for millions of dollars for harassment and and all this um just the the idea that there's you know an army of employees out there with visions of causes of actions dang like what's that from the night before christmas visions of cause of actions dancing in their head um and this is really true we We've had a little experience here. It was a

stupid flare-up we had here about whether people could be on standby for their shifts. Turned out we were 100% compliant with the law. But everybody was Googling, and they were passing around, and they became lawyers. And it was a whole mutiny until they realized, oh, that was just a proposed law. It had never been passed. But I mean, the ardor to catch the boss and to sue for something, this is real. And then you make an additional really insightful point that the ambiguity, both of the complex, caused by the complex descriptions in the law where each word

is ambiguous. And then, so the employers don't know what's okay and what's not okay. And then, and I, when something is ambiguous, you don't get anywhere near it. Like we've talked about this years ago. Like if you know where the line is drawn, where the cliff is, you can walk right up to the cliff and look over it because you know where the cliff is. But if you don't know where the drop is, you're not getting within 20 feet of where it might be. And this is the way employers are operating now. We all operate scared. And half the time, 70% of the time, when I, when if I have a tough thing I'm not sure about, and I'll call my employment practices attorney, like, okay to do they'd be like I don't know you know you think they don't know so you so you try you just don't take the chance this is no way to run a business right so your book is excellent on that

yeah thanks yeah they're they yeah the idea is that like you know it's ambiguous a hostile work environment yeah um you know uh you know sexual harassment people flirt you know it it's ambiguous, a hostile work environment, you know, sexual harassment, people flirt, you know, it's not like there's a ban on flirting or dating. It's just there's, you know, if it's, you know, severe and pervasive, what does that mean? Who knows? Right. And, you know, who, who interprets civil rights laws? I mean, they're not, you know, they're not, you know, freewheeling, you know, shock jocks or comedians or something like that. I mean, they're people who have a broad definition of racism and sexism, and all they've got to do is convince a jury or convince a judge or convince a bureaucrat that you did something wrong. And it's no wonder, you know, 100% of, you know,

the top corporations end up either getting sued or settled because there's no way around this. Even you have statistical discrimination, right? You have the, you know, they treated me unfairly. Then you have some measure of employment. You have some kind of standard people have to meet and some groups do better than other that's also a problem too so you can get everyone on everything i mean the sort of cultural idea that corporations are the super sanitized place where everyone is sort of neurotic and working on eggshells uh the law made it that way i mean there is a pretty direct connection between what the law says and just sort of how institutions operate and ultimately like what we experience which we call this thing you know political correctness or wokeness um two two more quick things what one thing with that is we also one

of these you know obvious contradictions that nobody wants to uh really talk about is the contradiction between feminism and the obvious protection protectionist way or that's not the right word but you know the the the uh careful way we assume that women have to be treated which is different than the way men have to be treated the hostile work environment remarks i mean you name it everything is basically um telegraphing that we think women are much more fragile and need much more protection than men do. We'll never say that out loud because they're just the same as men are and nobody is ever going to reconcile. Well, what does feminism stand for now? Does it stand for the fact that men and women should be treated exactly the same or does it stand for a little

bit seasoned with a kind of sense of chivalry and you know the delicate flowers uh I'm giving you can I give you another example I just thought of it that's pretty else so it reminded me something I hadn't thought about in years if you're a man and you and you have to get a shot in the butt by a by a nurse and you take down your pants and the nurse says, oh, cute butt, right? A man would giggle, oh, thank you. No man would ever be bothered by that. He'd be flattered. The reverse, if you're a woman

and you have to take down your butt for some male nurse and he says cute butt, you're going to fucking sue. Am I wrong, Perrielle? Yes, you're wrong. And now this is a cute example, but it's not a meaningless example because you can extrapolate from that. Who are we kidding?

We don't think everybody's the same. That's completely unprofessional. What do you mean? A nurse telling a guy that he has a cute butt before she sticks her finger in your ass to check your prostate like is that i wouldn't care as i think as i think what he's saying i would i i can't imagine most men caring don't interrupt her i like where she's going with this i would not be um offended i would not feel sexually harassed i might question

um just how good a doctor she is. Like if she's got a screw loose and she would say something like that, maybe she's not that competent. How about this? Wait a second. What if the nurse were a man and he said that to you? You would still think you would just blow it off? Because I think that's actually a better.

I wouldn't care. There are plenty of men who are, as it were, homophobic. No, no, no. You don't have to be homophobic to... I'm saying I wouldn't care about that. I wouldn't be outraged, but I wouldn't be flattered quite in the same way if a girl said it to me. Oh, okay. But I'm assuming mirror image heterosexual situations.

Male heterosexual nurse, female patient. I'm assuming. Just listen. Let's not pretend. All right. Finally, this is the last thing I meant to bring up. So your statement about interpreting the agenda of people by the issues that they're concerned about, this also disturbs me about the people who are harping on the trans issues. Now, I don't think a college male swimmer ought to be able to change his bathing suit and then blow all the female swimmers out of the water. I'm not for

that. And there's some other common sense issues I'm not for. On the other hand, it makes my skin crawl the glee with which so many people ridicule trans people. And so, for instance, it's all fun and games for these people until at some point, someone you care about, like I have a very close friend who became trans, or someone in your family, I have a very close friend whose daughter went through stuff. Someone you care about becomes, you know, trans, and then your concern becomes, I want this person who I love to be able to have a fulfilling life in a world that's not cruel to them and then all of a sudden your your way you look at it will immediately change this would happen to matt walsh or anybody else out there is it like you say like uh prisons yeah there was a prison right well when i think about my friend who's trans if he if god really ever had to go to a prison if they put him in a male prison they would fucking tear him limb she she put her in a male prison they would they would tear her they would rape her they would abuse her she might she might find her hanging in her cell like

the the shallowness with which people address this issue i think really does say something about their motivations even if on many of these aspects i i agree with them i don't know if you have any comments and all that i don't even know where you stand on that stuff yeah i mean there are people who just dislike homosexuality dislike any kind of gender non-conformity i mean and of course there's a backlash to trans a lot of it justified you know a lot of it i think that it's kind of become a, you know, a social panic among kids, a kind of a social contagion. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, I think that's true. I think that there is like just an anti-gay stuff that's out there. I think that focusing on trans actually is like the biggest issue in the country is also a sign that you just really, really hate homosexuality because, you know, if it's in your top three or five issues, I think you're overrating it. So that probably tells you something too, just how much emphasis people put on it. Is it possible that, I mean, cause you see this on the left too.

I always thought that wokeness is really just an excuse for bullying. Is it possible that we all always need something to hate? We need something, the lightning rod for this kind of primitive aspect of our personalities. And, you know, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's weird because you'll see some people like, you know, they'll talk about Leroy DiCaprio likes younger girls. And it's like, wait a minute, when we stop judging people based on their sexual orientation, suddenly we judge them for being too old with too young of a woman. Or sometimes people will judge a race preference say if you're white you should have just want to date someone

uh who's white so it seems like there is a conservation of a of a sexual judge especially on sex yeah we feel like we have to judge people for based on sexual uh sexual romantic decisions and that seems to yeah it's very rare to find people who just are non-judgmental about these things uh oh i know you gotta go there's something else that I saw you, you write somewhere, which also really rang true to me, which is that you notice that that nobody gets anything right. I'm paraphrasing, like, over time, this economist, that economist, everybody's, you know, the sky is always falling. And you get to live to be a certain age, you're quite younger than I am. But it's been my conclusion after seeing some, you know, kind of getting on board with so

many people warning me that this is going to happen, that's going to happen. Say, you know, they don't know and things are never that bad and things kind of work out. What do you think about all that? Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of prediction markets. I mean, I put probabilities on things that I predict. If I say, you know, there's going to be a, you know, Trump is going to be the nominee, I'll say people 70%.

You could actually, you know, calculate going to be a you know if trump is going to be the nominee i'll say people 70 you could actually you know calculate how people how good people are this should be sort of i think mandatory uh for pundits i think people should just do it as best practices and you're right i mean people are often uh people are often wrong but you know we could try to have good epistemological habits and we could sort of try to hold ourselves accountable and that's really the best we could do all Richard, go ahead. That I don't know if you write about this or think about this, but my gut tells me you have an opinion and it's reasonable and interesting Bitcoin.

Well, I don't know when this is going to be released, but I have a podcast. I just did a podcast on with somebody who knows a lot about cryptocurrency. So so far, I've just been listening to some guys who are really into cryptocurrency and I've just been taking their investment advice. One told me to invest in Dogecoin about a week ago. I've got like a 35% return in a week, which is pretty good. So, you know, taking these guys' advice has been good so far. But yeah, listen to the podcast. It's going to be on my newsletter. It's going to come out probably by the time people hear this. And I'm still in the process of learning myself.

I'm just taking the advice from smart people who've made me money in the past, but I don't have deep specialized knowledge. I hope to get that soon. Are you bullish on America in general? I am. I mean, I think just the economic data, the numbers, they don't lie. We're just blowing past Europe. I want to write an article about this.

I actually do think it's our polarization that is, to a large extent, the benefit. I mean, I think we end up sometimes with good policy just because there's sort of red states and blue states, and they try different things and they fight over it. And we actually do end up with better results overall uh so yeah i am bullish on the united states a global look at a comparative advantages of every country on earth does any country have more advantages in america um no i mean as far as like how we're i mean you know you know cutter or uae or stuff here if you know you're just sitting on oil wealth and you could just live off that you, your life is pretty easy.

But no, I'd rather be here than anywhere. Some places have less crime. Some people have less disorder. I mean, if you just want to sort of have an exciting life with the greatest possibilities, I don't think there's a better place to be. Yeah, I think, you know,

like in video games, like my kid plays it, like the racing game, they'll have a car and have like 10 different aspects of the car, acceleration, traction, blah, blah, blah, steering. I think America,

between our fantastic system, our youth, our resources, our, you know, just, you just go again and again and again. Sure, this policy may be bad. We might have to correct it. There's definitely problems. I don't see any country

with our just tremendous advantages. I'm very positive in the long term about America. I really wish we could get past this cultural period and get to, you know, when I was a kid, it was conceivable that a president could win 45, 50, 48 states. And it happened, you know, real landslides happen with some regularity.

I would like America to, I would like that to be possible again in America, that somebody, some presidential candidate could win a huge landslide. That would say something about our culture being repaired. Yeah, I think I'm a little bit more ambivalent about that. I actually think the fact that they can't do that is sort of might actually be one of our strengths, but you know, it's something I want to think about more. I think there is something to say for the polarization. Maybe both. Maybe good things come out of it, but

we are really at each other's throats in a certain way. All right, we could go on. It's interesting. All right. You have been a great guest and if anybody else has to say, check out Richard's book. I can't recommend it enough. I don't, and I don't just say that about, you know,

books that people have written who come on the show. It is really, you will not be able to put it down. I was up late reading it and I plan to finish it on my Kindle. What's the name of the book now? Origins of Woke. Richard? What's that? It's the Origins of Woke, Civil Rights Law.

Oh, the Origins of Woke. Corporate America and the Triumph of my Kindle. uh the origins of corporate america and the triumph do you do you um no do you get more put more stock into his explanation of the origins of wokeness or yasha monk so they both have they both have their uh good points well i don't know i I mean, definitely what Richard wrote made more sense to me in the sense that it jived with my experience. And I'm about halfway through it. while both things were true, what he says is closer to the reason that major corporations are coming out for policies which make no sense from a business standpoint

or a profit standpoint or anything. That didn't come from Foucault. I think that came from legal and systemic pressures. And then, so I think on that one now then you know you maybe breaks down into finer gradations of issues maybe yasha is right yasha's a friend of mine so it's almost impossible for me to take sides against you don't have to be seen as like you know if you believe one you can't believe the other i mean there they there there's different parts of reality there is sort of the ideas. I mean, there's different parts of reality. There is sort of the ideas.

There's a civil rights law, which sort of forms the pipeline for the way the idea is to just influence and take over institutions. So I think if people are interested in the issue, they should read civil rights law, you know, coming out of Jim Crow and then America flailing about to try to get a more equal society, which it naively thought was just going to happen by, you know, a stroke of a pen. Everything that followed from that seems kind of predictable and seems like it would have happened regardless of any philosophical underpinnings in academia. It seems like these would be the trial and error steps that America would have to take as each smaller reaction fizzled. That's why I think you're basically right i think that's a

good point and you can look across the world i mean racial preferences for groups that underperform are you know i'm not going to say universal but they're very very common all over the world so i mean you you get this stuff just through the sort of the interaction of politics yeah all right sir we kept you long past the time. Thank you very, very much. Take it easy. Thank you. All right. Podcast at ComedyTeller.com, everybody. Take it easy.

Bye.