TRIGGERnometry - The Controversial Race Scientist Who Exposed Jason Arday - Nathan Cofnas

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

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Whether life serves you an ace or an unexpected backhand, the high-protein yogurt, Oikos Pro, is there to feed your strength and help you turn every challenge into a smash. Oikos Pro helps build strong muscles and support muscle recovery with high protein and contains no added sugar, because true strength isn't about being able to take the hits. It's about being able to bounce back. Oikos Pro, feed your strength. Visit oikos.ca for more details. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do. Jason Arde has resigned following a row about plagiarism. This is breaking news. Professor Jason Ardei has been found dead. One of the leading people campaigning against him was Nathan Kaffnoss. A white Jewish man who he's a white supremacist.

This is a story of corruption. of people who knew the truth, who used to threat legal intimidation, to silence people, including journalists, who tried to tell the truth. Nathan Koffens, welcome to Trigonometry. Trigonometry is proudly independent and sponsors like Hillsdale College make that possible. Access their free library of world-class educational courses at hillsdale.edu slash trigger. Many of you have commented that you are seeing too many ads in our videos. We've listened to your feedback and disabled YouTube ads in the middle of our interviews.

Can we ask you a favor in return? According to our analytics, most of you who watch our show are not subscribed to the channel. Please help us to continue bringing you fantastic content by subscribing today, hitting that like button and leaving a comment with your thoughts on this video. Nathan Kofnes, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me. You are, of course, the quote-unquote controversial race scientist who was involved in bringing attention to Jason Arde's various false claims about his work and other things. And you have now yourself become the subject of intense media scrutiny.

And I'll be honest with, in fact, I said this to you when we invited you on the show, that the subject of your research, which we will talk about, is not something that we're desperate necessarily to cover on the show have ever been. partly because it's one of those rare things where it's on the one hand extremely toxic and controversial. On the other hand, neither Francis or I are particularly qualified to assess the scientific accuracy of veracity of the things that you say. But we'll talk about it and see how we can discuss it. But the reason we had you on is I'm just not prepared to swallow the hypocrisy that's on display, whereby we've just had a week since Jason Ardley tragically took his own life, where we've been told that it was the media scrutiny and the criticism and the negative attention that caused him to do that.

And yet the very people who've been talking about that are now doing exactly the same thing that they said is murderous to you. And I just thought it's outrageous that you're not allowed to even express the things that you're trying to communicate and being shouted down. So that's why you're here. Thank you for coming on. Before we get into both Jason Adi and your research, can you tell us, can give us a brief overview of your career today and how you've ended up in the position you've ended up?

So to begin, I should say that I'm not here as a quote unquote race scientist representing Ghent University or as in my capacity as an employee at Kent University. Now, okay, my background is in the philosophy of biology. I'm interested in evolutionary theory. and how it applies to various questions in science and philosophy. And that includes the questions concerning human evolution and how natural selection has created differences in the distribution of traits among human populations that have been separated for an evolutionarily significant period of time.

So that's a kind of long way of saying race differences. Now, that's not the only thing I work on, certainly, but that's, I work in that. That's less controversial stuff, huh? Can you tell us a little bit about your career? Because the scrutiny you're receiving now is not the first time, perhaps unsurprisingly given the area is the research that you've had various run-ins with various university authorities. Just tell us a little bit about how your actual career has progressed today. So my mobbing actually was by the right, not the left.

It was in 2018 when I published a critique of the evolutionary psychologist, Kevin McDonald, who argues that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy and that Jews are genetically and culturally adapted to undermine Gentile society for their own benefit. that he was the intellectual godfather of the alt-right, which was sort of at its tail end in 2018, when I published the first academic critique of his theory. And it was retweeted by Jordan Peterson, who at the time was wrongly suspected

of being sympathetic to the anti-Semitic wing of the alt-right and then when he outed himself as not an anti-Semite, there was a huge backlash against him and then it turned on me. And then after that, actually, the leftists also pounced on me because they said that by responding to Kevin McDonald's theory, I was legitimizing him. And anyway, my own explanation for Jewish prominence in Jewish overrepresentation in certain fields was itself racist. So I was sort of getting it from both sides from 2018. Then in December 2019, when I was a doctoral student at Oxford, I published a paper in a respected philosophy journal called Philosophical Psychology, where I simply argued that we ought to be allowed to study all possible causes of group differences in intelligence, including genes.

And then this triggered a huge backlash. There's a petition to retract the paper, and it got very ugly. and some activists, scholars lobbied the editorial board to accept their comment on my paper, bypassing the normal peer review process and then denying me the right of reply. In response to that, one of the editors-in-chief of philosophical psychology resigned in protest, the other then apologized for publishing the paper but was fired anyway and there are there are a few more there are a few more controversies between now and then when i was the biggest one before the r day affair was when i was a leverhume early career fellow in the faculty of philosophy at cambridge after i I received my doctorate from Oxford.

I published a paper. First, I published my first essay on Substack in January, 2004, which was called Why We Need to Talk About the Right Stupidity Problem. And I presented several lines of evidence that the right people who, although I myself am on the right, people who identifies being on the right tend to be lower human capital than those on the left, that elites lean overwhelmingly left and woke. And I had, even though I think wokeism is incorrect, I explain why this is the case and what the political implications are. Now, no one at Cambridge had any problem with that. No one asks, well, how would a conservative student feel

and you're, you know, if they heard that you said conservatives have lower IQs, silence from Cambridge. Then a month later, I published an essay called A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution, where I explain that wokeism is the ideology that stems from the denial of group differences. The only way to stop wokeism is to talk about differences. and it included a frank discussion of what the differences are and what the consequences would be in the United States if there were no affirmative action, what the consequences would be for representation of certain groups,

particularly African-Americans. And there was a huge backlash to that. And the university placed me under investigation for a year and a half, although ultimately exonerating me, my college, which was a manual, College terminated my unpaid affiliation with them on the grounds that my essay is or could be construed as a rejection of the values of diversity, equality, and inclusion. And I've sued them for belief discrimination, and that case is still ongoing.

Okay. Nathan, before we, Francis, one second, sorry, before Francis gets into the Jason-RD. with you. Can I just ask a bit of a kind of personal, like, why do you do this? Clearly, you're going around upsetting everybody left, right, up, down center with your opinions and the facts that you believe are important to bring to the table. What motivates you to do all of this? So the, first, the understanding group different. is simply the fact that there are different distributions and different means of socially relevant traits

between different groups, besides being, in my opinion, intrinsically interesting as a way of something that's key to understanding the evolution of intelligence and human evolution in general is key to understanding so many social phenomena. Like, the world makes no sense. If you think that the average person in the Congo is born exactly the same as the average person in Japan,

the world makes no sense. It's very, the only conclusion is that there are some mystical forces of injustice that are permeating the earth and depriving huge groups, billions of people, the opportunity to reach their full potential. And if you have, if you're a morally sensitive person, then the most, the most, urgent task is to correct the environment which in practice means white racism colonialism something like that and bring and then bring about a quality of

outcome create a world where everyone can achieve their their full potential so there will be no peace until until people learn to accept that certain different not all differences but sometimes there are different between groups on average that are no one's fault, that are simply the result of nature, and we can learn to be okay with that. So, Nathan, your name became intertwined in the mainstream with the Jason Arde case for obvious reasons.

But before you published that substack, how did you first encounter Jason Arde and his work? Like many people, I read the headlines in 2023 when he was hired and touted as being this formerly illiterate, somebody who had various accomplishments, seemingly implausible accomplishments in athletics and other fields, and was now the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge University and not only a professor but a chair professor the very exalted position so I assumed that it was just a regular DEI hire and I didn't think much of it then on June 13th I was contacted by a whistleblower on the faculty

at Cambridge who told me that it has been known by the majority of professors at Cambridge for more than a year that our day is a plagiarist and a fabulous and totally unqualified for his job. But the the the knowledge of these facts has not escaped Cambridge because everyone is intimidated by the administration. They fear being called racist or that the administration will retaliate against them if they say anything. There wasn't so much as a single tweet, even though thousands of people knew about this story. And of course, as everyone knows, there were journalists who tried to write about it, most notably Jack Grove at Times Higher Education, who were then shut down with threatening lawyers, defamation lawyers, who were making veiled legal threats against if you

would publish this information, you're harming Professor Ardei, and it's based on racism. Racism is the only reason somebody would criticize Arde. So I started looking into it after I got this tip, and it was very easy to discover. First, the claims that Ardei was making about his personal life were absurd or impossible and or contradicted publicly available evidence. Now, in my expose, I didn't take a definitive position. on whether he had actually run 600 miles and six days and whether he had really been nonverbal until age 11. I just said, like, this doesn't seem to add up, but I'm going to focus on the plagiarism and the quality of his work,

because that's something that I can say, a comment on given the evidence available to me at this moment. And, you know, you have to note that when I published the essay on July 21st, it was very different on that morning calling Jason Arde a fraud than it is today. He was a respected professor with backed by dozens of prestigious institutions and Cambridge. And all I knew is that somebody had tried. to write about it and got shut down by legal threats, which meant that they thought that the threats had some sort of merit. And who knows what Arde can do?

Like he could get some fake doctor to claim that, yeah, I saw Ardei and he couldn't speak until age 11. And then I'm in court under cross-examination and having to prove a negative. So I thought that there was a more than 50% chance that. I would be dragged to court with a vexatious lawsuit either by Ardei or Cambridge. But it turned out that within a few days, a popular opinion kind of turned favorable to my position that Ardei had in fact was a fraud. A few weeks ago, we pointed you toward Hillsdale's free course on The Odyssey.

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This is one of more than 40 free courses Hillsdale offers on the Constitution. the Roman Republic, the American founding, Genesis, the Second World War, and more, all build the same way, taught properly and not dumb down. I couldn't recommend Hillsdale courses more highly. Go to hillsdale.edu slash trigger to enroll for free. That's hillsdale.edu slash trigger. So Nathan, because people have been using this word plagiarism to describe Jason Ardo's work, let's delve into that.

exactly what did he plagiarize and how many instances were there of this plagiarism? So in the expose, I had been tipped off that there was plagiarism in the dissertation that he had copied extensively from another PhD student at Brunel University London, Paula Zwazdiak Myers. So her dissertation was published in 2009, our days in 2015. And so that was what I started with. So I just ran his dissertation through copy leaks and then out pops. It flags a bunch of plagiarism, not only to Paula, but also to a bunch of other sources. So, of course, I had to check everything with myself manually. So I went through, you know, passage by passage, and I put Arde's words on one side,

and then the plagiarized words, which are either bipolar or somebody else on the other side. And I just highlighted in yellow the verbatim text that was copied in green, the lightly paraphrased text. And there are, there's now an industry of Ardee plagiarism denies. even some supposedly respectable people have participated in this. And Simon Baron Cohn says, it looks to the naked eye like plagiarism. It looks to the naked eye, but he was actually already investigated by Liverpool, John Moore's University, where he got his PhD. And they said it wasn't plagiarism.

So there, but well, yeah, it looks like to the naked eye, you see the plagiarism. So I don't know what else to say. It's page after page of plagiarism. So that was from the dissertation. Now, I also, because, you know, I didn't want to go through everything that RDA is published. So on his faculty website, his Cambridge faculty website, he has a section on his website called Principle and Recent Publications.

So these are the publications that he considers his most significant work on the basis of which he was hired to be a chair professor at Cambridge. And they range in publication date from 2018 to 2023. So that's the year he published his first paper to the year he got hired by Cambridge. So there are 10 papers there. I went through each one considering whether it's plagiarized. If it's not plagiarized, does it employ something that could resemble scholarly methods? And also, was Ardei actually involved in the writing of the paper at all, or was he one of 20 authors with evidence that he wasn't really an active participant in any way?

So, like, around four papers had plagiarism in them. The ones that were not plagiarized and that appear to have been written by Ardei were auto-ethnographies, like he would just rail against his colleague who had microaggressed against him with no real point or no scholarly kind of conclusion or methods. or anything, just saying people are racist against me. Or he would interview what he euphemistically calls a convenience sample, which actually just means his friends. For example, in one of his papers, he interviews three black or minority ethnic professors

in the UK who are a convenience sample and in his network. So just three black academics that he knows. He asks them questions. Then he prints their answers, quoting them at great length. And then he has some commentary about how racism is a big problem and we need to continue fighting it. So this, you know, we're talking about a chair professor at Cambridge. Leaving aside that these are replete with typos, he is, doesn't really grasp principles of punctuation. or spelling.

It's just not something that any reasonable person could consider to be real scholarship. Okay. So there are numerous, there are multitude of of instances of plagiarism in his work right the way through his career. You then write this substack in July what happens is it an instantaneous explosion is it a slow burn uh within hours it was blowing up on

twitter uh it's a it's a juicy story uh now my the uh the source the whistleblower from cambridge who contacted me thought that if i would write the story first then the mainstream press would take it as permission to cover the story too. And that is exactly what happened. Were you surprised now? Sorry, I was going to say, were you surprised by the reaction? Because this became the biggest story in the country. And I mean, look, I'm not denying that it's an important story,

and we need to talk about the corruption within academia. But nevertheless, I mean, this was front page everywhere. It went around the world. I had mates messaging me from South America. And Francis, what's going on with this? Yeah, but for me, the story was never about Jason Ardei. I really don't care that an academic plagiarized. I don't care about Ardei.

I don't think that he's a terrible person. Look, he was guilty of some wrongdoing. It's not important, really, to me. i mean the punishment that our day received was totally disproportionate to whatever he did um the international humiliation and ultimately paying the ultimate price for me the story was about de i the cover-up the fact that people think that dei means you know just increasing looking for qualified applicants from different groups when in reality it means Jason Arde and it means holding people to totally different standards or even no standards based on characteristics like skin color.

So it went completely viral. It became the breakout news story of that week. Everybody was talking about it. Then what happened? So a couple weeks into it, I went to, London and I did a bunch of interviews with including on mainstream outlets like Times Radio. And I got a very positive response. And actually at that time, there were a number of journalists who were writing me out of the story in order to take credit for it themselves. So that, for example, the Telegraph never mentioned my name. until I think they have recently so now people are saying oh Kauffin has started this because it ended badly but and in fact the British Union of Journalists

published a statement as everyone knows Ardea committed suicide and I think the 14th of August so the British Union of journalists published a statement on the death of Jason Arde which mentioned after they had written 249 articles about him i wrote one article about jason arde which was really it was about him and about cambridge and the cover-up one article the british press wrote 249 articles about our day almost all of them just attacking our day and picking apart his whole life since he was a child every lie ever told 249 articles in 22 days two-thirds of those 249 articles were written after he already resigned from Cambridge. So there was really

no more story because everyone on earth knew that our day was a fabulous. But this statement by the British Union of Journalists mentioned one person by name to single out for criticism, which is me, for writing a totally 100% factual article. No credible person has accused me of even making one mistake in that in that article. And this is worth... Sorry, go for it, Nathan. Well, now I've... Because it ended badly for Cambridge. So Cambridge, for two weeks, they said that this was a vile campaign. That's what they said about the people criticizing Ardei, obviously insinuating that we're racist. The Good Law Project,

an activist organization, had this huge... petition, which explicitly accused us of being racist. Then finally, they had to admit that Ardei, after setting him up, because Cambridge knew about Arde's plagiarism since at least 2003, within months of Ardae's being hired. If they didn't know about it before, there was another academic at Plymouth Maron University named Dave Harris, who sent them evidence, the administration evidence of Ardei's plagiarism. That was in 2003.

So they knew, besides the fact they must have known that he was unqualified, because anyone can see that, that there was a huge scandal waiting to happen and that Ardae was being set up for humiliation. They definitely knew about his fabulism since at least a year ago, because that was when he submitted a complaint to, he reported that he had been attacked by a racist with a knife in his Cambridge office twice. And Cambridge investigated and took it very seriously, but this racist could not be found on CCTV. So at least since then, they've known he's a fabulous, probably earlier. And the, sorry, keep going. Yeah, and they chose to cover it up. They chose so they knew.

the truth. The Cambridge administration knew the truth and they decided to cover it up and intimidate people into not telling the truth. And when the truth came out, instead of saying, okay, you know, you got us, they imply that we're, they say we're vile, vile, storing up hatred against us, which has become very serious now. Now they had three years to figure out a solution, maybe move Ardei to a non-research position or something like that. Create another professorship for public understanding of racism in academia where he isn't expected to write serious papers or something and then just park him there for the rest of his career.

But their impulse was to lie and to remain committed to the lie of DEI and the lie that our day, that no black person can do anything wrong. Go ahead. Yeah. So that being the case, everything that has happened now has happened. They printed, your name went public, and everybody said, well, this is down to Nathan Kofnas. I mean, this is where the story gets really ugly from your perspective, because there were

demonstrations against. which to me was just insane. So just explain to us a little bit of what it was like being in the eye of that media store. So it was in everybody's interest not to take responsibility for their actions. There was Cambridge who was most obviously at fault if you're going to blame somebody for what happened. Cambridge set Ardae up for humiliation. Then once Ardea became an embarrassment to Cambridge. They just stopped protecting him. And they said, okay, we're going to place you under investigation. They didn't, Cambridge didn't learn anything new. Nothing changed. They already knew he was a plagiarist. They already knew he was a fabulous. So what changed in on August 5th, when they placed him

under investigation and then he resigned a few hours later? What changed was that they were embarrassed and they were protecting themselves. So they tell essentially Ardei to pack your things and go home. And then meanwhile, the British press is completely gratuitously writing article after article. Now, I'm not saying that the press doesn't have a right to cover public figures and say negative things about them. But you can still ask the question whether it was a nice thing to do, whether they ought to have chosen. and to do what they had a right to do. And really, so, but I think that what the press did can certainly be subject to moral, if not legal, critique.

I don't agree with shutting down the press, using the law to shut down the press. But morally, what they did was very questionable. They don't want to take responsibility for that. Cambridge doesn't want to take responsibility for that. So who are they going to blame? Well, you know, I'm the super stimulus scapegoat. Everything about me says, you know, scapegoat. If you're on gold, you probably bought it for the same reason I did,

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slash trigonometry. Well, I think one of the things that says scapegoat about you, Nathan, is the area of research and the conclusions you draw from it, which is what I'd like to turn to, because I do think it's important. It's something that's come under a lot of attention in recent weeks because you're being blamed solely for Jason Arde-tech in his own life. So let's talk about it. Let me summarize it as concisely as I can, and you correct where you think I'm misrepresenting if I am at all. Okay. So your central thesis, as I understand it, is that there are differences between different groups, including racial groups, in many things, including intelligence, which we'll talk about and define later. And that it's the failure to accept this reality that gives us wokeness.

because if you live in a world where everyone believes what you call the equality thesis, which is the idea that all groups are effectively equal on average, there are no differences between, you know, Asians and black people and white people and Jews and so on, if everyone believes that and they look out at the world and they see that these different groups have very different outcomes on average in certain fields in particular, then the natural conclusion from that is, well, if everyone's equal but the outcomes are not, there must be something nefarious going on, i.e. institutional racism, structural discrimination, whatever label you want to put on it. And it's therefore, naturally, our moral duty to address

those things by DEI, other forms of wokeness, etc. And what you say is, because everyone believes the equality hypothesis or equality thesis, which isn't true, that is effectively where we've ended up. And what we should be doing is going looking at the reality of group differences and then we'll talk about what policy prescriptions you advocate for on that basis. But if we just accepted that their groups that differ in terms of their intelligence and other factors, in the same way that we might say accept physical differences between groups that clearly manifest in sporting achievements, for example, in sports like basketball, American football, etc. then that would solve many of the problems that we currently got socially and culturally.

Is that a fair summary of your views? Exactly. I would just add an important qualification, which is that not all groups that races themselves are not homogeneous. So not all white populations of white people are identical with each other. whites in Appalachia are not the same as whites in Massachusetts, and that's partly due to genetic differences. African immigrants in the United Kingdom are different from African Americans, and they have different outcomes in some respects, which are also due to genetic differences.

So it's not saying that all black people are part of the same population with the same characteristics and or whites or Asians. It's just a hereditarian perspective, a biological way of understanding how populations differ from each other. Explain what hereditarian means to people who are not scientists, Nathan. So, hereditarianism with respect to group differences refers to the idea that genetic differences play a non-trivial role in average differences in socially relevant traits such as intelligence.

That's it. And what is your claim about how significant the genetic part of it is versus cultural, you know, environmental, et cetera? And I don't think hereditarianism, to be considered hereditarianism, it's just to be a significant amount. So where what number you choose, how heritable exactly a trait should be for, for that. to be considered hereditarianism. I don't know. I think it should be the majority of differences. So over 50%. Yeah.

So intelligence is over 50% heritable. And the differences between groups are a reflection of that. So there are all sorts of subtleties that I'm leaving aside. about how to calculate heritability and heritability of a trait is tied to a particular environment and particular population it can change over time but what i'm saying is that when raised under comparable conditions you will tend to get certain patterns of differences between population representative groups of different races uh okay you have the same same patterns of of subs are an African, European, East Asian, for example, will manifest all over the world.

Even though when these groups are subject to very different histories, when they're living under different cultural conditions with different incentives, different economic systems, you still, you always find the same pattern of differences, and that's for due genetic differences. Okay. And so I'm just getting us to define the scope of what we're discussing and then we'll get into the different conversations about it. What is your claim about what the differences are between the various groups that you would classify? So the most significant is variation in general intelligence. So IQ score. IQ, there's a big discussion to be had about IQ.

You know, many people think that IQ tests are just asking you, you know, to distinguish between different kinds of yachts or to what kind of wine goes with bass. But anybody actually looks at it for five minutes can see that. that that's not true. These are IQ tests are asking about rotating shapes, recognizing patterns. Now, there is a cultural component to your performance on IQ tests, right? If you give an IQ test, there was an attempt by psychometricians to invent so-called culture-faire IQ tests that you could give even to an illiterate hunter-gatherer and and just test their innate intelligence. And we know that's impossible. It doesn't work.

Your ability to take IQ tests depends on your familiarity with the concept of testing and all sorts of background, cultural knowledge. But IQ tests test knowledge that. is that anyone in who goes to public school in a country like the United States will have been exposed to and it's not just a bunch of culturally by a test of your cultural knowledge. Differences between individuals are meaningful. They correlate with a wide range of life outcomes and not only in the classroom, but everything from your chance of getting into a car crashed, your probability that you resort to criminal activity.

Differences between people are meaningful. It's not just a test of culture. And there are stable race differences in average scores. Okay. Let me just summarize this in simpler language for people listening and correct me if any of this is inaccurate. But what you're saying is intelligence tests, yes, there's a cultural dimension, and we'll delve into this because there's questions about this, but they measure your ability to reason effectively. If you've gone to public school in a Western society, maybe even most of the rest of the world, you have enough in, you have been given enough to be able to take a test and for that score to be meaningful. and that people who score higher or lower on IQ tests,

that correlates quite strongly with their life outcomes, both negative and positive. So if you score higher on an IQ test, on average, your lifetime earnings will be higher. You will be less likely to commit crime. You will be less likely to get into a car accident. And there's probably a bunch of other metrics you could give. Is that accurate so far?

Yes. And... Okay. So what are the racial differences? as an IQ then? So in the United States, the African-American IQ is between 82 and 85. The average white IQ is 100. The average East Asian is a few points above the white mean.

You'll hear some people say that the African-American white gap has been closing in recent years, which is untrue. That's based on achievement tests, which are not IQ tests, the actual IQ tests, which are not measuring just acquired knowledge, but are measuring actual reasoning ability, continue to show approximately one standard deviation or a 15-point gap between blacks and whites in the United States. And what about Hispanics and Ashkenazi Jews? Hispanics are intermediate between blacks and whites, so 90s, somewhere in the 90s, and Ashkenazi Jews. There's a huge debate about this in the online right.

There are a lot of Jewish IQ truthers, but in reality, there have been some, Some studies with very small samples made potentially unrepresentative, which showed extremely high, implausibly high numbers. But the best IQ test studies for Ashkenazim have come around 110 to 112. Okay. So can I ask you some questions about the validity? of IQ testing and the hereditary notion more generally. So the first one I wanted to ask you is, if we accept that environmental factors will affect people,

even if they have a certain biological predisposition, I'll give you an example of height, right? There are population genetics that determine height, but if you have a population that's consistently malnourished, you will get a population whose height is not whose height is not the same as it would have been if they had been given proper nutrition. And you see this, for example, from what I understand in the difference between the average high of South Koreans and North Koreans genetically the same, but different outcomes in terms

of height purely because of the nutrition that they've received for decades and over generations. if a group of people are effectively given poor intellectual nutrition over generations, i.e., they're denied access to education or have reduced access to education. They have a disproportional likelihood to come from, to have intergenerational single parenthood. They have poor nutrition, which I imagine contributes ultimately, if you particularly in childhood, to somebody's life outcomes, et cetera, et cetera. And if this sort of environment is intergenerationalally locked in, wouldn't that have exactly the effect on people's IQ that poor nutrition intergenerationally would have on people's height? Well, height is a good example of a trait which is highly heritable,

but is still malleable, right? So over time, within a generation. So if you look within North Korea, height, well, height actually in a country like North Korea would probably be less heritable than it is in the South, because the North has a class system where the party members or the people in the elites will have access to much better nutrition, and then you have the rest of the population. So their height will be, they'll be taller for environmental reasons than, than the plebeians. But in South Korea, you know, everybody has like similar access to food. So because variation in nutrition doesn't vary as much in the South, the, it's only genes that will be left to explain the rest of the difference. So, you know, intelligence is the same way. You know, our grandparents would have scored lower, like surprisingly low on IQ test. I say, Newton would have scored like average on an IQ test because they just weren't familiar,

not because they didn't have the same genes for intelligence. They just weren't familiar with that. They didn't have the training to make the kind of science, the kind of classifications or scientific engaged in the kind of scientific thinking that is tested by IQ tests. Well, that's what I mean. Nathan, that's exactly what I'm getting. getting at. So if you're saying, well, the average black IQ is in the mid-80s and the average Y IQs in the hundreds, wouldn't black people be just effectively intellectual North Koreans in this comparison, whereby four generations they have been denied the things that would have helped them improve their IQ from nutrition to education, to familiarity with testing, to a safe environment

in which to grow up and study, to access to to parents. who could look after you and give you the time and guidance to be able, all of these things, wouldn't that have a very significant detrimental impact on your IQs? Because let's be honest, you may have had the Civil Rights Act in the United States, which has addressed formalized legal discrimination. But that's not to say that everybody gets the same start in life. And if you go around, you know, the Black Ghetto, you can clearly see that if I'd grown up in that environment, my IQ would have also been lower as a result of that. Well, this is the kind of thing that can actually be investigated.

I mean, one shouldn't just kind of rely on intuitions. I mean, of course, one can have intuition about what kind of hypotheses to explore, but then to conclude, one has to investigate. But has this been explored is what I'm asking you. So I would say this is the most studied question in the history of social science is the cause of the black-white IQ gap in the United States. We have every remotely plausible hypothesis has been studied, has been tested multiple times at an enormous expense.

And the conclusion is early childhood interventions will raise IQ in the black population. And they can raise it significantly. And over time, there's what's called a fade-out effect. So IQ shoots up in early childhood, and then they start getting lower and lower until finally in early adulthood. Mean IQ after intensive intervention reverts to the African-American mean. And there's been a very, there's been a cross-racial adoption study, the Minnesota study, the twins reared apart, which were black adopted children were raised by middle class white families in childhood. Their IQs were much higher, and by adulthood, the fade-out effect occurs. This is consistent with intelligence being much less heritable in childhood.

The exact reason for that is partly because childhood IQ tests are more likely to test acquired knowledge than general reasoning ability, which is compared to adult IQ test. But anyway, when IQ is less heritable during the period of life when IQ is less heritable, during the period of life when IQ is less heritable, you can increase IQ, but by early adulthood, everything that, any intervention that we know how to make doesn't have lasting effects. Let me say this because I know I'm not alone.

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And when they ask where you heard about them, tell them trigonometry send you once more for 20% off. Use code trig at bubsnaterals.com. Okay. And so I'm just getting us to define the scope of what we're discussing and then we'll get into the different conversations about it. What is your claim about what the differences are between the various groups that you would classify? So the most significant is variation in general intelligence, so IQ score. IQ, there's a big discussion to be had about IQ. You know, many people think that IQ tests are just asking you, you know, to distinguish between different kinds of yachts or to what kind of wine goes with

with bass. But anybody actually looks at it for five minutes can see that that's not true. These are IQ tests are asking about rotating shapes, recognizing patterns. Now, there is a cultural component to your performance on IQ tests, right? if you give an IQ test, there was an attempt by psychometricians to invent so-called culture-faire IQ tests that you could give even to an illiterate hunter-gatherer and just test their innate intelligence. And we know that's impossible.

It doesn't work. Your ability to take IQ test depends on your familiarity with the concept of testing and all sorts of background. cultural knowledge, but IQ tests test knowledge that is that anyone in who goes to public school in a country like the United States will have been exposed to, and it's not just a bunch of culturally by a test of your cultural knowledge. Differences between individuals are meaningful. correlate with a wide range of life outcomes and not only in the classroom, but everything from your chance of getting into a car crashed, your probability that you resort to criminal activity.

Differences between people are meaningful. It's not just a test of culture and there are stable race differences. and average scores. Let me just summarize this in simpler language for people listening and correct me if any of this is inaccurate. But what you're saying is intelligence tests, yes, there's a cultural dimension, and we'll delve into this because there's questions about this,

but they measure your ability to reason effectively. If you've gone to public school in a Western society, or maybe even most of the rest of the world, you have been given enough to be able to take a test, and for that score to be meaningful. And that people who score higher or lower on IQ tests, that correlates quite strongly with their life outcomes, both negative and positive.

So if you score higher on an IQ test, on average, your lifetime earnings will be higher. You will be less likely to commit crime. You will be less likely to get into a car accident. And there's probably a bunch of other metrics you could give. Is that accurate so far? Yes. Yes.

Okay. So what are the racial differences in IQ then? So in the United States, the African American IQ is between 82 and 85. The average white IQ is 100. The average East Asian is a few points above the white mean. You'll hear some people say that the African American white gap has been closing in recent years, which is untrue. That's based on achievement tests, which are not IQ tests, the actual IQ tests, which are not measuring just acquired knowledge,

but are measuring actual reasoning ability, continue to show approximately one standard deviation or a 15-point gap between blacks and whites in the United States. And what about Hispanics and Ashkenazi Jews? Hispanics are intermediate between blacks and whites, so 90s, somewhere in the 90s. And Ashkenazi Jews, there's a huge debate about this and the online right. There are a lot of Jewish IQ truthers. But in reality, there have been some studies with very small samples made potentially unrepresentative, which showed extremely high, implausibly high numbers.

But the best IQ test studies for Ashkenazim have come around 110 to 112. 12. Okay. So can I ask you some questions about the validity of IQ testing and the hereditary notion more generally? So the first one I wanted to ask you is if we accept that environmental factors will affect people even if they have a certain biological predisposition. I'll give you an example of height, right? There are population genetics. that determine height. But if you have a population that's consistently malnourished, you will get a population whose height is not the same as it would have been if they had been given proper nutrition. And you see this, for example, from what I understand in the difference between the average high of South Koreans and North Koreans, North Koreans, genetically the same, but different outcomes in terms of height purely because of the nutrition that they've received for decades and over generations. If a group,

of people are effectively given poor intellectual nutrition over generations, i.e. they're denied access to education or have reduced access to education. They have a disproportional likelihood to have intergenerational single parenthood. They have poor nutrition, which I imagine contributes ultimately, if you, particularly in childhood, to somebody's life outcomes, etc., etc. And if this sort of environment is intergenerationalally locked in, wouldn't that have exactly the effect on people's IQ that poor nutrition intergenerationally would have on people's height? Well, height is a good example of a trait which is highly heritable, but is still malleable, right? So over time, within a generation. So if you look within North Korea, height, well, height.

actually in a country like North Korea would probably be less heritable than it is in the South, because the North has a class system where the party members or the people in the elites will have access to much better nutrition, and then you have the rest of the population. So their height will be, they'll be taller for environmental reasons than the plebeians. But in South Korea, you know, everybody has like similar access to food. So because variation in nutrition doesn't vary as much in the South, it's only genes that will be left to explain the rest of the difference. So, you know, intelligence is the same way.

You know, our grandparents would have scored lower, like surprisingly low on IQ test. say Isaac Newton would have scored like average on an IQ test because they just weren't familiar, not because they didn't have the same genes for intelligence. They just weren't familiar with that. They didn't have the training to make the kind of science, the kind of classifications or scientific engage in the kind of scientific thinking that is tested by IQ tests. Well, that's what I mean. Nathan, that's exactly what I'm getting at.

So if you're saying, well, the average black IQ is in the mid-80s and the average Y IQ is in the hundreds, wouldn't black people be just effectively intellectual North Koreans in this comparison, whereby four generations, they have been denied the things that would have helped them improve their IQ from nutrition to education, to familiarity with testing, to a safe environment in which to grow up and study.

to access to parents who could look after you and give you the time and guidance to be able, all of these things, wouldn't that have a very significant detrimental impact on your IQs? Because let's be honest, you may have had the Civil Rights Act in the United States, which has addressed formalized legal discrimination, but that's not to say that everybody gets the same start in life. And if you go around the black ghetto,

you can clearly see that if I'd grown up in that environment, my IQ would have also been lower as a result of that. Well, this is the kind of thing that can actually be investigated. I mean, one shouldn't just kind of rely on intuitions. I mean, of course, one can have intuition about what kind of hypotheses to explore, but then to conclude, one has to investigate. But has this been explored is what I'm asking you. So I would say this is the most studied question in the history of social science

is the cause of the black-white IQ gap in the United States. We have every remotely plausible hypothesis has been tested multiple times at an enormous expense. And the conclusion is early childhood interventions will raise IQ in the black population, and they can raise it significantly. And over time, there's what's called a fade-out effect. IQ shoots up in early childhood, and then they start getting lower and lower until finally in early adulthood,

mean IQ after intensive intervention revert to the African-American mean and there's been a very there's been a cross-racial adoption study the Minnesota study of the twins reared apart which where black adopted children were raised by middle-class white families in childhood their IQs were much higher and by adulthood the fade-out effect occurs and this is consistent with intelligence being much less heritable in childhood. The exact reason for that is partly because childhood IQ tests are more likely to test acquired knowledge than general reasoning ability, which is compared to adult IQ test. But anyway,

when IQ is less heritable during the period of life when IQ is less heritable, you can increase IQ, but by early adulthood, anything that, any intervention that we know how to make doesn't have lasting effects. The slightly different to what I'm asking you, because you're talking about early childhood interventions, what I'm talking about is attempting to explain the gap. And what I'm asking you is, isn't it possible that intergenerational deprivation in various forms

would lead partially to an IQ gap, which you attribute to genetics? Well, in science, there's never a single experiment, right, that proves the case. So you're looking at the totality of the evidence against kind of the given in the context of a theory about what kind of explanation is plausible. I mean, people who promote like environmentalist explanations of race differences. We'll say some, for example, say that it's due to epigenetics. It's epigenetics.

But then how come epigenetics doesn't affect the Jews? Jews weren't affected by epigenetic. They're in ghettos and concentration camps, pogroms, and no effect at all. So, and, is that true? Isn't it true that Jews whose IQs were measured in the early 20th century, United States scored very low on IQ test? Same with Irish and other Italians as well. These were basically people who didn't speak very good English,

and so they scored lower on IQ tests because the IQ test was designed for English speakers who'd had a certain type of education. Yeah, there was a notorious statement by an early intelligence researcher in like the 1920s, who administered tests in English to some immigrants who didn't speak English and then made some silly statement about how their IQs are very low. And he himself recanted and said that he made a stupid mistake. I've never seen an academic admit that he's wrong in such unequivocal terms. I cite him in my sub-subsack essay Thomas Sol's wishful thinking about race. But people...

Yeah, I was very triggered by that because, as you know, I'm a big fan of Thomas So. But just come back to this point with me that if you have a population that have to live in intergenerational deprivation, poverty, poor education, etc., that is likely to significant extent to affect their average IQs, even down the generations, particularly for the reasons that I gave, which is even today when formal legal discrimination is no longer in place, that does not. not mean that everybody starts on the same place. If you go to an inner city black school in some American cities where only 7% of kids can read to the right level by the time of their 13 or something, I don't remember the exact statistic, but something like that, where you're basically getting a terrible education. Would that not affect your life outcomes, including as measured by a general intelligence test? Well, it might. So the adoption studies that I refer to look at kids who are adopted by basically at least lower middle class families because you have to meet

some conditions in order to adopt a child and you have to be have at least provide evidence that you have can provide a stable home and stable upbringing so you know some if you're running a crack house then you would not be allowed to adopt a child you wouldn't be part of the study so okay so So we know that if you're raised and at least the kind of middle class to upper class environment, the differences between your in parenting style or income or anything like that, that doesn't really have any detectable effect on your adult IQ. Now, if you're in a genuinely really deprived environment, it's very possible that will, although Thomas Sol himself, who I disagree with him on that one point.

He's obviously a brilliant guy. He himself came from an extremely deprived background. And there are a number of other black luminaries, intellectuals, who did as well. I think Glenn Lowry also came from a deprived background. But, yeah, I don't deny that that's a disadvantage in life to come from a very deprived background. Yeah, disadvantage is different point. I think the point I'm trying to make, and maybe what you're saying is there hasn't been enough research on this. but if you, like, I give you an example, and maybe scientifically not, not accurate, but just my dad, so my,

my grandfather grew up without a dad who was killed in World War II, right? My dad grew up with a dad who was kind of there and not there, and then I grew up with a dad. It wasn't perfect or whatever, but I can see the massive differences between all three generations, depending on what, whether they had a dad in the house, right? Now, and those, I don't know if those correlate to a lower or higher IQ, they probably don't, but the point I'm making is if your people, your group, as you talk about, four generations, has been denied access to good nutrition, education, et cetera, et cetera,

I think it's credible to assume that that would have an impact on your IQ scores, particularly, as you say, because they are somewhat culturally affected. Well, the thing is we have no memory of what happened. There's no biological memory of what happened two generations ago. There's some minor epigenetic effects that last one generation. It doesn't, there's no plausible evidence that that epigenetic effects last. But that's why I brought up my dad and my granddad, because my dad, I can see it in him, has in him the consequences of being raised by a dad who had no dad, right? Whereas I don't and my children

don't in the same way, if that makes sense. So you might not have a memory, but being raised by people who were themselves raised by people who experienced certain things and lacked certain things will have an impact on how you grow up. I mean, so, okay, I agree. One can formulate hypotheses that seem intuitively right and maybe are consistent with anecdotes about people that we observed or our family. But then test the theory. Like, okay, what about? Has this theory been tested is what I've been asking you this entire time? Because for you to make the bold claims that you do, it seems to me that this is something that might be worth testing. So we have, for example, adoption studies where you're raised from early childhood.

by somebody who doesn't have all those experiences. So we also have regression to the mean, which is really impossible to explain on the environmentalist's assumption. So if you, because a trait, your value of a trait is determined by both genes and either environmental or random environmental factors. So your particular, your height, your IQ is determined by a combination of those of those things. If you have a very, if you depart, if you're very far from the mean, then it's likely that that was due to, in part, to good, let's say you have a very high IQ. So that's probably due to a combination of genes for IQ and a very favorable environment for IQ. Now, you're passing on only the genes to your genetic offspring.

So their IQ is more likely to be closer to the mean than your IQ. So that's regression to the mean. And the same way, if you have a very low IQ, your children are more likely to be a little bit smarter than you. you. So African Americans regress to mean 85, and white Americans regress to mean 100. So even the children of high socioeconomic status, black Americans tend to get lower scores on the SAT than white Americans or Asian Americans from low socioeconomic status. That is, I mean, that is impossible to explain on the assumption that this is some intergenerational inheritance, cultural inheritance, because that's just the biological thing.

Yeah, that makes sense. I wanted to ask you about the genes part of this. So I went on Venice AI, which we used for researching things, and what it came up with is it says, no specific genes have been found that explained the racial IQ gap. Genome-wide association studies have identified genes correlated with educational attainment. But researchers, including some hereditarians, note that polygenic scores derived from mostly European samples, don't reliably predict outcomes across populations. And none of this research has found genes for IQ differences that track with racial categories.

in the way that the hereditarian argument requires. Do you disagree with this? This is just to bamboozle people. I mean, there was a hope that this issue could be resolved, that we would just find, you know, single nucleotide polymorphisms that are associated with intelligence, and we would just check how they're distributed from one race to the other, and then that would be the end of it.

it turned out to be a lot more complicated than people hoped. And these genetic variants, so polygenic scores, so just looking at variants that are associated with intelligence in one group, which allows you to predict the IQ or height or other traits, say, within Europeans who are generally the population that's most studied and for which we have the most reliable polygenic scores for a variety of traits. they often produce invalid results or at least less valid results when applied to Africans or Asians. But these variants, they are different, but we know that there are genetic variants that are

genetic variants that that are expressed in the brain that vary between racial groups. There are... Like what? Now, I don't do the... Sorry, a fly, been besieged by a fly which just landed in my teeth. Okay, sorry, that's a very

dramatic way of putting it nice. Well, anyway, least the fly won't bother me anymore. So it's, I think it's safe to drink the tea. It's a very unscientific conclusion there. But carry on. What are, what are some of the things that differ in brains between groups? So I can't comment on the details of the science. That's not my area. I'm not at the forefront of population genetics. But this is uncontroversial, just I'm just reporting uncontroversial results. It's well known that just a few months ago, David Rice Laboratory at Harvard published a paper in the journal Nature,

so the most prestigious university in the most prestigious journal, showing based on an analysis of ancient DNA, that there has been selection for genetic variants associated with intelligence and educational attainment in West Eurasians in the last several thousand years. So the idea that evolution stopped, you know, 200,000 years ago or something like that, is just not consistent with mainstream science. Okay, there's a few other things I wanted to ask you. What do you think, if we accept your thesis that these things are genetic, presumably they're the consequences of evolution.

Is that fair? Well, I mean, evolution, some, either natural selection or some random drift. Okay, I'm not a scientist, so I'm perhaps speaking imprecisely about this. But what I mean is these IQ differences are the result of adapting to different environments over very long periods of time. Is that accurate? Well, that would be the difference between races would be due to becoming adapted to different environments over a long period of time. But of course, you get different population differences between groups based on migration patterns. For example, migration can be elite.

African immigration to the UK is highly selected. So you get... So the reason black Africans, for example, do well in education in Britain is that we're getting the cream of the crop of the African continent who are coming here. So we're getting self-selecting high IQ population from a continent that you would argue on average has a lower IQ. Is that right? Yes. And it's unlikely to be cultural. Some people say, well, that's just African culture.

But then why doesn't Africa have the same results in Africa? If you take very intelligent Africans and you form a group of those people, then you get high-performing group. So makes sense. What would be the reason that certain groups would not evolve to have as high an intelligence as another? group, for example, the two groups that you've talked about today? So when you speculate about this, people will get angry and say that it's pseudoscience and these ideas haven't been tested. I mean, this is the kind of thing that academics should be working on, right?

That's such an interesting question. There should be theories that which and anthropologists and geneticists and should collaborate to test. what are the historical conditions that seem to have selected for differences in various traits, including intelligence, but also specific intelligences? So, you know, we don't have a huge amount of data to go on. It's been speculated, and there's some prima facie evidence that encountering winter is a, relevant condition for selecting for certain kinds of intelligence, that the challenge of dealing

with a period of time where you have to prepare in advance for winter where you won't have easy access to food, that that selects for intelligence. Farming also appears to select for intelligence. Things involving planning effectively. If you have to plan to survive, you're likely to evolve intelligence, whereas if you don't and food is ready available, you might evolve characteristics and traits that are helpful to hunting or gathering the food in the moment without necessarily evolving adaptations that are useful for planning for the entire year.

Is that what you're saying? It seems very plausible that that's a big part of the story, if not necessarily the whole thing, but a big part. Okay. And if I ask you, so there's obviously a big conversation in both the United States and Europe about the underperformance in education of poor working class, white boys in particular. what would be your explanation? Would you say that they are genetically lower IQ or is that a cultural thing? There may be some cultural aspect to it, but there are, you know, this is also this is wokeism just, you know, making whites into the victim, right? They're using the same woke logic as, you know, as blacks do in other contexts.

So they're saying the whites are not doing as well as African immigrants, therefore whites are being discriminated against. But that's not necessarily the case. And like there are genetic differences between people of different, you know, socioeconomic status. Like, that's not only cultural. You can see how to somebody encountering your views, it would seem counterintuitive to believe that if you said there's a massive racial gap

between white people and black people, and suddenly you have white people really underperforming in things that are highly IQ correlated. That would be odd, right? Well, I would hope people can appreciate a little bit of subtlety. It's not, hereditarianism isn't saying that there's, it's a law of nature that all groups of,

who are, of this ancestry, have and ancestry A, B, and C have the same pattern of differences like under all conditions, right? Because these populations can be divided into different, into smaller groups. Like, again, like whites in Appalachia are clearly different for, they have a different culture and that may have something to do with it, but they're not exactly the same on average as whites from, from, you know, I use the example of Massachusetts where all the fancy universities are, or Connecticut.

Okay. It makes sense. So that all being the case, Nathan, we've prodded around. And let's say that we, for the sake of argument, accept that your view of this is accurate. You mentioned right at the top of our interview that the reason you were doing all of this is that the world won't make sense. and in fact, you mentioned we won't have peace until we accept this worldview,

which means that behind it, you have, I guess, a set of policy prescriptions to address the realities that you're pointing to. What is that set of policy prescriptions? What should we do about the fact that different groups have different average IQs and therefore different average life outcomes? OK, just before Nathan answers that question,

I think there might be an interesting question to talk about classification, How do we classify groups? That's a good point. Go through. Yeah. So, Nathan, here's my question to you. Everybody can now drink.

So I'm like half South American, half British. I think people would look at me and say, oh, he's white British. I'm not like, I've actually come from a very multiracial background. I'm oppressed, as you can see. So my point is this. How do we classify certain people? If they're half black, half white, are they black, If someone's half Latino, half black, or Puerto Rican, what does that mean?

Because particularly when you're talking about Latin Americans and African Americans, there's a lot of racial mixing going on there. So is Dutch the same language as German? I mean, they can sort of understand each other. And, you know, it's how far do you have to go into the hills of? of Appalachia until Hillbilly Twang becomes its own dialect. And where does dialect end and language begin? In South Korea, they've borrowed thousands of words from English.

And in North Korea, they borrowed thousands of words from Russian. Are they speaking the same language? It's exactly the same with popular. There's no sharp lines separating English and Mandarin. And Mandarin uses some English words and vice versa. They borrow grammatical structures, expressions. But you can still say that Mandarin in English are different. It's not a meaningless statement.

So I see race as being exactly the same way. There are populations that are distinguishable from each other, but there's overlap and they blend into each other. and there are populations that are a combination of one population, the other. That doesn't mean that there isn't a pattern of differences that really exists in the world. Now, how you categorize those patterns, whether, for example, you would be categorized as white or something else, like whether I'm white. So the leftists say that I'm bad, I'm white.

The right says that I'm not white. Koffness isn't white. he's pretending to be white, he's a Jew. So it's not, there's no like objective answer to how, to, to what's, what, what I am, why I'm bad, right? It's just how you classify even languages, how you classify languages as a dialect, as a different language, is reflects your kind of personal interests

or political realities or whatever. But again, it's still, The point isn't what words we use to describe or how we, where we draw the lines around this category or that category. The important point is that the underlying reality, which is that there are patterns of differences. You said at the beginning of our interview that the reason that you're doing the work that you're doing and doing the research that you're doing is that you think there

won't be peace and it's very difficult to understand the world. unless we accept the thesis that you're putting forward. Let's say for the sake of argument, we accept the thesis that you're putting forward. If we were to do that, what would be the policy prescriptions to address the racial IQ gaps and to create a better society, as you would see it? So the first thing most obviously is that you undermine the empirical premise of wokeism. So you make wokeism impossible. The world is no longer seen as permeated with the injustice of past or present racism.

Now, I'm not saying that people need to turn on the television and hear a lecture about hereditarianism every day or that this necessarily needs to be taught to elementary school students. but what my idea is that a critical mass of the elites will just kind of come to understand that this is the way it is, even if they're not going around talking about it all the time. You know, I get all that, Nathan. I totally get it. What I'm saying is the elites and, in fact, the ordinary person

has a broad understanding of what you're saying, which is when different groups have different outcomes, it's because of nature, it's not because of the system or the government. or the man or the oppressor or whatever. Now what? You said yourself in one of your substacks that if we were to have a purely meritocratic system, that would mean that there would be almost no black representation,

for example, in academia. Likewise, there would be almost no ex-representation and white. If you had a purely meritocratic system, the world would look very unfair, quote, unquote, based on the equality thesis that we currently hold. okay, the world has accepted that you are right about this, hypothetically. What do we do now in a society where these groups have such different outcomes? Well, I should say an important qualification.

It's not that there would be almost no blacks in higher education. It's just at that very highest level at some place like Harvard, it would be under 1% representation. There would still be brilliant black scholars, but there's no question about it. Of course, because there are outliers within every group. But what I'm getting at is you would have a society that is by your own assessment very, very, there would be huge disparities in people being quote unquote represented in important fields of human endeavor, right? So now I, as a Burkean conservative, don't really, I'm cautious about. you know, issuing recommendations about how society ought to be arranged in any great detail. I think that it's necessary to go through a process of absorbing this truth and then slowly adjusting

the institutions to align with this new understanding. Adjusting in what direction? What would we do differently? That's what I'm asking. So my lodestar is. meritocracy. I think that ideally people should be treated as individuals and that on average, everyone benefits when the person who is best qualified for a job is given the job. I do recognize there's a competing value, which is representation and people feeling that they're participating

in society in a meaningful way and that their group and their interests are represented. in a way that is visible to them. So that's a value that can be in conflict with the value of a pure meritocracy. And I think that one may need to find a balance between these things. So I've... So less DEI, but still some DEI.

So there'd be no DEI, because DEI refers to the ideology of addressing the history of injustice. So what I'm saying is not DEI. It's saying, look, it's like the United Nations, every country gets one vote. Like, that's not DEI. That's just, that's just, you know, everyone gets represented, even though some countries are more.

Inclusion in the United Nations is based on identity. It's not based on your ability to do a job, whereas employment at a university is. And so if you're only higher on merit, you are, as you said yourself, in direct conflict with representation. So you either have some thumb on the scale or you have a pure meritocracy in which, you know, representation goes out of the window. And there'll be plenty of people who would who would be okay with that. I'm asking if you are. So I'm okay with some level of quotas or something like that.

You know, in the case of the United Nations, I think it's very possible that that, you know, you know if you took the uh what i think there are 193 countries in the united nations and two observer states if i remember correctly if you if you uh um selected the 193 most able statesman in the world to govern the world most effectively and it was americans Maritocracy, it's very possible that Micronesia would not be represented there, that it would be mainly from the United States and China or something like that. But we recognize part of the, okay, so the United Nations is a special institution, so I don't want to push that analogy too far.

Yeah, it's very different. I'm just saying in principle, we're, or like, why can't you just say you want a meritocracy? What's the hesitation? Because the meritocracy is the logical conclusion of what you're talking about. Because there are two things that I recognize as being values, which are meritocracy and feeling represented. So those are two good things. Now, the two good things, you can't have both of those things to the maximum degree

at the same time. So right now, we are destroying the meritocracy in favor of feelings and pulling feelings and feelings of representation above everything else. And we're doing that under the banner of fighting injustice, which I say is largely imaginary. Not that there wasn't injustice in the past and all of that, but we're fighting the injustice that is affecting people today in the way claimed by the wokesters. So I think that's bad. So do you then believe in some quotas for Jews in the end?

then? I mean, this is kind of where this is the thing that doesn't work about DEI. It's like, you have quotas for some people for some areas, but they only sort of work in one direction. You don't seem to have quotas for women to be bin women and other things of that nature. It's all about certain types of jobs, but nobody seems to be advocating for more Ashkenazis or more Muslims or more white people in sports teams. Do you see what I'm getting that? Yes. I could there could be a quota for a Jew in the in the 100 meter dash in the Olympics. And then I could watch him coming in last in order to feel represented. But I mean, I don't think that that would make me feel very good. But the thing is.

But this is my point, though, is it's so unrepresentative. It's so unhelpful, rather. But sport is an era where it actually, objectively, doesn't matter. If you add another lane for the Jewish guy at the end of the 100-meter final, and there's now nine guys and all of them run it in under 10 seconds, and he takes about five minutes, like, no one loses out from that. But when you have people at university. I could do a solid 14 seconds when I...

I'm sure you could. If you have that in academia where you have people like the person about whom we started this conversation, who are teaching and doing research and indoctrinating the next generation, that is actually damaging, right? So I don't understand how anyone who particularly with your worldview would come out in favor of quotas. Well, quotas doesn't mean representation that's proportionate to the representation in the population. So 14% of blacks. So I'm saying the two values have to be balanced against each other. You have A is good, B is good, but you can't have both of them 100%.

Okay, so what if you have 30% of B and 70% of A? So let's say the quota system is 3% black at Harvard. They'll get qualified people. They'll get good black applicants. they won't be ridiculously unqualified. And so you just want, but this is why I said, you just want less DEI. You want DEI, but but, but pulled back somewhat, right? But again, I, I don't call it DEI because DEI has the connotation of wokeism being based.

Fine, fine. You want racial quotas that are not as extreme as what we have now. I'm saying, you just want everyone to accept that the reality is there's big differences between different groups. Because this is the reason that nobody wants to touch this stuff, Nathan, is you're kind of advocating slightly less of what we have, but everyone to accept a really toxic thing to be part of the public discourse. That's why people don't want to talk about this. Well, if we don't talk about it. The game doesn't seem worth the sacrifice. The alternative is that we perceive disparities as the result of injustice, and that's wokeism. And we'll be dealing with wokeism forever. So that's also toxic. So which kind of toxicity? The alternative isn't that, in my opinion. The alternative is you say we're going to identify discrimination where it exists and eliminate

it. But other than that, we will accept that people are going to be treated on their merits. And whatever is the outcome of that is the outcome of that. And we don't have to get into trying to prove that some racial groups is more stupid than others because that seems to me like a very toxic path to go down from just a communication perspective, not least given that the outcome that you're advocating for is actually very tame based on the very strong claims you're making about human intelligence. Well, you can say that you would like to have a meritocracy.

But what is the consequence? If we actually have your meritocracy, Harvard will be less than 1% black. People are going to notice that, and then they're going to demand an explanation. And if you haven't, if they think that- The explanation is different groups have different apt to for different things. End of story. Yes. Well, okay. So you would say hereditarianism and pure meritocracy, no quotas. Now, if people are willing to say, I wouldn't say hereditarianism. I'd just say, look, different

people have different outcomes for different things. All we can do is focus on, can we eliminate discrimination? Has this Jewish man not achieved his position in the 100 meter final based on merit or discrimination? We have found no discrimination against Jews. in athletics. Therefore, we can conclude reasonably there's no Jews in the 100-meter final, because whatever, and we move on with our lives. Instead of delving into the stuff where we're really getting into the difficulties for most people of having this conversation morally. We've seen that it doesn't work. We've been trying that. Mainstream conservatives have been trying this approach for decades, and we see that the vast majority of intelligent and morally sensitive people do think,

it's a moral emergency to correct the environment and achieve equal outcomes because they think that again, the average African, the average Asian, the average European, they're all born with exactly the same potential. There's no reason that the whole world can't be turned into Singapore. So it's just the most important thing is to figure out how to do that. And So much moral energy is channeled into this hopeless project. And this whole idea about wokeism being over is just not. This is just based on Twitter vibes. All the survey data shows that the opposite is true.

The younger generations are far worse on every measure than the old. Gen X is worse than the boomers. Millennials are worse than X. Zoomers are worse than millennials by a long shot. This isn't going away. We can't just say, let's treat everyone as individuals and ignore this disaster of group disparities. It isn't working.

And once the boomer and Gen X gatekeepers are phased out, it's just a. It's just, you know, it's going to be really bad unless we find a new strategy. Okay. I mean, I think that's a fair response. The only question is how do you, if you accept that the next generation is even worse, how do you persuade those people to believe that there's IQ differences between races? That does not seem like a realistic prospect to me.

How do you persuade a woke 20-year-old girl that what you're saying is true? there are many people who will not be persuaded by anything. That's just, but that was true of the taboos of previous generations, where people would not consider the atheist, woke, anti-racist college girl today, who won't listen to anything about hereditarianism. In a previous generation, she would have hated you if you questioned Christianity,

or if you said that homosexuality should be okay. It's that these taboos change over time. It's not the taboo of your generation, of whatever generation one is living in seems like a law of nature, but it really isn't. And you defeat the taboo. You know, Darwin himself said that when he first told his friend about that he had,

rejected the idea of special creation. As he said, it felt like I was confessing a murder to propose the theory of evolution was so outrageous in the mid-19th century. And now it's not controversial at all. You have to make the case and you have to explain the reasons why hereditarianism is correct

and persuade those who, are capable of being persuaded and the information will spread. So Nathan, the final question is always the same. I'm going to be honest with you. It feels a little bit redundant in this episode. But nevertheless, what's the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Nathan answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to go to Triggerpod.com.uk, where you'll be able to see this.

Has Jason Arles become a martyr and so beyond criticism? In academia you survive by publishing, but you can only publish if you discover something or have positive results. This makes people very risk-averse as every project has to work from a master's to a postdoc. How can we re-include the ability to fail? What's the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? I don't know. I have to give the least surprising answer in the history of the show. We have to talk about hereditarianism.

Well, I'll tell you, I'll give you a little bit, maybe a more surprising answer, which is related to hereditarianism, but was the title of my first substack essay, which was why we need to talk about the right stupidity problem. And the fact that resistance to wokeism has been so ineffective and the fact that the right is totally unable to create serious effective institutions, this is something that people don't want to talk about on the right. Give us a little bit more of what you're doing. A little bit more of what you're talking about, Nathan. So what is the right stupidity problem, exactly? I've heard, I've seen people on Twitter showing research to sort of support the anecdotal claim that basically the problematic people on the left are mentally ill and the problematic people on the right are stupid. Is that kind of what you're getting at?

I don't know about the mental illness. I think it could be that leftists are just more likely to be diagnosed with mental illness because that's become like, its own identity, kind of left-coded identity. But definitely there's a problem that the intellectual elites lean left and woke. Now, there isn't a definitive study that proves that, but, and there's several lines of evidence that indicate strongly that this is the case. In the general social survey, which surveys a representative sample of Americans regularly for the last few decades, finds that on abbreviated intelligence tests, very concerned, people who identify, whites who identify as very conservative, do worse than those who identify as conservative,

do worse than those who identify as liberals, and the very liberals do the best. Wow. It's consistent with, well, stereotype accuracy. So stereotype accuracy is improved. You can't prove something just by saying that it's a stereotype, but it is a generalization that stereotypes tend to be, you know, not totally based on nothing. And, you know, in the United States, the Republican Party is known as the stupid party. and the stereotype in other countries of right-wing parties is generally similar.

You have the fact that conservatives have not managed to control one single serious university in the United States. And that includes Brigham Young University, which is still majority non-conservative, and universities even in deep red states, are still staffed primarily. by liberals. This is not what you would expect. Now, okay, it's true, a lot of what goes on at the universities isn't serious. It's just a bunch of left-dring activism. But still, there is real intellectual work being done at a lot of universities,

and conservatives are just not well represented. And if conservatives really cared just as much as liberals about knowledge and scholarship, and they were just as smart and capable as liberals, you would expect them to have at least one university, or even they could just create a new university. But even that is not something that they are seriously struggling with. And in terms of the intellectual culture on the right, it's just a disaster.

So I think people, before, now I think the right stupidity problem is related to hereditarianism, I think that without hereditarianism, it's impossible to have an intellectually coherent right, that a right-wing philosophy that appeals to smart and intelligent people. I mean, okay, there are smart, intelligent people on the right who deny hereditarianism. They exist, but it's just statistically, smart, morally sensitive, thoughtful people are more likely to be on the left and woke if they accept the equality thesis and the taboo on hereditarianism. So that is actually a big taboo on the right.

It's not a taboo on the left, but it's a taboo on the right to point out that conservatives can't, they have very little scholarship, they have very little art. You remember the, in order, there was the, during an American, in football, they have the halftime show where they feature, you know, some, the latest, you know, homosexual artists doing some flamboyant performances, as I say. And so conservatives are very triggered by that. So they wanted to prove that they are just as good at art as liberals. So then there was the competing conservative halftime show. And the star of the halftime show was this guy, it was beyond parody.

He was like, I just want to wear my boots and walk my dog. Did you see this? It was like last year ago. And they say, how come anybody say that conservatives are not as good at art as liberals? Well, I think one of the things I think Jordan, who you mentioned earlier, is described is the temperament, different, smart people on the right tend to go into business. business, not academia, not least because from a financial perspective, that's a much smarter decision. If you run a business and you're good at it, you're going to make way more money

and have way more freedom than you would if you became a professor at university. All right, Nathan, well, thank you for your time. We're going to go to Trigopods.com. .uK now where our audience will get to ask you their questions. What evidence would convince you that average group differences in cognitive ability are environmental rather than partly genetic.