The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - We Are Ruled by the Worst - The Charlie Kirk Conspiracy and Other Symptoms | Richard Hanania

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Get KAKISTOCRACY on Amazon: https://bit.ly/4hxg9Lh Synopsis Richard Hanania is back. His new book, Kakistocracy, argues that populism ends in rule by the worst people, and he and Noam spend an hour testing that against the news: why populism can win without being popular, whether the Iran war was worth the shot even if it fails, whether China would rather help us than fight us, and how the right built a media culture where Tucker Carlson can say Israel killed Charlie Kirk and the vice president shrugs. Then the hardest subject on the show: Nathan Cofnas and "race realism." Hanania explains why he thinks the taboo is universal and why Cofnas is wrong that breaking it defeats wokeness, and Noam tells two stories about kids the experts wrote off. Plus the Epstein email dump, diagnostic inflation, and why smart people believe in God, demons, and the supernatural. 0:00 Intro: Compliments 4:21 "Believe the media": defending the Times, what populism is, and "low human capital" 11:24 Is populism even popular? Mamdani, Trump's 30 percent, the AfD, and what populism costs 22:42 The Iran war argued with hindsight: Hormuz, the Houthis, "worth a shot," and China 35:00 Making things up: Tucker, Candace, Charlie Kirk, Ilhan Omar, and Father Coughlin 41:51 "Our guys lie less": Covid, the mulligan, gatekeepers, and what democracy is for 52:59 Race realism: Cofnas, Charles Murray, little Bernie Goetzes, and two kids the experts got wrong 68:02 Diagnostic inflation, labels, and why smart people are finding God

I didn't think you're recording. I literally hit the button right then. Oh, my God. Okay. Is this my sound okay? There's a fan here. Can you hear it? No, it's good.

You're good. Zoom is good at removing background noise. It's very good at that, yeah, actually. Hit it, Peryel. Welcome to Live from the Tableau, the official podcast for the world-famous comedy seller. I'm here with Noam Dorman, the owner of the comedy seller. Dan Natterman is at sea or... Nobody cares. Continue.

In Canada somewhere. I'm Periel. I'm the producer of the show. And we have a return guest today. Our beloved Richard Hanania is a political scientist and writer. He has a popular newsletter on Substack, which you should subscribe to, called richardhanania.com, right? It's the... Well, if you want somebody to find you, you've made it easy for them. He's the author of The Origins of Woke, and he has a new book out, which seems to be garnering a lot of praise from a lot of very important people, called Kakistocracy, why populism ends in disaster. Welcome back to the show, Richard.

Thank you for having me, for you. I have to say like 20 positive things about you. First of all, first of all, don't stop at 20. You can keep going. So, you know, I don't know, it was the last time in time before we had you on about your woke book, wokeness book. And I'd read a bunch of these books.

And yours was, I have, no offense, was really the best one. Not only the best in its insight, in my opinion, but also just in being well, well written. And I define well written as you don't feel like you're taking your medicine. when you have to plow through a book that you're actually happy to read it because it's entertaining and, you know, it doesn't dwell too long on things and it doesn't feed you with jargon and details that you kind of find yourself skipping. I mean, in every aspect, it was excellent. And then your substack has just been tremendous. And the only thing I could say about the substack is that

You have a whole book now we're going to talk about, which is kind of, you know, defending in some way elites. And yet your substack regularly takes opinions that are contrary to the elites and I think smarter than the elites. So that's a kind of interesting irony there. And then also, you know, I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks that people are really smart when they tend to agree with them. You know, so that's how I define really smart. Not only do I find myself almost always agreeing with you. I basically email you every time I don't agree, and it's usually a minor thing of degree or something like that, that your kind of journey, I know this is just, I have to say all this,

that your journey from where you were like the 2020 election, the 2024 election, where you're turning away from things now, this very much traces my own opinions about things. and so, you know, in that way, you're a kindred spirit. And finally, this last book, Cacistocracy, I have to recommend it to everybody. I've been sending it out, I don't want to say the names on the list, but I sent out the introduction to a few prominent podcast hosts because I said, you need to read this. This is a, you know, a guest you should have on.

One of them who's very prominent, and I'm wondering, I'll ask you by email whether or not he contacted you. So that's it. So welcome, Richard Hanania. Thank you, No, Matt. Just think it as a strategic thing. I'm pretty hard on podcasters in the book. So hopefully, hopefully they missed that part when they have you on the show. No, this one, no, I wouldn't say, I'm not going to send you on the, I don't know Rogan,

but I'm not going to send you on the Rogan. Well, I mean, by all means, send me to Rogue. You're right. I take that back. But he's the kind of person you would have been hard on. Right, right. So, all right. So, well, let's start from where, whatever.

touched on. You defend elites. Oh, you know what? I sent this to you right before we got on the show, the thing you might see it. But this is, there's a tweet that came out by this tweeter named Gumi. Do you know this guy?

I've seen him. I've seen him on Twitter, yeah. And he tweeted something which sounds just like Richard Hanania. He said, the left is dumb that they'll believe everything the media tells them, even when it's obviously false. The right is dumb.

and that they won't believe what the media tells them even when it's obviously true. Yes, and I would probably add, if you're going to have to choose, and this is the kind of main idea of the book, believe what they tell you. Because most of the time you're going to be right if you don't have the time or the willingness to make the effort or whatever, the educational background to understand, to differentiate kind of what's true and what's false, it's probably better to just trust the media. rather than distrust everything. Yeah, you wrote a very, getting back to the book, you wrote a really good post one time defending the New York Times. And this is something I've done too. That's why I say, I track you.

I'm like, yes, of course, when you hear, there are these outrageous stories in New York Times, which are just, you know, examples of obvious malfeasance and malpractice. But still, the New York Times is the best, most reliable source of news in the world. Both things are true, correct? Sure, absolutely. And, you know, the other outlets are out there. I mean, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, these all do great reporting.

And even though they have flaws and probably a thousand, we probably have a thousand memories each of us stored up and things that they got wrong, I think the last few years in particular, you know, it was easy, like 10 years ago to complain just to be a regular conservative and complain that the media was biased and just take the idea that you would have a media that cares about truth for granted and just wish that the ideology would be a little bit different. Now we can't take that for granted anymore. I mean, the last, I think, five, six years, particularly since Elon took over Twitter, I think, since 2022 really was, if you want, one watershed, we've seen that, like, the alternative to how humans gather information is really, really awful. And just to have institutions that can, just the institutions that, like, engage in basic fact-checking and get their facts right, that's quite valuable. The book was reviewed. I was profiled in the Atlantic a few months ago. And whatever they say about me, the ideas were represented correctly.

The ideas were represented correctly when I talked to the person doing the profile. He gave a fair hearing. He editorialized a little bit. But I'm on Twitter a lot, and you can't take that for granted. I mean, people are just making things up, or people are making assumptions about you, or people are unable to, like, understand what you're saying and, like, are attributing beliefs to you that you don't hold. And so, yeah, I mean, the market for elite criticism is,

is saturated. It's a very large market. One of the reasons I wrote this book was somebody needed to make the alternative case. So tell us, so I'm going to give you some of the themes in your book and then just remind me, Perry, all, to get back to this concept of making things up, because this is one of the big differences between the left and the right and the way the right has started to allow people who literally just make things up into the highest echelons of influence. So you focus a lot on low human capital. So tell us about low human capital. And by the way, along the way, define what populism is for the listeners so they know what point you're making.

Yeah, low human capital is a term that has meaning. And it was kind of a trolling Twitter term I use. I use it sometimes just in kind of an offhand way. I realized I was actually going to write the book about the human capital issue. And that was kind of like an early version of what this book was going to become. but I realized at some point that the phrase was confusing people more than it was enlightening them. So elite human capital doesn't necessarily mean that people, some people are smarter than others. It is correlated with intelligence, obviously.

But I would always get the pushback. Well, someone like Elon Musk is obviously very smart and very talented and basically believes every crazy right-wing conspiracy theory that's floating around on X. So this phrase was really, really confusing people. So I tend not to say low human capital, unless I'm like kind of trolling or making fun of people. As far as populism, I think this is kind of a better idea of what I'm getting at. So we live in a world where ideas where the way people are platformed, they're mediated through institutions. Someone might come on a show. They might be a professor at a major medical school.

They might be a journalist and an important elite publication. they might have some degrees, they might have some credentials. And this is one way of like choosing your elite or choosing who to listen to. And political movements could be like this too. Populism tends to get rid of that mediating influence. So if you look at a populist politician versus a non-populous politician, a non-populous politician will usually be somebody who's good at winning over donors, who's good at winning over elites in his party. A populist politician will often be opposed by his own party, will it be opposed by elites,

and we'll just have a direct relationship to the voter. You see the same thing with the media, too. You read somebody in the New York Times, you read a big profile on the Atlantic. You probably don't, you might not even have known the author's name. You just take the signal of this is an elite institution. So maybe it's something worth listening to, and you take it as kind of a bundle. It's depending on the institution itself. Something that's a populist media outlet or media figure is somebody who just has a direct relationship to the audience.

So why is Joe Rogan famous? Joe Rogan is famous because he has a large audience, right? There's nobody, like nobody would publish an op-ed by Joe Rogan if he was just some random guy. You see the same thing. You can apply this to, like, medicine. Like medicine has become politicized, right? So some people will listen to their doctors. Some people, it means something with the American Medical Association says, standard credentials.

Some people are just, they practice a form of populist medicine. It's the people who go viral on social media, podcasters, This is how RFK built his reputation as a person who is worth listening to about health. This is how he became the head of HHS, going directly to the people, right? There's no mediating institution between RFK and the people. He's ended up in power. So populists are people. They can be elites in the sense that they have power.

Donald Trump, obviously, RFK Jr. These people do have power. But they're still populace because they exist in this world where their legitimacy and their power comes directly from the relationship with the audience or the voters or whatever the case might be. And do you have a, well, let me ask you this before I ask you that. One of the things I always think about is what we can actually infer from these wins. And I'll say, for instance, Mamdani in New York City, yeah, he won. But, you know, if Cuomo were not such a horrible candidate and Kurt,

of Sliwa hadn't been such an egomaniac, it's not clear to me that there was a groundswell towards the Mamdani voter. And similarly, I mean, Trump was fortunate in his opposition with Hillary Clinton. But then against Kamala Harris, I mean, if they had put up just any reasonable moderate who could answer questions, I believe Trump would not have won. And then if his populism were truly popular, he would have better than the 30% approval rating that he has now. So is part of this a fluke that America has turned to a populist president? Well, there's always kind of contingent historical factors. But I wouldn't say populism necessarily means something is popular. Donald Trump has never had, or almost never had,

approval rating of a majority of the American people. Populism, I tend to think of it as something that is underrepresented in elite discourse. So somebody like Trump, a person who had his views on immigration, trade, and foreign interventions that had a base of support, maybe 20, 30 percent of the population was really populist in its beliefs. But you didn't get that with either, the choice of either political party in previous election. In these European countries, the big populist parties might win 20, 30 percent of the vote. Doesn't mean they're popular, but they're just opposed by 95 or 99 percent of the elites in those countries. So, yeah, It's not, they're sometimes really popular.

I mean, like, Victor Orban was really popular for a really long time. So populists can be popular. But the way I think of it is they are popular with the people relative to how popular they are among the elites, where they tend to have very little support. Yeah. I just wondering, like, I don't know much about German politics, but I just get the feeling that the anti-immigration movement in Germany is a lot more deeply felt and serious than it, it is here, and we're seeing as soon as Trump made moves to really look like he was going to rounding

people up, the people really say, wait, we didn't mean that. We just want to get the border under control, right? We're not having the, but in Germany, I don't know, what do you know about all that? So in the German case, their kind of default policy has been pretty open the last few years. I understand it's actually quite hard to deport people. So the AFD, the big, populist anti-immigration party, it is tapping into something that's there in public sentiment. I mean, one of the differences between Europe and America, and you'll see this in case after case, is we have a two-party system, and they have a system with multiple parties. So they have maybe four or five big parties in Germany.

And so, yeah, like in those cases, you'll end up with one party that is just completely focused on immigration, while the Republican Party is going to be more divided between pro-immigration and people who are anti-immigration, with the anti-immigration side dominating in recent years. Anyway, so what is, so the point of your book is that populism is bad and leads almost always to bad consequences. People should read the book to get all the details of that, but what bad consequences, well, have you seen already? What of them do you think will linger and what bad consequences are yet to come. Yeah, I mean, so people have looked at this.

There tends to be lower economic growth in populous countries compared to other countries. There's a high chance of like just backsliding in your democracy, just people seizing, government seizing power, arbitrary arresting people, changing the constitution in order to favor one side or other. Just like the kind of the historical data we have on this is pretty clear. In the American case, like, yeah, I mean, it's very kind of interesting to see what's going on because economic growth in the Trump era has been kind of like, I mean, it's been okay. It seems to be really propped up by AI. There seems to be a lot of things going on globally that have not been good for American status. The Iran war is just a quagmire and we just lost, and basically the global community just lost access to the other side of the strait where the Houthis have been attacked. And, yeah, I think as far as like norms institutions, I mean, the corruption of the Trump administration, and this is a common feature of populist governance, is just off the charts. I mean, just like the amount of money that has been taken just kind of directly from Trump from his supporters and the level of profiteering off the government.

It's just you can't even put it on the same scale of anything that came before. The level of like prosecution of the president, like just telling people to prosecute people that didn't happen before. I don't know what people think happened under Biden, but it wasn't anything like that and like firing prosecutors until you get the one that goes after the guy that you want to get. Some of this stuff I think will be, you know, will be corrected once Trump is gone. He's just a figure who like uniquely, he's just a unique figure. Like focuses on arresting his enemies all day. That's not necessarily what every president is going to do. That's not the most presidents are going to do.

But I think some of this stuff is like here to stay. I think like kind of the norm of what you can get away with as far as, kind of corruption or just seizing power for the executive, the kind of the damn, the norms have been so weakened and so broken that I think it's going to be bad for future administrations going forward. Yeah, I'm worried about it too. I would say, you know, the Trump defender in me feels like he has to point out. It's no excuse, but it just needs to be said that part of his reaction was to him being

singled out for prosecution by various government on some. often very, very flimsy charges. So we knew going into it that he was dangerous on this issue because he had a righteous urge to score settle, and he's classless in the way he settles scores. And that's most of what he's doing, right? He's personal peak in ordering prosecutions. Yeah, I think the New York prosecutions in particular,

were unwise and probably legal stretch. The politicians or prosecutors were Letitia James was campaigning on the idea that she would go after Trump. I think that's highly inappropriate. I think that's something that you shouldn't be doing and that should be that should be denounced. Some of the others though, I mean, I think were legitimate. I mean, I think on the on the document documents. Yeah. So they had them dead to rights on the classified acts, but also obstructing.

Yeah, that all, in my opinion, in my, I'm sorry, in my opinion only the obstructing, which is worse, worse, actually, than the documents, in my opinion also. Yeah, it's both those things. So I don't think he has a case there. I mean, the, the overturning the 2020. I do think he overturned the election, but I think as a legal matter, there's not actually a law against trying to, trying to institute a coup against the elected government. So actually, he's pretty bad for that, but maybe not, maybe not legally the strongest case. but like, okay. And the campaign finance thing was ridiculous.

Yeah, the campaign financing was part of New York cases. The valuation was out of the real estate was ridiculous. But more than that, you know, from the minute he took office, I mean, Comey, we know now, was bullshitting him from day one. He was a suspect in the Russia gate. This guy was so resentful by the time he took office, you know. Well, the FBI has always been. been really independent of the president. Like, Comey would not play basketball with Obama because

they just didn't want the, they didn't want the appearance of any conflict of interest. So, they've always kind of pushed back on the presidents and done not what the presidents wanted. And they've had 10-year terms. So it wasn't like every time a president came into office, they would appoint somebody who would be loyal to them. Trump with Comey tried to get him to, like, say he's loyal to him. And Comey wouldn't do that. So a lot of the stuff was like the institutions were reacting to Trump. But Trump was trying to break. norms. No, you may not have done the psychotic deep dives that I did at the time, but Comey early on, this is Guy Baker, who was the council for the FBI or something, said this on

the, what's the podcast, it has like a spy name. Oh, geez, my memory's going. Anyway, and he admitted that Trump was suspected in the Russia thing, basically from the transition time. And Trump asked him, am I a suspect here? And Comey said, no, you're not, but they were investigating him. And obviously, Russiagate, whatever, we're off on tangents. God forbid, I don't want to defend Trump. I just think that's all true. The only reason it's relevant to me is because you wonder how much of what we're discussing

is part of this tit for tat and how much of it is an actual truly populist leader who came into office looking to politicize his prosecution. People are treated unfairly, like if you're going to be the president or you're going to be a nominee for president, like a lot. I think a lot of the stuff that was done to Clinton was unfair. I think there was a lot of stuff that wasn't that big of a deal that the Republicans blew up. It didn't justify Bill Clinton, you know, saying I'm going to put personal loyalties, destroy the independence of the DOJ and the FBI, because that's just not something we do. So it's like, yeah, presidents have things that happen to them that are unfair. They continue being professional people. who adhere to the norms that we've established in a democracy. I don't think in any of this excuses what Trump has done. Yeah, of course. It doesn't excuse it. It's just, as I said, I can hear the Trump supporters screaming as you're talking.

What about the fact they prosecuted him? So I want to give air to. I mean, he was trying to prosecute people in the first administration. He was trying to tell people they just, nobody would listen to them. So it was before this stuff happened. Trump was already already trying to do it. He just figured out how to do it by the second administration. All right.

So you wanted me to remind you about making things up. Oh, yeah. So, you know, where, okay, so as I go back and forth about all these things, you know, there are very many important accomplishments of Trump, especially in the first term, which I really, really do value, for instance, the fact that the Supreme Court is right of center and got rid of racial preferences, which I think were a huge threat to the country going forward.

I agree with most of their decisions. I would not want a left-wing court for the rest of our lives as we would have had. Even on Iran, I'm waiting to see how it turns out because it seems to me that once Iran was exposed as a paper tiger, really in the very first time Israel bombed

them and showed that Iran's defenses were useless against Israel's technology. Iran at that point had to make a decision that they were going to sprint to an atom bomb as quickly as they could. And to the extent that one thinks that that kind of proliferation is dangerous for the world, I prefer Trump than Kamala Harris as the commander-in-chief. And I'm hopefully optimistic that we're going to get some kind of outcome, which in the end will kick that can much further down the road

that it would have been otherwise. So I'll ask you this question about the Iran War. I wish I could have asked it for you a couple days ago before this Houthi thing happened, but that may or may not last.

If you had to argue against the war back in February when it started, but you had to argue against it using the actual

information that you had to argue. that you know today of how it turned out, rather than the arguments that were made at the time, which were worldwide economic collapse, no more fertilizer, oil at $300, you know, you know everything, all the catastrophic things that were predicted. What argument would you make against the war then

based on actually how it's turned out? Yeah, I mean, I think that, so the economic consequences haven't been dire. I've been trying, this is maybe a little bit of a tangent, but it's an article I'm going to write. I'm kind of wondering why growth is not taking off with AI. And someone pointed out to me that, well, we've had this giant shock in the Middle East and we've had these disastrous tariff policies. And maybe that's why maybe with AI we'd be growing at 10% a year or something.

And it's just the Iran War. So things don't look too bad, but we don't kind of know the counterfactual of how the economy would be doing if we didn't have this war. and basically there was this global choke point of the world's oil and the oil prices were up. But yeah, I mean, I think that it's the kind of the disastrous scenario. So I'll just say, I mean, just to act like not act like I'm, you know, somebody who foresaw everything that was going to happen. I was, you know, optimistic plausibly that it could work out well when the war was launched in the first few days. I didn't have all the information to say like this is obviously a good idea, but I assume that there might be some good information.

Venezuela worked out well. And based on what they knew, it seems like in retrospect, they probably had an agreement with the, with the Maduro second Delci Rodriguez. So we didn't know actually what the plan was. Information has come out later. That basically the plan was like Ahmadinejad would become president and they bombed his house and they like killed a bodyguard and then injured. It's like it's kind of like crazier than you could have, you know, you couldn't have scripted something crazier. So yeah, I mean, the Iranian. have a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz. It was always like kind of a nightmare scenario

that they would grab, that they would prevent traffic and just seize control. They have done that. We don't know how to... But Richard, this is... But actually, they haven't been able to choke it because the last report,

90% of the volume of oil had gotten through, you know, in the last few weeks, which is fantastic because this is exposing the Strait of Hormuz as a depreciating asset. Pipelines are being built, and all sorts of workarounds, which is really good because in the future, even if this regime

lasts, this threat of closing up the Strait of Hormuz ain't going to be the threat that it was today, right? Well, I mean, the Bab al-Mundup, so the other side of Saudi Arabia was just closed off as a result of the Houthis. Now, we tried to force the Houthis to open that early in the Trump administration, and we did a bombing campaign for several months, and we couldn't do it. We eventually basically gave up on that. and the Saudis had a pipeline going through their country,

and they've closed that too because they could threaten that too. That's why I said I could have asked you a few days ago. I'd be better on this all happened the last couple days. Yeah, I mean, it's so, yeah, I mean, it seems bad. I mean, it seems like there's a situation where we are trying to do things with force that are very hard to do through force because all they need to do is create some chaos, and basically the Gulf Arabs and kind of the world's oil supply is in trouble. So no, I don't know what we've gotten here.

If the regime fell and, you know, democracy bloomed, which I think, you know, there's an argument that Trump should have gone harder. Like there was an idea that, like, they would equip the Kurds. They would come in. There would be an actual plan to overthrow the government. Trump, like, the first night of the bombing was saying stuff like that, like rise up. And then, like, the next day, he was saying, oh, no, we're just going to find people to work with and we're going to be friends with them. I mean, it was just like this kind of confused, this mixed messaging, this kind of policy. incoherence, I think it's hard to argue that it worked that well. Like, okay, they used it and maybe

it's a depreciating asset, but like in that case, what was the danger from her? What was the danger from Iran anyway? If they could do do this thing that didn't matter in the end. I do think it matters, actually. I do think that probably what's happening with AI, we probably have a lot higher growth. It's just harder to see that because I think the actual AI boom is actually covering for how bad this has been economically. So I saw in the Wall Street Journal today that they attribute 0.3% of our inflation rate. This is not the same thing, but just maybe maybe some

proportionality to it to the Iran war. Yeah, maybe we'd have some better economic growth in the last few months, but and, you know, it's the idea of taking a snapshot of a day during a war and extrapolating from that

is obviously dangerous. My feeling is that if they can keep a cork in Iran, and we hear reports coming out of what this is doing to the country there. And the price of oil fluctuates, but never actually, a price of gas, never actually gets even to an all-time high. And Iran is occupied such that they can't make trouble with Hezbollah, can't make trouble with Hamas, can't go for a nuclear bomb, and may or may not either look for a way out with some

face-saving deal or actually fall. You never know. I mean, saying regimes will fall is always a risky bet, although they do fall. But less ridiculous to speculate about after they just ended up killing 20, 40,000 people, who knows what number to trust of their own people in uprising. So obviously, the regime is unpopular. All of that is like, you know what, I'm not, I'm not ready to say this is not worth a shot because the alternative of them, as I said, sprinting for an atom bomb or making some sort of deal where they won't enrich for five years and then in those five years build up so many missiles and so much infrastructure around it that the cost of us stopping the bomb in five years is just obviously too high. This is the low watermark of Iran's power. So if we're,

if we're serious about stopping this, this is our only shot. This is our only time, right? And I think we have to try. Yeah, I mean, but how are you stopping? You're occupying them for a while. Like, countries can hunker down and just focus on military activities. Now, it's probably Iran is probably not North Korea and that there is a limit to what they can do politically. They're restrained by kind of public opinion. But yeah, I mean, we're at the position where we're just kind of like at the point of just like put pressure on them and like speculate hopefully something good will happen, which is.

I don't know. I don't know if that's a good outcome, but we're just like speculating at this point that it might work out well. You know, in business, somebody who would make a decision or try something, and in business you can say,

oh, you know, I don't know. I kind of don't think it's a good idea, but you give it a shot, maybe it'll work. You know, you can say that. But in politics, you have to say, no, this was a mistake. No, I 100% support it.

But, you know, obviously there's a, there's an odds. 75, 25, 65, you don't know. And I'm, like, I could say to you, I think the odds are 55, 545 that this is not going to succeed, but the stakes are so high, it's worth the shot anyway. And even if it didn't succeed, I said, well, you know what? It was really important to try because preventing Iran from beginning of Adam Baum is one of

the rare, truly serious issues in my lifetime, I believe. I can't prove it. Yeah. I mean, it's not crazy to say it didn't work out and it was worth a shot. There hasn't been, there's some people who are anti-war who have these disaster scenarios. Like, oh, my God, if you go to war with Iran, you're going to have to fight China and Russia. And there's going to be a, like, World War III, they would all talk about World War III. That, I think, was never realistic.

So from the perspective of, like, yeah, like, we didn't, like, destroy the country or anything. And, you know, it was bloody and we spent a lot of money. But in the end, like, there was nothing irreversible that kind of destroyed the world or destroyed the global community. Sure, you could say it was worth trying. Looking back, though, we're just going to judge Trump's decision-making. It does not seem like there was much foresight or much thought into what was going. Oh, clearly.

Yeah, we could withhold judgment for a while. But as the story comes out of actually what they were thinking and what was going on, it just looks more and more irrational in retrospect. That I agree with. By the way, am I right in saying, just on paper, just in terms of what we presume to be a nation's interest, China would be more likely to want to come to our aid in a war than fight a war with us. This is a country whose entire economy is based on selling things to us. As opposed to other words, why, what is the logic, other than Taiwan, what is the logic

that says that China would want to fight a war with us? I don't think, I never thought China would want to fight up. But people say it all the time. Like World War III involves us fighting China, right? Yeah, I mean, the Taiwan thing is the actual meat of the issue or what you could imagine a war happening over. And I think a lot of people who are hawkish tend to tie these things together. They like to say China and Russia and Iran and North Korea are all best friends and working together. And they do support Russia and its war with Ukraine.

So, I mean, in ways, I think that it does see the U.S. as arrival as we see them as arrival. It does try to make life difficult for us if it can with low cost. But no, I don't see them as kind of these reckless actors who are looking for conflict. I just, that's not my read of the Chinese government. Their economy is totally dependent on us, correct? And us on them, yeah. I mean, we're the ones who are trying to screw that up. But, but yeah, I mean, it's mutual dependence.

Well, we have gotten lazy in some way and become, using the word, dependent on them. But we will figure, if they were to drop, off the earth, we would figure something else out. Did manufacture so well? There would be some transition pains, but we would exist without China. But China's economy, they don't have an, as I understand it, they don't have an internal economy that creates wealth for the Chinese citizens.

It's just they manufacture. We buy their stuff. And then even still, they're a poor country. But that's their money, right? China is, I mean, they sell to the world. It's a conscious choice to dominate manufacturing and actually keep domestic consumption low because that's just kind of what maximizes national power, even if it doesn't maximize the well-being of the Chinese people. But I mean, I don't think there's anything like irreplaceable in the United States. Like they couldn't also adjust to the world.

I don't think they're like, I don't think like America's like too big to fail from their perspective. I think that would be going too far. That's interesting. I don't know much about it. I feel like we are too. to fail for them. Okay, let's talk about making things. Well, there's actually a theory that China is keeping the oil prices down from getting worse through some of their activity. So there might be some of that thinking, go God. There actually could be some kind of, but there might be something

to that thought. It is consistent with some things we see regarding what they're doing. This thing about make, this is the thing that bothers me most of all. And in this, I don't regard Trump as the main enemy, although he fertilized. it, this making things up. Let's just take the recent example of Tucker Carlson, while Tyler Robinson, oh, skull duggery, by the way, is the podcast, Michael Isikoff and Baker. Everybody should go back and listen to that. Tucker Carlson, while Tyler Robinson is being tried for the murder of Charlie Kirk, gets out there and says, well, you know, I think that most people agree now that Charlie Kirk was murdered for his evolving position on Israel.

Not this Israeli documentary maker, by the way. He's not being murdered, but Charlie Kirk was murdered by Israel. Now, and where do you get? This is a Candace Owens theory, right? So it couldn't have a worst lineage. He just makes it up. It's right out of a Father Calkland type of thing. It's the most anti-Semitic, you know, garbage. And in a different era, somebody who just made something up like that would just not be embraced, especially something so foul, by the White House, by the vice president. Yeah. So I think that I think the problem is much deeper.

And sometimes people focus on Tucker or they focus on Candice. And it's actually like they're not looking at exactly like the full picture of what's going on the right. I was just reading the other day about this Ilhan Omar married her brother. Do you know about this? I've heard the accusation. I'm sorry, what? So there's a rumor that Ilhad brother, Elhan Omar married her brother for some kind of citizenship reason.

And like right-brain podcasters are like pressuring Mark Wayne Mullen to denaturalize and deport her. And I didn't know what the origins of this was. It's one anonymous message board post on like a Somali forum. That's the entirety of it. With Tucker, you know, people, I wrote an article critical of Charlie Kirk on the one-year anniversary of his death, which a lot of people got upset about. But Charlie Kirk was the person who platformed Tucker Carlson, who, defended him against his critics. Charlie Kirk would go around and say stuff like, I think Biden let Afghanistan collapse on purpose so he could bring in more democratic voters, which is just, you know,

absolutely insane. And the fact that it was always like had a mega angle, it was like always Biden doing something. It usually in Charlie Kirk's case wasn't anti-Semitic. Trump, Tucker hadn't got that far in the anti-Semitic direction. It was like always kind of okay. And then Tucker and Candice, they go completely crazy. And now their conspiracies are like, they're anti-Israeli, they're anti-Semitic, they're anti-Maga and like anti-Trump in some cases. And now it's like, oh my God, what are these people doing? It's like, no, the problem of like making stuff up is much, much larger. And these people, like, Tucker Carlson are just like the extreme manifestation of it. I think you have to have like a bigger concern with making things up rather than just being mad when the conspiracy is targeting people. You don't want it to be targeting. Well, to be fair to me, I just brought up because that's recent and because it's just your fault. I mean, it's It happened a few days ago. But, like, I'm proud of the fact that I was railing against Tucker Carlson before ever set his sights on Israel. He was insane for a while.

Even still while he was on Fox during COVID, I've said by the time. He would wheel somebody out in a wheelchair and say, the vaccine, you know, like just, and bio-weapons labs in Ukraine. And the Mueller probe wasn't really about Trump. It was about Podesta. and then it was aliens and we're studying alien cadavers and alien weapons systems

and Alex Jones is a divinely inspired prophet and yet but of course the Jewish thing matters not just because I'm Jewish because normally we drew a bright line

as a nation around bigotry so you know when the Republican when George H.W. Bush disdistance himself from David Duke who was running for office. It was because of the bigotry. If he had said 20 other ridiculous things, George Bush wouldn't have gotten involved. But we

have a certain hygiene that we want of ourselves in this nation. And usually the higher the office, the less tolerant they would be about that, especially once they were elected. And but to see J.D. Vance really twist himself into Nass to try to justify his relationship with this make-up anything wing. And of course, this is also related to RFK Jr. This is new and it scares the shit out of me. Yeah, I mean, me too. Yeah, it's terrible. And, you know, people don't understand, I mean, what a gaff was like five or two.

10 years ago. I mean, it was just like a politician, like slightly mixed speaks, like, you can, you know, you can, like your health care, you can keep it. Or you have Gerald Ford, where there's no troops and there's no Soviet troops in Poland, I think, it was right? There's these things that are like, you know, there's 20 things that Trump says at any press conference that are crazy or the worst gaffe of like any other administration. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is, this is what you get when you no longer believe in institutions. You no longer accept journalism. You don't accept scientific papers or academics or anything like that.

Like, yeah, you're just in the realm of, like, making things up. And this is, you know, something that's gotten worse in the last couple of years. I think Elon buying Twitter has just made this really bad. I think Trump, it's just hard to, like, him being the – it's such an elephant in the room, right? He's just like he sets the tone for, like, everything else on the right, right? It's hard to have, like, kind of moral standards when this is the man leading your party, it's bad. It's bad. It's, there's just like, it's something that it kind of, the consequences of it are bad, but also like, do I feel at home in this culture? People talk about

like immigration, like, oh, the country's changing. Like, I feel fine with people of different races or backgrounds. Like, people where these just liars are going around making things up and profiting off of it and getting into office based on that. That to me is much more, uh, it's much more disturbing. But they will answer, and they're right. Really? What about our elites who told us we couldn't go to our mother's funeral, and then as soon as George Floyd was killed, encouraged us to go out and protest because racism is a public health crisis too. And all the Jason Ardaise who've been hired and covered for, and all the nonsense we've been told about gender science. And and, you know, like, everything is politicized.

Why are they any more reliable than our guys? I mean, because they lie less often. I mean, those are, you know, you can actually list the lies that they have. You know, try to list the lies of, like, a typical Tucker. I was sitting with Michael Tracy once. We were just, like, live streaming, like, watching some Tucker thing. And he was just, like, trying to fact check everything. And, like, we couldn't get through two words.

It just have to stop every two words, right? The fact that you can even list what these people have done. and what they've done wrong is actually a side. But like, you know, the bigger thing is like, when did this become like an excuse? Like the other side is worse. Like, why do we like have that standard? Like, why does lying about Charlie Kirk being killed by the Israelis like compensate for you being mad about COVID?

It's just completely like, it's like a child's way of. Yeah. I was just about to make an analogy to a child. No, of course, there's no excuse. When my son punches his brother. in the nose. And he says, but he called me, blah, blah, blah. I say, that's no excuse.

You can't. But it's not even like that direct, right? It's not like he called you a name. It's like he did something a week ago that's completely unrelated. Well, like that. This is a question. Is there actually some dynamic going on where things are actually in reaction to each other? Because I know all through Russiagate, I was actually quite happy.

I know when people look like I'm crazy. I was quite happy with the way our government handled COVID in real time. I obviously it's easy to look back on what was wrong, what was right, but as I always joke, like, we still don't have a final word on whether eggs are healthy for us or not. Like, you know, it's not easy sometimes to determine things about science and medicine. And so I think we did a pretty good job. But nevertheless, there was really at certain times outrageous, like daring us to call bullshit politicization by so many people.

And this was radicalizing people. I mean, I was feeling deep anger about it on many issues. Like, what do they take me for, you know? Is it related to what happened? I mean, I think it is. I mean, it brought a lot of people like kind of who didn't have to pay attention to politics into politics because there was just no way to avoid COVID restrictions, everything from lockdowns to like mask mandates of schools and schools being shut down. So yeah, absolutely. It's just like, you know, it's you incorporate it into your worldview. That's the healthy way to deal with it. You do not, I mean, you do not just say nothing matters and I don't believe anything. thing. And you're right. I mean, when you say, I'm probably, I may be harsher on elites than, than you are in this case. I think that the first three months, maybe you get a mulligan, you know, kind of nobody knows what's going on. I think it was obvious maybe by three, six months

that like the school closures and things like that and mask mandates were doing much good, because we saw some places open up and some places being closed and basically like the numbers weren't that different. And at that point, we just had to kind of let it go. I think the vaccine obviously was a good thing and we developed it very quickly. So it is more it is more mixed. It's not like it's not completely bad. But at the same time, it's like, what are we, you know, what are we, what are we doing here? I mean, you can, you know, you can do this in the opposite direction. Like, the elites are going to be radicalized because these people support Trump, who is like a liar and corrupt. So like, what are they going to do? Like, they're going to, all they

can do is like, tell these people what to do and how are they going to ever trust the people to have a say in their government again? You can do that, but it's like, that's not the healthy way to think. The healthy way to think is like, what are heuristics we should use to kind of understand the world? How should we respond to specific issues? And what should our attitudes be towards different institutions, like based on historical performance and based on like common sense and what we know?

Like this kind of finding equivalency, you could do this. But like, what's the, you know, it's almost to me, it's like what's kind of the upshot of the analysis? It's hard. I mean, I think we both long for the, you know, the era of gatekeepers because on paper our speech was every bit as free then as it is now. But lucky for the world, technology didn't allow anybody in their, in their basement to communicate with a billion people for free. And as you said somewhere in your book, you know,

most people have a below average, or you know, half the people have a below average IQ. And I said in a tweet and probably 90%, 95% of people had an IQ lower than most gatekeepers. And, you know, they kind of kept us on track. I'm sure if we had perfect knowledge of everything they were dealing with, we would find some really big mistakes they made. But they kept us on track. And, you know, this notion that there is such wisdom in the masses, I don't actually, think that's why democracy succeeds. I think democracy succeeds because the trial and error of it, we all have enough sense to realize things are not going well. So then enough people shift to the opposite direction and just like it is sooner later, just the way AI learns, sooner or later

we hit on the right course because we have the agility in our system to react to things in a relatively short period of time and redirect just based on the fact that we can see it's not working. Not because we have such insight as a majority into what the right thing to do is. That's my feeling about it. Yeah, I think that's a sophisticated understanding of democracy. So you have like a democratic sensibility and you have a populist sensibility and kind of the simplistic that people should rule because they're wise and elites shouldn't tell them what to do and if they want price controls or if they want to kick out the immigrants or whatever they

happen to believe today, that's what we should do. And if you don't do that, you're a traitor, that's the populist sentiment. That's the populist ideology. It's more democratic in a way. But I don't think it's what a healthy democracy looks like. So a healthy democracy or a healthy perspective on kind of what democracy is for is that there is the, you're right. One thing is it's a way to achieve truth. So even if the people aren't brilliant, they can react to things that are clearly bad if somebody crashes the economy or something, you know, there's going to be, there's going to be a reckoning for that. And also, it's a way to peacefully transition to power. And it's just a way to settle political disputes, like, better than, you know, shooting each other or having a king

or something like that. And we try to, like, protect the liberal values, like free speech and the independent institutions that sometimes in anti-democratic ways, because the majority of people want to shut down speech or they just want to tear down the universities or they don't like some kind of scientific field of study. we also protect against that, too. So I think that's like the more sophisticated understanding of democracy and what democracy is for. Unfortunately, we're in a populist era where we're going to legitimacy comes from directly doing what the people want. You see this on the, mostly on the right, obviously with the Trump movement.

But I think Mamdani, DSA, this is left wing populism. It's challenging the elites in the Democratic Party. Often they don't like the media anymore than people on the right do. And we see the kind of person and the kind of policies that come out of them. that. There's nothing good. By the way, you and I and maybe Michael Tracy will probably agree with this. But, and I guess this is sort of an example of left-wing populism, but it drives me nuts. You know, in the movies, I looked into this, it's actually true. Like there'll be a scene where the cops are listening in with a wiretap, and then the mobster starts talking to his wife

about something, and they have to shut the tape recorder us off. Because you're not allowed, right? if you take that as the analogy, this notion that anybody who had any email with Jeffrey Epstein that without a judge, just because the mob wanted it, they had all their personal correspondence released by Congress

to like, you know, the case that really bugs me most of all, Larry Summers. Yeah. And, you know, this to me, is a violation of the American way, every bit as much as many of the things on the right. And almost nobody has had the nerve to speak up and say,

no, you don't get to just release things that are tangential to an investigation that are personally but have nothing to do with any crime, or even if the crime even charged, it wouldn't have had to do with the crime, you know? Yeah, I mean, the origins of the Epstein thing is fascinating. Like, why we were still talking about Epstein? in the 2020s was exclusively because of the right-wing podcast fear because of people like cash

Patel and jaddy vans and the podcast hosts who believed there were some big child sex trafficking ring going on kept promising that we're going to do something now it turned out that trump was like more fearful of epstein stuff coming out than anyone else and then these democrats in congress jumped on it and said okay it's these elites who don't want epstein and so it became this big bipartisan uh this big area of bipartisan agreement and once you get the you get these big areas of bipartisan agreement, you know, thinking goes out the window. You have these feminists and these people on the left talking about Trump and they're talking about powerful men, sexually amusing women.

And you have rightists just being general conspiracy theorists and never meeting a conspiracy theory they don't like and being obsessed with pedophilia and human trafficking. And you've got this kind of perfect storm of just insanity. I mean, like for the perspective of what we're talking about, like, it took a lot of product to get elites to care about Epstein. You know, he would have been forgotten for 10 years if it wasn't for. the podcast sphere. And now they've seen that they can get, you know, political hay out of it. They've, of course, jumped on that bandwagon. But yeah, this is just like a good example of kind

of how stupid we've gotten as kind of podcast and the social media have replaced like thinking and news and actual journalism for how we get and process information. All right. We're getting to the end. What else did you and I talk about? Well, the, where are you you wrote a really good column or good substack post about race realism um do you want you want to talk about that or is there is that uh for another day it's it's your show i'm glad to talk about it or so so yeah that i i actually you and i had an email exchange my feeling and by the way everything you're saying about the low human capital.

I think you do use something about human capital in your book. Maybe you left, maybe you dropped the word low. I might have said, the Republican human capital problem instead of low human capital. But anybody who's read you before knew what you meant. They're such idiots and they'll believe anything.

To me, regardless of what is true. And I'll just say that people who just say, it's not true because it can't possibly be true. I mean, that speaks for itself as an emotional thing to say, that this particular issue will poison the mind of everybody, not least of which poisoned the mind of, God forbid, black people who are, black kids,

who are, you know, have to grow up in a world where this kind of thing is bandied about. So I find these people who insist on wanting to talk about this. They really repulsed me. I'm like, and just to say one thing. Would you have Nathan Kauffmanus on your show? I want to have him on the show. But yeah, I'm happy to talk to him.

We are having him on the show. Oh, good, good. But, you know, Charles Murray in his book said that, you know, he wrote the book in the 90s at kind of peak crime. And he says, well, if we're going to handle crime, we're going to have to come to terms with cognitive differences in people, you know, like that. And, you know, actually crime basically disappeared without having to do that, right? So I just think that cure is way worse than any disease.

That's how I feel about it. Yeah, so there was a series of like two or three articles on this that I wrote. And I use coughness as kind of my foil, so people who don't know much about coughness. He was the guy who exposed Jason Ardei, who brought up the charges of plagiarism, basically got attention for it. That was the beginning of the end for that was the downfall of our day from that. And so Kauffness's thing is he's a philosophy academic, he's a philosopher academic, who basically says, look, you have wokeness because people think that the world is unfair if there's racial disparities between whites and primarily blacks, right, whites and other races. And basically what he says is that the racial differences in intelligence and achievement are genetic. And we need to talk about this because if we do not talk about this, the wokes will always be able to say, look at these disparities.

We need to seek social justice by achieving equality. We need affirmative action. We need preferences or whatever. And if they thought it was genetic, then they would, I don't know, presumably give up or something. And I just said that that was crazy. I mean, it's crazy for a couple of reasons. of all, Americans have not believed in elites in America. The period of time when elites stopped believing in genetic differences, or it became kind of taboo to talk about, is much, much goes much

further back than people think. By the 1930s, this stuff was kind of defeated. It was kind of considered just taboo politically incorrect. In the 1950s, most white Americans denied, like the overwhelming majority of Americans denied that there were inherent intelligence differences between the races. Now, it's a long time before we got wokenness, right? So in 1930s, between 1930s and 1950s, American society comes to solidify around this concept that there are no inherent differences between the races. We don't get wokenesses for another 60, 70 years. Now, Kauffness might say, well, it was just a matter of time.

And, you know, there's an argument for that. But still, this is like, it's kind of, you're making that connection. It's just a very, very long time. And you're right. The crime one is another one, too, where you say never deal with crime. No, actually, we were able to deal with crime by not doing it now. So I think the historical record of, like, what is not consistent with how coughness thinks the world works. And I think Koffness also, the problem is he kind of thinks everyone is

going to be as smart and scientific in their reasoning as he is. Like there's a reason people feel like there's a taboo. There's a reason people feel that if somebody goes around talking about some groups being genetically not as smart as others, that person has bad intentions. And you know what? Maybe Koffness doesn't have bad intentions. I have no reason to think he does. But 90% of a time, they do have bad attention. Yes. They really believe. It's like it's a group. I think that they have, go ahead. Did you just say, you want to say something else? No, that's basically it.

I mean, and so basically, like, he's, he's overestimating kind of like how much this stuff is necessary to defeat wokeness, and he's underestimating kind of the dangers or what the societal implications would be if people actually accepted as ideas. Yeah, I mean, when somebody has a burning urge to, you know, dwell on a particular issue, and you look at that issue and says, okay, you know, maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but is the world really going to change? Like, it's an outsized obsession with the issue compared to how impactful it is actually on anything that would make changes in the country. You suspect that in the same way people say, why are you so worried about Israel all the time?

Like, you may be right about everything you're saying about Israel, but if everything you only talk about Israel, I wonder if there's just something else going on there, there may not be often there is and with and a lot of these guys i hate to say they're a little peculiar in a certain way little bernie getsish and um you know that that and i i'm just very very suspicious about but i'm going to tell you a a personal anecdote but i think this is important i have a friend whose um son was had issues when he was young and the um um the experts that psychiatrists or psychologists, I don't know which, tested him, they determined he had all these learning issues and a low IQ of like 85 and they told the parents, you know,

in the way, this is what Charles Murray named his book, you have to face reality. This is your son's limitations and, you know, you better plan for what his life is going to be with these limitations. Well, the mother wasn't having it and she just never. gave up on him, and you fast forward, and he's graduated, he just graduated from Dartmouth. Now, this is, this is probably not that unusual story. All of what you say is that, but once you, once you marry a certain performance with a certain theoretical understanding of what is likely the reason for that performance, on average, these particular people,

this gene pool are likely less intelligent. And here, lo and behold, look at this kid, he's less intelligent, people will just, very often, just not leave every stone unturned in terms of doing what can be done. And I just say one other thing. And no matter what, God forbid, might be the truth about the world, it just can't possibly explain the shameful problems we have in this country. You know, like with third graders who can't read and stuff like this. And the excuse that people like Khafness are offering for people to say,

ah, come on, forget about that. Don't you know nothing we can do about it? Don't you know the data? This, I just, everything in my bones tells me that this is horrible. It's wrong. And the people are playing with fire here. You know, God forbid they should. Yeah.

I mean, and so if Kofthus was here, he would say something like, well, that's, illogical because, you know, people know that, like, individuals differ in intelligence. And we know that, like, genetics has a great deal to do with how individuals turn out in their work ethic, their intelligence, a propensity crime, basically, you know, everything that you can imagine. So, like, why would knowing that your race, on average, scores lower, or they're unathletic or whatever, have a major influence on how you do in life? And I think there's, like, that's, that makes sense kind of in its own terms. But I think the way, people think about race is just different. When you say you feel it in your bones, like, yes,

we are kind of wired to think about racial groups in like this way that is kind of like, you know, it kind of collapses reality. Like we do often think when we're primed to do this, unless we try hard not to, we do think of people as representative of their groups. And even though, even us, me and you, and probably like the most sophisticated people out there, have this issue. Now, imagine how hard it is for people who are not a sophisticated, right? People who didn't graduate from college or people who don't read a lot of books or things like that. For them, like, they hear one group is dumb. They're just going to be repulsed by that or they're going to run with it and they're going to become Nazis,

like a lot of the people on Twitter are. And so, like, yeah, I think that the fact that people do have this emotional reaction, even though you could like, if you were coughing us and you could just talk people, he thinks he could just like talk people out of it, it's not taking into account human nature. way we actually react to this specific issue, race in particular, it's a data point. It's something that, like, it tells us why the taboo is there, and we should listen to that. We should just not ignore, like, this thing that is, like, a human universal as a taboo. I looked at different countries. Like, no country accepts race realism, as Koppanis calls it, as a, like,

ideology. Like, it's taboo everywhere. The Chinese are 90% Chinese. They have some underperforming minorities on their countries that don't do as well as the majority. They give them affirmative of action. The Chinese do not have discourse about like different groups IQs, groups having different IQ and this being hereditary. It's just kind of a taboo everywhere, and there just has to be a reason for that.

Yeah, and you left out of your list about people who are smarter. Also, people who don't feel the moral obligation to question themselves and push back against this kind of these short circuits that your mind does. There's

many, many people out there who are actually always on a lookout for ammunition for things to justify their racism and their bad feelings and their tribalism and all that stuff. And here we're presenting them with some, you know, science. And there's so much, and by the way,

I'd also say, you know, race is shorthand in this conversation for a gene pool. But there's, I don't know that we under, that that's even accurate. So for instance, Jews, Ashkenazi Jews are white.

and, you know, but you can't judge white people, like, because this, we are, we, the Ashkenazi Jews, we all know that have different IQ scores according to the data. So why does anybody think that in every race, they're just one gene pool? Like, you know, that bothers me, too. Like, people, continents are big. There's South China and West China, and these people for thousands of years probably weren't mixing. And it's totally likely that certain people, that race is just not shorthand for one gene pool.

That's all I'm saying. It seems very imprecise. Yeah. I think the empirical data, though, like you look at the kind of the genes and where they, how people cluster together. And then you kind of look at, you know, like school performance.

Like East Asians, interestingly, happen to be smart at every country and happen to be really good at math. And it's plausible that like maybe Koreans would be bad at math and Japanese would be good, but we actually find like looking at irrational test scores that they all tend to be pretty good at math. So I think this is what people would point to is like, oh, actually there's something here. But of course, everything else we've said about not wanting to make this a big thing we talk about all the time. All that remains valid. Yeah. I'm actually, I'm skeptical about that. You know, I don't even want to talk about it,

but you know, there are other market differences between different parts of continents. Sure. You know, just as a shorthand, you know. Can I ask a question, no more about this? At what, like, age are these people being measured on IQ? Like, in this high, in this made-up scenario? Like, what, like, are they as a kid, like, when they're five?

like before their heavy influence or at like 18? I mean, there's studies that do all of it. So there's international test scores or something called the PISA scores, which does like all European, most European countries and the East Asian countries and a lot of Latin American developed world. And they'll give it to fourth graders, eighth graders, 12th graders, and they'll try to make the test as similar as possible. And then there's people who gather IQ data of like college students and adults.

So it comes from like across the different age regions. I'll tell you one of the personal story, then I'll let you go. So I have a step-son. He's half-black, and I raise him since he's nine months old. And he has various, I don't think he'd care of it, he has some learning issues. And at some point, the geniuses at the New York City Public School system

advise us to send him to the Lowell School. The Lowell School is the special school that handles kids with these various learning issues. and he was going there for a couple years and what they were demanding of him and what they were telling me about him just didn't jive with my gut feeling about what this kid was capable of, you know?

So finally I went down there and I got into a conversation with the principal and I was very dissatisfied with the answers I was getting and I pulled him out and I just put him into regular Arsley High School, regular school, you know, whatever? This motherfucker got a 90 on his social studies, regions and like an eight.

88 on his on his trig regions or something like that, you know, they were teaching him, they were teaching to the resume or whatever you want to call it to the, what do they call the IP or, you know, these kids get a file. IEP. IEP. They were teaching to the IEP. And these were the experts. This was the school, which is dedicated their, their resources and their lives to understanding

kids were learning issues. And they didn't know a fucking thing about this kid. Yeah. Let me tell you. So this, I think there's a different issue here. We're talking about kind of diagnostic inflation and putting labels on people. When I was a kid, like, I didn't talk much. I was kind of didn't understand social interactions.

I didn't make eye contact until I was really like junior high or high school, like pretty late. And I had an immigrant background and it was like a, you know, kind of a middle, lower middle class area. So we didn't have like this thing where like each kid was considered, you know, diagnosed with something. So no psychologist or psychiatrist ever came up to me. and said, you know, you have autism or you're on the spectrum or something like that. Years later, I look back and I kind of know myself growing up too, and like, it's kind of a textbook case of Asperger's syndrome. Like, if any psychiatrist had ever run into me, they would have diagnosed me and they

put that, they would have put that label on me. And looking back, I'm just like so glad that that didn't happen because to me, I was just like a person who had, you know, shortcomings or flaws that I could work on to improve. I never thought of myself as a person with a disease or a disorder who was just kind of like destined to be, you know, screwed over by my inherent nature, right? And so I think there is something here where we're like not doing good by people, by labeling them, by trying, you know, sometimes with the best of intentions to help them. In a lot of cases, they're just kind of, there's normal human variation. And, you know, the old way of talking about it, what they just need a slap on the

head or they just need a little bit discipline. Like, there is actually a lot of wisdom in that. I think that the modern approach to childhood development has not worked out well. This is the lesson of double-blind experiments. I think you and I once discussed this. You tell a researcher who got the placebo and who has the medicine, and the researcher thinks he sees results from the medicine. You tell a teacher, this kid is this, this kid is more likely to have this. We can't help it as human beings.

That confidence doesn't understand these pit. You know what, this is the thing. I would be a thousand times more open to what. what he has to say if he would really, as they say, steal man the other side, the real risks, not the people who are just flaky and just trying to cover their ears and assume that the universes couldn't possibly do such a thing to us. But the people who were talking about the things that we're talking about, the real life implications of humans, not computers, humans who have human minds, human psychology, and what these ideas can do, as I said to you, how they poison

the mind. It really disturbs me. Anyway. Yeah. You might like, I don't know if you listen to Koffinus on Coleman Hughes. I had some clips on Twitter. I don't know if you saw that, but I think Coleman got him to admit some interesting things from that perspective. Yeah, I did see that. And then apparently there's an interview now between Kovnis and Charles Murray, where Charles Murray was the liberal. I have to have it in my cue to listen to it. All right, Richard, you know, really, I can't say enough about you. I'm going to just edit out my, you know, I don't know, my mind gets foggy, Iran, Iraq, I don't know, I'm going to edit out my blunders of getting those countries confused, and then I'm going to put this up tomorrow.

When are you going to come to New York? I was there a few months ago. You know, it was funny, I was supposed to be on Douthis podcast, and then they ghosted me, and then I found out he went to 60 minutes. So I was going to come back for Douthet, but it looks like that. that's not going to happen. But whoever the successor there might actually have beyond. I don't know.

I'll need an excuse. I wanted to see you last time, but you were busy. I guess you were starting a new club, right? Yeah, we're working on that. Listen, next time, what I really want to understand what your opinion is like, this guy's Douthit and Charles Murray and they're all finding God. Well, Douthat has always been a religion. Daupheth forever.

But he just wrote a book about it. Yeah, yeah. He's been a religious conservative forever. Yeah. But the stuff they say is so wacky. It's so freaking wacky. Like, you know, I don't know. I don't even know how to react to it.

These are smart people, obviously. You know, this is part of the human thing that you just have to accept that this is a part of human nature. And Murray is like 90 or something? How old is he? I was 80s, right? He's very old. He's up there, yeah. I mean, there are like really serious scientists who believe in God, too.

How do you? I guess. I don't know. No, there are. It's not just believing God. Yeah, yeah. No, Dotheth believes in like demons interfering in like the world. Like it's more.

So does Tucker Carlson. Exactly. Well, I mean, that's a great. Has Murray said something like that? Has Murray said he believes in demons or anything? I haven't heard that. I haven't heard of that. I haven't heard of it believes in demons, but he believes now in the supernatural.

That's what we're talking about, the supernatural. And that there's a different. between believing in a god, like a deist kind of thing who just like, you know, lets the universe happen and believing like my political enemies are possessed by Satan. Like, I think there's just a difference there. I mean, also in the supernatural, I think you have to distinguish between like believing in demons, no? Demons are just wild to believe in.

So this is it. You can say, I've thought, look, the nature of existence and the origin of the universe is beyond my comprehension, and whatever the explanation is, and it has to be one, it's no more or less plausible than the notion that a God did it. Like, you know, like, I can, that I, that I can say, because I'm unable to ever grab, get my mind around the idea that something has always existed. And there was no, I just can't, I can't. But these people seem to think that God is communicating with them, that he comes to them and influences their judgment in some way, urges them.

God, I think this is, Megan Kelly, this is what God wants for me right now. This to me is just ridiculous. Whatever God is occupying his time with, it's not what he wants for Megan Kelly right now vis-a-vis her opinion on Candace Owens. This is absurd. You see the Trump video? They played up the, like, the little convention that they just had. Yeah, no, I didn't see that one.

I saw the other one. It was called God created Trump. And it's just all about how it's a voiceover of how God sent Trump to save America. It's like an official Republican convention. They've completely lost it. Wow. Yeah, and these are the same people who are outraged when Ben Gavir says it, right? Like the Israeli nuts who say it, how do you hear these Israeli nuts?

God was speaking to me. Anyway, I'm sure you agree. All right. Listen, you have to subscribe to Richard Hanani. Sonia's substack because he doesn't give a shit. He will write an anti-Charlie Kirk column on the anniversary of Charlie Kirk's death. And that's the kind of people you need in the intellectual sphere. And then attack the left the next day.

I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's what makes it so, so perfect. So yes, thank you, of course. Yes, yeah, and attack the left left the next day. I really, you know, when I, when I first met you, you know, I didn't. know fully how to be fully confident in you, but now I am 101% confident. You're just the best. I really, I really, a huge admirer. And, and your, your books are fantastic. I wish I had, uh, uh, spoken more about the book, but everything we spoke about was interesting to me. All right. Richard, leave something for people to buy, right?

We will hold it up, hold it up for a second. Yeah, hold it up longer. I'll throw it up. But you're covering the title with your hand. Oh, sorry. Okay, there you go. Cacostocracy, which means being ruled by the worst people to rule you, right? Right. Right. Ruled by low human capital.

I should have been the full title, yeah. Get his book and that's it. I feel like I just want to keep him on the show. Good night, Richard. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye, Richard. That's my music, by the way, Richard.

I perform, composed and perform the theme song. Impressive.