Caribbean rhythms. I have today on show what I consider best journalist, certainly the best journalist in the United States for the last at least 10, 15 years and not just journalist but one of the most insightful, observant thinkers. I think one of the best writers in America right now needs no introduction. You all know him. It's my honor to have on the show Steve Saylor. Steve, welcome to the show. Well, thank you. That's quite a build-up. I'm feeling a little intimidated trying to live up to it. Well, no, you are being very modest, but I think it's true. Everyone I've spoken to knows the best-kept secret in American media, your influence on mainstream journalists, so that every time you say something, within a few months, let's not name any names.

You don't want to embarrass or stop the stream of this influence, but it appears that in the New York Times and various other publications, I mean, everyone knows this. And I wanted to ask you, I mean, you are considered a heretical thinker, an orthodox thinker today, let's say a maverick thinker. When did you first maybe notice that you were a noticer? When did you sense that you had sense for observation and, you know, maybe that you were a dissident or maybe you don't think of yourself as a dissident? Yeah, I mean, I mean, is it, I mean, am I a natural contrarian? No, I don't think so. I think basically I observe both the world around me and statistical patterns, data, and academic works and nobody believes me, but I think they all kind of fit together.

I mean, all right, when did I start noticing these kinds of patterns that are controversial today? Yes. I can recall going to a college football game at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1968. It was a big game. Oregon State had a great running back, Earthquake Enyart. And he just pounded into the USC line in the first half and Oregon State started heading for an upset. In the second half, USC unleashed their extremely fast running back named O.J. Simpson, who rushed 238 yards that day, a career high. And I kind of took away from that at age nine, oh, OK, yeah, there's some really strong white athletes, but maybe for foot speed it looks like maybe the black guys like OJ are even a little bit faster. And in the 56 years since then, has that

turned out to be not true? No, that's pretty much what it's looked like in October 1968. So yeah, I mean that's that's a that's a start. Probably my interest in kind of higher-end social sciences, human sciences, goes back to when I was 13 and starting high school in ninth grade. So the debate topic that year was how to finance public education across the country. So we We immediately started doing a lot of research on all the latest social science, and there had been a huge pile of it coming out, starting with the Great Society, such as the Coleman Report of 1966 and so forth. And it was kind of surprising to what the liberal orthodoxy had expected. The Coleman Report was commissioned by Congress as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to have

the biggest study ever of how much better schools would be if they just had more money and how much higher test scores kids would get if they just had bigger budgets. And James S. Coleman, a leading sociologist, did prodigies of research by 1960s standards. So it was famous as like the first study that used computers. And when they came, when they got done in 66, the evidence was, nah, it doesn't seem to make that much difference. It's more what the students bring with them from home when they show up for school. And that was pretty shocking to the Johnson administration. They released the Coleman Report like 4.30 p.m. July 3rd, just as all the media was headed home for the long weekend. But by 1972, when I was 13, there had been a lot of research.

People like Daniel Patrick Moynihan had led a major study to kind of go through the whole Coleman Report and so forth. Others were piling on. One of Moynihan's grad students, Christopher Jenks, published a book in 1972 called Inequality, in which he made the argument that's probably still pretty valid that, like, you know, that equal opportunity isn't really going to bring equal outcomes, and if we want equal outcomes, we really need socialism. And as a snarky 14-year-old in the spring of 1973, I wrote a letter to the editor of National Review after reading Ernst Vanden Hegg's review of Jenks' book, Inequality, and I said, I am reminded of an old psychiatry joke, a psychotic or egalitarian in this version, says, all people are equal and I'll fight anyone who

says I'm wrong. In Urotic, such as Christopher Jenk says, people aren't equal and I just can't stand it. So, you know, as David Foster Wallace said, that in the end, you grow up to be who you are. And yeah, I was kind of a snarky bastard at 14 in 1973. I'm probably more sympathetic to Jenks's viewpoint, having, you know, lived longer and seen more of the things that can go wrong in life. But yeah, I don't, I don't, I basically see, yeah, the last 51 years is kind of playing out the the implications of that were that were there in this, in this one paragraph letter to the editor in 1973. Yes, well, the education funding thing is a huge, I have a big international audience. They may not know the extent to which America funds especially inner city schools the amount of money that it puts in.

I think, I don't know if this is still the case, a few years ago the United States spent second only to Switzerland per schools and then other high performing countries of course that do better than maybe Switzerland spend far less and you go to some of these inner city schools. It's state-of-the-art equipment, laptops, the latest models. Of course, they're all used for porn, the same thing that you go to a public library. It's porn. But yes, it's made no difference, the amount of education, the funding. Was it Zuckerberg or was it Bill Gates who put just an ungodly amount of money into it. Yeah, it was a kind of a fad around 2005 to 2015 for tech billionaires to go, well, all we have to do is fix the school, so I was just reading this great fix.

So like Bill Gates spent a fortune on a fad of the first decade of the 21st century called small learning communities. And then in 2009, I just wasted all that money. But then he came up with the common core fad. And then at some point, kind of everybody got sick of it. And you don't hear much about education reform anymore. Now, now mostly you hear about how we have to lower standards and make things easier, and so forth. And somehow I suspect that's not going to work terribly well either. Um, on the other hand, you know, during the COVID study from home remote learning thing, you know, what you kind of saw was that that all the all students test scores went down. The, the upper half of society, kind of the, the kids from what you might call the laptop class,

their test scores didn't decline that badly when they went to remote learning. they kind of like sitting in a laptop and typing away and so forth. It's like the bottom half of society, their test scores just got crushed. And what it suggests is, yeah, it is good for kids to go to some organized place like a school and be talked at every day by middle class grownups. That a large fraction of the population does benefit from that. from, from basically going to school. So, you know, it's not, I'm not completely nihilistic about this stuff either. Spending money on education is basically a good thing. But it's not the solution to all our problems. Well I don't, you know, it's a somewhat side point. We don't have to go down this path.

But I found school to be a prison, and I know many, many young people find it to be a complete waste. I don't think I ever learned anything in school, and I think mass education is a mistake. But you know, that's a… Yeah. I mean, to give you an insight to my personality, I like school. enjoyed it But it's but that's kind of the person I am which is You know people think Oh sailors constantly coming up with all these saying these terrible things He must be you must be really dissatisfied person like no, I'm actually I'm actually Kind of happy-go-lucky social prosocial person. And, yeah, the idea that I'm some sort of unspeakable, unmentionable Lord Voldemort seems particularly weird to people who know me.

No, I mean, to lunatics like me, I just maybe audience and maybe outsiders listen to the show too who are looking, but Steve Saylor has disagreed with me and with people on the right many, many times, and maybe more often than not, it's just you seem to have an interest in the truth, which, you know, has become, yeah, has become forbidden. And that's, you know, Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know, it's, it's partly my pro social side, I think the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking. And what the other side of it is just, yeah, it's, it's really interesting. All truths connect to other truths. Whereas when you make stuff up, it tends to be kind of an intellectual dead end. So yes, you've,

you've mentioned in the past, some interesting things about countries that people wouldn't think perform well. And, for example, but that have managed to create a small intellectual or technological elite that achieves things. For example, you've mentioned in the past Turkey, which has bad performance overall but has a small elite or group within it that does very well on testing. And you've also mentioned Brazil, which, you know, is a – on the right, if you look in the – they use Brazil as a dystopian example, but actually with all the talk lately of Boeing and how woke is destroying Boeing. You've mentioned, I think, that Brazil has managed to build quite good jets, Embraer, and actually I think this company, Embraer, has a very good reputation.

So Brazil is one of the four countries in the world that has a commercially competitive jetliner company along with the EU, US, Bombardier in Canada, and I mean look who's not on the list includes Japan so So Canada in its small and mediums, I mean Brazil and small medium-sized jets makes a decent plane Something that Japan hasn't quite gotten around to yet So that's that's impressive now the the Brazilians take a lot of pride in it and you know, of course It's it's it's centered way down south and in the more European part with the nicer weather so forth But you know good for the Brazilians Yeah, I mean to go like to talk with about Turkey I mean, this is something that I just glanced at in the Pisa PISA test results from around the world

And, you know, it's a real challenge to wrap your head around all the things that could be influencing PISA results. But like Turkey, you know, Turkey and Mexico scored somewhat similarly on average. But Turkey seemed to have this group of young people age 15, you know, a tiny group, but just ace the test, I suspect mostly, you know, in Istanbul or, you know, a few expensive Turkish Riviera suburbs or so forth. Mexico just basically faded out at the highest level. And it's kind of like, yeah, there must be a highbrow elite in Turkey. And I've been and slightly exposed to some Turks at that level of Turkish society. In Mexico, for whatever reason, I was talking to a very bright guy from Mexico last year,

and he agreed that probably the Counter-Reformation basically prevented pretty much the emergence in Mexico of kind of a puritanical elite, the way English science and so forth is kind of dominated by people like Newton and so forth who came out of this self-selected elite of like, oh, you know, every man should learn to read and teach his kids to read and we should read the Bible for ourselves and, oh, they won't let us into Parliament, so we'll start our own colleges. They won't let us into Oxford and Cambridge. We'll go to our own academies and study math and physics, et cetera, et cetera. So Mexico kind of missed that kind of intellectual elite formation period. That's, and without that much European immigration,

It's probably, you know, it's why Mexico kind of is lacking at the upper end. Yes, well, I mean, the pathologies of Latin American culture, which is something I'm very familiar with, because I've lived there a long time. We can talk about this later. I mean, I only brought up, I didn't bring up Mexico, Turkey and Brazil, to say that That even, let's say, in societies where overall you might not have the human capital to have an intellectual elite, funding for education or efforts in that direction could work as long as it's targeted by a government or by a society that's aware, let's say, of human differences to be polite, and that targets unambiguously the smartest youths of whatever background they are. But if they end up being of one particular background, as you pointed out, it's true

in Turkey and certainly in Brazil, the society doesn't freak out. Brazil has a kind of racism that you've talked about, but it's very different from the American racism and the anti-racism is therefore also very different. But look, Steve, the reason I'm saying all this is I want to bring up this – you're the orchi or the killer whale of Twitter lately. Whenever you show up, the libtards shake and you've been having these arguments lately with people like – I don't even want to say his name because he's a nobody and he's catapulted himself to Will Stancil and these people, but it's just amazing the extent to which even when they're presented with all the evidence of a hundred years of research on human intelligence and differences between groups and so on, they refuse to accept it.

And I mean the reason I brought up Turkey and Brazil is some people say wokeness, the recent woke craze, which I think is not really that different from the political correctness craze of the early 1990s, and it's maybe even older than that, but they say it's something that will be solved if you simply publicize precisely this new genetic research or publicize research on intelligence, and I think, maybe not, I don't know, what do you think about it? Yeah, I think science denial is definitely growing, probably in response to the enormous amount of genomic data that's pouring in, and basically the world decided about the year 2000 that probably during the Rose Garden ceremony that Bill Clinton held for the Human

Genome Project and during it one of the entrepreneurs involved, Craig Venter, got up and made a speech that's become hugely influential over the last 20 years, 24 years saying, okay, looked at one person's DNA and we saw we saw there was no race now if you think about it okay so they spent billions of dollars to look at basically one person's genome that person actually was Craig Venter mostly how you would find whether a race exists in the DNA from looking at one the first ever genome I I don't know. And, but nobody noticed that because that's what the world wanted to hear, was that science had proved that race does not exist in the DNA biologically and so forth. Now, of course, what we've discovered is since then, and tens of millions of people have sent

off their DNA and got back all sorts of interesting results about their racial ancestry is that yeah, of course it exists. And it's pretty much kind of like what the Enlightenment, you know, skull and caliper scientists like Blumenbach were coming up with at the end of the 18th century. Surprisingly, there's more complexity to it, especially when you go back before existing races to like, oh, okay, well the Europeans come from these three different groups, but the idea of three different types of Europeans isn't all that radically different from say 19th century, thinking about Nordics and Alpinoids and Mediterranean And so forth You know, it's mostly you know, the glad the glass is is largely Full rather than although partly empty

alright, so the world but the world wants to believe that that's totally been disproven and So what you're seeing is an increasing tendency to discuss to state that all the human sciences are basically race science and therefore we aren't going to know anything about we simply are going to shut our eyes and put our fingers in our ears about things like IQ and the heritability of IQ or you know evolution and affecting anything other than Adam and Eve was wrong. So that's a pattern that's growing and you can see it on Twitter there's just a huge number of people who are convinced that the science has proven that everything that anyone ever thought before this century was all wrong. Now they've got a basically a close to 180 degrees backward but you

know there aren't that many people who really want to stick their necks out at this point and go no it's it's actually different you know it's it's like ancestry.com and 23andMe. Yeah, they'll show you your race. That's what they do for a living. You know, yeah, all this stuff means something. Have you watched sports on TV? Yeah, it's kind of important. So, so yeah, so going on Twitter for me, you know, is, is kind of a way to kill time when I should be trying to come up with something really new. But basically, I have a lot of good one-liners at this point after decades to you know to respond to the conventional wisdom of the 20th century so it's it's generally pretty it's pretty one-sided I mean I appreciate Will Stancil because you know the guys

the guys competitive and courageous he leads with his chin like Rocky Balboa you know God bless them. Steve I'm concerned that yes they do reject the latest genetic research and a hundred years of intelligence research but I am concerned that if some of these let's say anti woke HBD bloggers whatever you want to call them if they got their way and if I'm actually not sure why the liberals resist the race science because I'm afraid that they could easily accept it and then simply redefine it low-key as a disability that needs to be redressed by and so you know from their point of view. I mean what you've got is and let me just jump in there you know this goes back you know to the intellectual origins of noticing which by the way is now available in paperback

just for $29.95, my anthology that's dated from 1973 to 2023. It's a collection of your work, yes? Yeah, it's a greatest hits collection. I think it's... No, it's a great book. It is a pretty good pick of stuff. That doesn't rule out that we'll ever publish a second volume of it because there's a lot of good stuff that didn't make this up, too. Anyway, Passage Press, Passage Publishing, Noticing, Steve Saylor, Paperback. Or you can buy an incredibly expensive leatherback version, which has been selling well. Yes, get the leatherback. Anyway, going back to 1973, yeah, basically, Jenks' view would be, yeah, all this stuff stuff, social economic status, maybe genetics. Yeah, that's pretty powerful stuff and we

don't actually know how to equalize students in schools. It's kind of what they show up with. So maybe we need like high taxes and welfare payments and let's equalize things. All right, so there's a bunch of countries do that Denmark does that they have outrageously high taxes But also Denmark more than than anywhere else in Europe has like followed out the logical side of that Which is okay, if we're gonna if we're gonna have a welfare state to really equalize the outcomes among Danes the way say that John Rawls proposed in the 60s and a theory of justice Justice that means much as Rawls went on to say in the 90s. You can't have open Immigration you got to have some limits on it. You just can't let the whole outside world pour into Denmark So over the last quarter of a century the Danes

Have come up with a bunch of pretty smart ways To try to get a higher quality of immigrant and keep out about immigrants who aren't going to do the Danes much good or make life much worse. And for a long time that was considered very far right, but now it's kind of like, yeah, the current social democratic lady prime minister, she pretty much pushes the policies that were far right in 2002. know, there's possibilities like this, but you can't have it all. You can't have a welfare state and just colossal immigration at the same time. The problem for the Democrats is they really like colossal immigration as a way to keep importing more ringers to vote for them now or hopefully now, but at minimum in the next generation.

And then they feel like, okay, well, what's uniting all of these people? We've got – we're bringing in all of these people from Pakistan and in Guadalambia and so forth where – okay, what can – and we've created this coalition of the fringes. How can we unite them? Oh, I know, we can sort of get them, we can tell them all to hate core Americans, that the more a current American is demographically like George Washington or Ben Franklin or John Adams, the more they're the other, they're your enemy. They will unite you and the transgenders and the welfare mothers and all these other people you don't really like much, you know, working coalition, a coalition of the margins of America. And it's, you know, it's a pretty brilliant strategy, but it's really obnoxious.

And I like to call it out, that's, you know, scoff at it, satirize it. Yes, it's just, it's old style, big city demagoguery. I noticed this when I lived in Rio on a smaller scale where, going back to the 80s, the mayors, the leftist mayors of Rio brought in people from the interior of Brazil for votes. They got partly the cooperation of a few of the rich, although not all of them, by promising them cheap labor which they kind of got and they mobilize them as Lula does in the same way by demagoguing them against you are oppressed, these are the evil colonialists and so forth. As an antidote, I suppose, you are famous for having come up with the principle of citizenism which I was going to ask you about later on this show.

Yeah, I mean, my notion is, you know, that we have obligations to others that tend to diminish as you go outward in kind of concentric circles, that you have strong obligations to your children and milder ones to your nephews and nieces. And then there's your community, your neighbors, the people you work with. These are all good things. There's and so forth. And so one obvious system would be to go, okay well as Americans we have obligations to other Americans and we actually have a legal system called citizenship to determine who's an American and who's not. We have less obligation to the 8 billion people on the rest of the earth. We have a lot of negative obligations to try not to make their lives worse and not drop

bombs on them and so forth and so on, but we have fewer positive obligations than we do with our own citizens. So therefore, policies such as immigration should be organized to primarily benefit Americans. And I'm talking about current Americans, not potential Americans. This was a debate I got into with Brian Kaplan, the libertarian economist of George Mason University. He went kind of nuts with rage when I recounted an old story from MBA school where the finance professor asked, okay, if you're thinking about, if you're running a company, if you're a CEO of a publicly traded company, can you sell your company's stock for less than it's worth than you know it's worth? And I raised my head and said, sure, I mean, okay, you're screwing over the current stockholders,

but you're doing a lot of good for the future stockholders, so it all comes out in the wash. And my professor went, no, that is, you violated your most important fiduciary duty, which is to the current stockholders, not to future stockholders you're conspiring with against the current stockholders. And poor Brian, nobody had ever mentioned this to him before, but it drove him nuts that there's an obvious analogy to immigration policy and that his open borders immigration policy is basically like selling stock cheaply to outsiders to screw over the current stockholders. everybody can recognize that so yeah so that's symbolism it's basic it's it's probably the most common sensical political ideology and the least

controversial one yes and because it's not very controversial basically nobody's ever heard of it and it's never gone anywhere in the 20 years I've been I've been suggesting it it's complete common sense that anyone in them more previous sane age, which might include even Bill Clinton in the 1990s, would have to agree with. I want to go to break soon. I've been holding you for a while, but before I do, I wanted to just end this segment asking you more on this subject of wokeness, because you mentioned Denmark. That is a very hopeful example. I've mentioned it too in the past. I hope that that kind of adoption of immigration restriction even by the left or the center left can happen in other countries. But the flip side of that could be an example like Malaysia where they somewhat concede

let's say Chinese superiority, maybe they don't say Chinese superiority intelligence or such, they say business acumen or whatever. The economies of all that Southeast Asian region is dominated by Chinese or people of Chinese descent. And yet the Malaysians therefore say, well, yes, you Chinese are better at this stuff. So we're going to, this is our country, the Malays, we're going to have a system that privileges us and also, by the way, our kin and cousins from Indonesia who can come here and get the same benefits and so-called affirmative action as us. And I'm just concerned that if these ideas, let's say, of differences between groups or inherent differences, differences in intelligence are accepted, it could very easily go with

what you've mentioned before and turn into a case like Malaysia where, yes, we need to right these natural wrongs. I mean, that is even what Rawls says, that there are natural hierarchies that are wrong have to be righted, and could things go in that direction, you think? And a closely related question is, what do you think the origin of so-called wokeness is? Because I don't think it's simply the idea that all races are necessarily equal and therefore that whatever inequalities develop are unjust. I think it's more the latter, it's an older idea based on inequality is unjust, it needs to be righted, and in particular this group of people from Western Europe, whatever you want to call them, white people or whatever, are particularly evil and their historical

evils need to be corrected, you know, they commit genocide. That's just my opinion. Do you want to comment on this before we- Yeah, I mean, yeah, the Malaysian example is pretty interesting. I haven't been following it closely. But the idea that, alright, so Malaysia is by Southeast Asian standards, not that densely populated and has some resources. So yeah, the idea that you have affirmative action for the three-quarters of the population or whatever, that's Malay, at the expense of the highly enterprising overseas Chinese, that's not the worst way to run things. The problem the famous very old prime minister said, who set the system up, said after decades It was, yeah, but my people just aren't really catching up. That's just, I wish they'd get, they'd stop being,

the Bumi Putras would be a little less lazy. But then the idea is if you look across the border and go, oh, I've got a third cousin in Indonesia, which has the colossal population, let's start letting in all the Indonesian Bumi Putras into our nice country. Yeah, then you've got this ethnic nepotism kind of running amok, and I'd be very displeased if I was a long-term Chinese Malaysian citizen that all of a sudden—okay, so I guess what's happening is the Southeast Asians are running Malaysia in the favor of the racial interest fellow Southeast Asians over the borders the way the Singaporeans are running Singapore as a as a Chinese racial outpost. All right so yeah I can see that happening and it's it's hard to it's it's hard to build a real strong

citizenist notion that that crosses racial and ethnic lines. Let's see, where were we on on wokeness? Yeah, I mean, all right, wokeness is very much like the political correctness that broke out at highbrow universities around 1990, I can recall, the Duke English department was seen as taking the lead in importing French theories of social constructionism and so forth to the United States. Now, what's happened in the third of a century since then is wokeness. Yeah, it's a continuation of that, but it's It's just gone so much more lowbrow than the days of Foucault worshipping Duke grad students. I mean, it's become this kind of academic prole ideology where you just have, you know, people like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo and so forth that kind of, you know, before

they made it big, like Robin DiAngelo's academic career is kind of depressing. And, you know, if I forget where, but somewhere, you know, remote parts of the Pacific Northwest and so on. But that's, that's where we are is that we've, you know, we've expanded these ideas to a much larger population than in 1990. And there I and so wokeness is like old political correctness. It's just kind of like the superhero movie version of it in which there are good guys and there are bad guys. And that's really all you need to know that. I mean, just okay, though. The white male is the designated punching bag is the designated bad guy of the story and and then there's all these other groups who are the good guys and it's important that they don't ever quite sort out who's on top of the

ladder and the fringes together but we all know you know basically the more like George Washington, you are the more you're a bad guy. And it's just dumb. It's childish. It's ill-tempered, ill-mannered, and people should make fun of it all the time. Well on that note, Steve, let's take a quick break. I've been holding you for a long time this segment. I want to come back. I think you just coined a very nice phrase, academic proletarianism, pro-academics. That's perfect, yes. But very good. We will be right back. Back to Caribbean Rhythms with Steve Saylor. Steve, on the last segment you mentioned the the phrase, ethnic nepotism. I know this is something you talk about a lot. It's very powerful analytical concept. I wanted to ask you about your, I don't like this phrase,

but you know, intellectual influences, the men you've liked to read and have been impressed by. I know that you like Pierre van den Berge. I do too, just for quick for audience who may not know, he was a Belgian born in the Congo who was a Marxist in his youth and then later on turned to such concepts as ethnic nepotism. He turned, in other words, Marxist dialectical materialist theory into, let's say, Darwinist dialectical materialist social theory in which he interpreted political phenomena by the the ethnic nepotist self-interest of various groups. I'm highly simplifying and therefore distorting it. But his book, The Ethnic Phenomenon, is one of, I think, best scholarly things of whatever last 50 years. I think he was a professor at Harvard, right? What's your opinion on him, and yes.

Yeah, so, yeah, I was fascinated by the concept of ethnic nepotism around the turn of the century. I mean, to give you kind of the backstory, it probably goes back to a pub quip of the brilliant Marxist economist, J.B.S. Haldane, and people would ask him, so would you, Professor Haldane, would you give up your life for your brother? And he'd reply that, well, no, but I would for more than two brothers or eight first cousins. And the joke is sort of funny because each of us shares about half of our variable genes with our siblings and an eighth with our first cousins and out from there. So then in the 60s, William D. Hamilton, another of the countless British evolutionary theorists, formalized this insight, offering a gene-centric explanation for altruism toward relatives. And the ultimate

reason you nepotistically gave a job to that useless young nephew of yours was because it might help him thrive and pass on some of your gene variants, one quarter of which you share with your nephew. So that is a pretty interesting concept. Now the question is, all right, do people and you can see that working with siblings. Yeah, you can see it with nephews. Do different cultures, though, seem to have different opinions on should you really help your second cousin, your third cousin, fourth cousins? In America, you might send a Christmas card to your third cousin, but first cousin's about as far as you'd go to invite for Thanksgiving dinner. So other cultures, though, they extend their kind of family or clan loyalties further,

and then they do things that kind of reinforce the actual genetic relatedness, such as cousin marriage, which is pretty popular around large parts of the world. We're talking about Denmark's immigration policies, and one of their immigration laws was, has, various ones have been oriented toward cracking down on what's basically immigration fraud through cousin marriage, that there's a Muslim girl in Denmark and her father ships her back to the old country to marry sight unseen her first cousin there, And then her first cousin gets a visa as the spouse of a Danish-born citizen. And they've been trying different things to like, you know, let's especially cut down on arranged marriages of first cousins. Northern England has a lot of trouble with birth defects and so forth due to all the

cousin marriages among Pakistanis. But this kind of stuff, you know, it causes trouble. Americans are particularly averse to cousin marriage because American eugenicists about a hundred years ago did a bunch of studies and said, oh yeah, this leads to birth defects. This is bad. The British eugenicists looked into it and then they decided not to touch it because Charles Darwins had married his first cousin. So, but lots of cultures think, yeah, this is a good idea. This really, you know, increases the bonds within the family. You don't have to split up your property. If you and your brother each own a herd of goats and your son marries his daughter, then your mutual grandson will get to inherit the herd. There's economic reasons, it's a good thing. All right, so.

Steve, I'm sorry, I can't resist interrupting because you're talking about this, but I don't remember if it was a British or an American sociologist or explorer to Hawaii, one of the earliest ones who mentioned the incredible, impressive physical power of the Hawaiians really don't exist anymore, I think the old Hawaiians only exist in mixed form right now. But the Hawaiian nobility, there's a passage where he has such good things to say about them. And he says that their royal families, which practiced brother-sister marriage, experienced no, you know, genetic or biological problems because of this. to the contrary were very physically impressive, you know, and wrestled in olive oil, not olive oil, what am I saying, coconut oil, yeah.

If you do this, if you in-breed long enough, then your birth defects die out, which is why you can have healthy dog breeds that are extremely in-bred, but it's pretty grotesque getting from here to there in terms of children with birth defects. All right. So, so Hamilton came up and did the math, and that was popularized in a couple of 1970s bestsellers, Edward O. Wilson's, Social Biology and Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene. And a more accurate title for Dawkins' book might've been The Dynastic Gene. So, Vandenberg in the 80s then, as a sociologist, was born in like the Belgian Congo, and he started sort of extending this logic to, you know, to the social sciences. So he started pointing out that kind of the 19th century European categories for how to

organize politics, such as nationality, 10 million people, or class, cross nationalities like in Marx, you know, that takes, that's not that common around the world. It's just sort of it's more like we you have a lot of ethnic Rivalries, it's sort of more resembled gang wars between organized crime families writ large and Yes, so extrapolating from from Haldane's witticism Vandenberg's book Asked that, you know, it doesn't make genetics sense to sacrifice your life for eight first cousins Okay, but what about 32 second cousins or 512 fourth cousins? Yes. You know, Vandenberg himself was agnostic about whether ethnic groups really were Hamiltonian extended families or whether their leaders simply borrowed family terminology to socially

construct solidarity, you know, Henry the Fifth, as we happy few we band of brothers. On the other hand, probably when they got back from Agincourt, he probably, you know, wasn't that happy to see his archers show up to hang around his estate like real brothers. Hang on a second. Yes. No, they're trying to attack us. It's okay. Yes. Steve, you should mute your mic. It's okay. We will take short music break while Steve takes a phone call. Yes. All right. I am back. No problem. I will use a music break for that. No problem. Go ahead. All right. So, Vandenberg's concept explains a lot about how the world works. We still don't know. So, and, you know, is this actually, is ethnic nepotism, is it really a biological nepotism extended out to, you know, your 512 fourth cousins, or whatever?

Or is it socially constructing feelings of kinship among people where the genetic math just doesn't work out? Yes. My impression, my impression, I asked a lot of top people this. My impression is that Richard Dawkins and Greg Cochran think the genetic math doesn't work. That Cochran's writing partner, Henry Harpending and Fred Salter thought, yeah, it probably does work. William D. Hamilton probably was leaning in their direction that the genetic math does work before his fairly early death. So at this point, you know, and this is kind of above my intellectual and definitely theoretical pay grade. So I'll just leave it at that. I don't, I don't really know. It hasn't seemed to be resolved. Not that much has happened in the last decade, but it's, it's a useful

perspective on how the world works, that there's an awful lot of things that look like they're kind of organized family clannishness is a powerful force in the world. Besides Pierre Vandenberg, have any other sociologists or philosophers or thinkers been important to you? Oh, sure. But probably, you know, when I make up a list of people I'm influenced by, they tend to be kind of second order synthesizers, you know. Like my writing style, my journalism is very much modeled on a columnist for Fortune magazine in the 1970s named Daniel Seligman who was kind of the first blogger who just sort of wrote. They gave him 1,500 words per magazine and he could divvy it up at any length. And he wrote about a lot of these topics and, you know, brought in

the little statistics, a little math, a little popular culture, and so forth. So yeah, I think when I look through people who've influenced me, a lot of it's been kind of the second order, the journalists and so forth, rather than the more profound philosophers and so on. Yes, although you do talk a lot about Darwin and Galton and their English tradition of studying nature, studying evolution, genetic differences. And I was always very interested in your insight that the culture of English gentlemen in general out of which Darwin comes, their interest in things like horse racing, the selective breeding of horses and other animals, country life in general, just seeing how animals act. What contribution this had to the rise of modern evolutionary theory, heritability research,

whatever you want to call it. I know you've talked a lot about this, about Darwin and Galton, this is a striking insight to me. Yeah, in most cultures the intellectual innovators live in the capital city, but in England there was a surprising extent to which the more well to do and the better read and so forth were kind of dispersed across the countryside, that the aristocrats really liked the country And if you were a Duke, maybe you spent three months in the summer in your townhouse in London, but the other nine months of the year on your estate. And then you'd have, you know, a cleric and so forth that you could support whose job was to basically be your house intellectual. And, you know, tended to have kind of networks

works of bright people throughout the countryside, and so you start to see about the year 1700 or so the rise of scientific agriculture in England. I mean, even before that, if you go back to Shakespeare and look up the word race in his plays, it becomes clear pretty quickly that the English of 1600 were obsessed with horse breeding, that they felt it was important for war to have faster horses than their traditional horses, but it was also fun because You could race the horses and in fact a breed of horses that that were bred to be faster in a race Was called a race to Shakespeare and the whole thing gets just confused But it's you know in the Shakespearean manner. It's real evocative. It's not clear But but yeah, you can see all the ties between it

So, then, you know, around 1700, the English farmers start trying to keep records and, you know, make their pigs fatter, et cetera, and they start to, so you have this rural, this progressive rural intellectual class, which is a pretty weird thing to have in human and history of bright people. So like a bunch of the names I brought up talking about ethnic nepotism, yeah, basically come from this kind of background. Darwin, you know, was a fanatical outdoorsman, naturalist, hunter. So was Galton as a hunter. William D. Hamilton grew up five miles from Darwin's house, Richard Dawkins in Kenya, Gregory Cochran, small town in Illinois, Henry Harpending from small town in upstate New York, Edward O. Wilson, small town in Alabama.

You know, he was, he had like, I think somebody asked a British biologist, what have you discovered about the Creator by your study of nature? And he said, the Creator has an inordinate fondness for beetles. Edward O. Wilson grew up as this boy scout who earned 46 merit badges and he had an inordinate fondness for ants. So you have a whole bunch of people who learned about biology firsthand, and then you get this split that emerges maybe in the 70s with the city boys versus the country boys. Some of the city boys in biology are Gentile, like James D. Watson from Chicago. And so Watson and Wilson got into huge arguments within the Harvard biology department in the 60s, whether Watson tended to think only experimental biochemistry was real science and everything

else under the term biology was just stamp collecting. And so Wilson started to recruit bright young guys like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, big city boys, and then to help him out with his wars with Watson. And then in the 70s Gould and Lewontin, the city boys, kind of turned against Wilson. And so a lot of the, you know, the intellectual wars kind of go back to, oh yeah, it's kind of the country boys, the Anglo, the super wasp Anglos who grew up in the countryside and dominated evolutionary theory and Gould was like, okay, it's time for, for my kind of people, you know, the Jewish city guys to, to make their mark and to, you know, not just play second fiddle to the Darwins and the Wilsons and Hamiltons and so forth.

So yeah, you can see that as a basic conflict that explains quite a bit about different people's opinions. My friend Yama is an entomologist also obsessed with Beatles and very much interested in the the same subjects of biological evolution. I think it's almost impossible if you have direct connection with nature for a long time, not to tend in that direction. If you look at ancient Greek philosophy, there was a lot of similar focus, I think, on heritability and breeding in some places like Plato, and there have been observations made before about that people like Plato came out of a similar culture to the English gentry that you're talking about. Similar concern with horse breeding, dog breeding, things like that. On the other hand, Darwin does talk about Schopenhauer,

I think in his notes, and some people have said that Schopenhauer has a lot of proto evolutionary psychology reasoning in his, in his own work. So it's possible that Darwin got some of it from that. But yeah, there's, there's a huge amount of overlap. So it's it's kind of exaggerating. But my suggestion is kind of in the 20th century in high end science, the, the national differences tended to be the British in, from the 19th and 20th century, the British and their American offshoots, kind of evolutionary theory is their thing. Physics tended to be a Jewish thing, like in the movie Oppenheimer. Chemistry tended to be kind of a German Gentile thing. So a lot of what, you know, a lot of the arguments we hear today

like oh, eugenics is the worst thing ever and so forth. It's kind of like – my suspicion is it kind of goes back to Jewish-American resentment that evolutionary theory was kind of dominated by wasps, guys with names like George Wilson or John Smith, Ed Wilson, Bill Hamilton just you know go on and not Dick Dawkins so you go on like that it's but you could you you know every every group tends to tends to develop a specialty and a strength you know physics is a good thing if you if you live in the city and you need a blackboard so yes do you do you think over time the thought of men like Galton has been held up and justified and that in time that thought of the – not just Galton but the early 20th century. I'm very impressed

by the views of the American, let's say, elite of that time. They're sometimes called progressives but they weren't always progressives. But they were very much into this, into eugenic They're the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt. Do you think that attitude will hold up over time? I mean, personally, I think I've never seen much in the way of a good eugenics policy. I mean, I sort of agree with G.K. Chesterton's criticism in eugenics and other evils that if we did succeed in eugenically breeding a stronger, better man through arranged marriages, the first thing this homo superior would do would be to tell the state to butt out of his love life and he was going to marry the girl he wanted. So, but on the other hand, I mean, when Galton came up with the idea of sort of extending

scientific agriculture to human beings and like oh we should he said like it was his thought like well we can't just do it in this crude cruel way we do it on the farm because we're talking about human beings so we actually have to know what we're gonna we're doing before we ever start this stuff and so Galton's ideas were like oh we gotta we gotta get a a lot better at statistics. We've got to study how human beings actually work. We've got to study their traits. We, you know, we need to know the interplay of nature and nurture. And he came up with this whole plan of improving science that's proven vastly helpful. You know, giant amounts of of modern science come out of kind of Galton's project. Much of, you know, basic statistics 101, you learn,

wasn't invented until Galton at the end of the 19th century or his followers, like Fisher in the early 20th century. It's kind of bizarre that it took people so long. I mean, the correlation coefficient that Galton announced in 1888 is not very complicated compared to what Newton was doing in the 1680s, but our thinking about astronomical and physics concepts just got so much more advanced than our thinking about human empirical concepts. So Galton, whether from being a genius or just kind of having the right idea at the right time, just helped the human sciences evolve enormously. So yeah, I'm concerned the more that you have this kind of moral panic over anything conceivably tied to eugenics, and that we have to cancel every thinker who

ever wrote a magazine article in 1925, endorsing eugenics. You know, this is just huge. You know, I mean, this is just an attack, basically, on everybody who was a big, was a great scientist in 1925. That's, that's the general plan is to cancel, you know, the great Anglo American scientists of 100 to 150 years ago and kind of throw them out of the history books, basically to demean the founding stock of the United States. I'm not saying that people have sat down and went, oh, yes, this is what we're going to do. It's kind of like, oh, that feels right to me, that feels good to do this. So that's why they do it. They do it because it feels good, but it's kind of malign, it's the usual hate motivations that are so dominant today.

I mean, it takes a lot more sense to go, oh, okay, these people who thought, called themselves eugenicists, they actually accomplished a lot, and then they had some really bad ideas too. You know, it's like they're human beings. Amazing. A lot of it, of course, I think has to do with World War II and the claim that that discredited eugenics, which is false, but that, of course, forgets that the primary antagonist of Hitler was the Anglo-Americans, who were far more assiduous and faithful practitioners of these sciences than that, so the progressive liberals were eugenicists and so forth. But, the practical application of eugenics aside, I think one of the best insights, one-liners at least, is that the social sciences have been mostly a failure, except for this one

thing, which is intelligence research and things of this sort, which have been very successful. Yeah, Steven Pinker about 2016 said, sent out a tweet off Anne and just said, you know, people talk about a replication crisis, but the one area of my field, psychology, that doesn't have a replication crisis over the last 100 years is psychometric. The psych new stuff really works. Yeah. I'm going off the top of my head, but yeah, it's, but you know, what's happening is Because more and more that the conventional wisdom is that the absolute highest priority is to, is that no one ever wonder whether there are racial differences in average IQ. So then anything related to that, any of this intellectual scaffolding that might lead to

that must be canceled as well, which turns out to be a huge fraction of the human sciences. So people are just getting dumber all the time intentionally rather than go, yeah, well, that could be true, you know, it might be true. It doesn't sound implausible, but it hasn't quite been proven yet, but it could. We probably should be ready to live with it, if it does, because what the heck are you planning to do if suddenly it gets proven tomorrow? No, this is very good. Steve, I wanted to ask you something else. I don't know if you want to take a break. I wanted to ask you this thing about Los Angeles. It's a completely different subject. Can I ask you now or do you want to take a break first? No, sure. We can keep going. All right. No, I'll ask you now then.

It's an unrelated subject, but you know, one of my favorite shows on TV is The Shield. I don't know if you've watched it, but it's from I think the early 2000s. It happens in Los Angeles, it's a corrupt police officer, but it treats a lot of ethnicities that live in Los Angeles that maybe most Americans are vaguely aware of, such as the Armenians and so on. And you've often had very incisive observations about ethnicities, cultures that are not normally a part of American discourse, media or public sphere. The normal discourse is very… it's not nuanced and it's very based on the black-white thing, you know. But for example, what you've said about, I mean, you are from Los Angeles, just so audience knows, and you have a lot of insight on what's been happening there for the last

few decades. Your observations about Armenians and other ex-Soviet Union ethnicities in Los Angeles have been very vivid and interesting. I was wondering if you'd elaborate on this and what you think the future of Los Angeles might be, if these groups might become more important and so on. Yeah, I mean, I just did a podcast yesterday, it'll be out in a week or so, probably about the time this one comes out, with a fellow in Los Angeles whose title of his podcast is The Filthy Armenian. So we talked a lot about these topics, but I mean basically there's two general sets of Armenians in Southern California. kind of the the ones who came early in the 20th century before and after the the Ottoman genocide of Armenians and they went to places like Fresno and Glendale in Southern California

and have generally done quite well become you know respectable bourgeois people and you know, are not, you know, are not as economically or intellectually dominant as, say, the Ashkenazis of Southern California, but have done very well. And then there's kind of a second group that emerged pretty much with the fall of the Soviet Union. And, and they're a little more trouble, you know, if in my neighborhood you hear about, oh, four people got shot in a restaurant. You go, oh, were they Armenians? Yeah. Yes. OK, so Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies pointed out to me 15 or 20 years ago, yeah, you can kind of guess ahead of time from the last three letters of the name, old Armenians like Krikorian, their names end with I-A-N, and they typically got here, their

grandparents or great-grandparents got here, and they're highly assimilated, and also they tended to come from the western part of the sprawling region of Armenia, you know, often up against, you know, out near the Mediterranean and even before they came were more influenced by the West and so forth. And then the more recent arrivals, typically from the Soviet Union, their names end in Y-A-N, and they tend to come from the more eastern inland region, probably more remote from European civilization, the influence of France, and the influence of Crusaders and all that. And the Soviet Union was not a real school for cooperative ethical behavior. So yeah, if you're going to see some gangster-y type activity involving Armenians, yeah, it's

It's like 80% of the time it's going to be a YAN type name. So that's my big Armenian insight. Yes, I know I've spent some time in Los Angeles. I think it's Zankou Chicken. You could go there late night and there'd be a guy come in in a tracksuit and so on. And it reminds me of, you know, a lot of right-wing people complain, I think, quite rightly about third-world immigration, but they forget that in parts of the West, for example, if you go to Iceland, the big complaints will be about Lithuanians in terms of crime and criminality, you know, just brutishness and so forth. And you had this line in a blog post about how, well, if the Anglo wants to give up control of this really paradisiacal real estate of California, there are going to be these other

ethnic groups that are very, let's say, brutish and enterprising, like the Armenians or other, let's say, gold chain groups who would move in. I mean, how do you see the future of, let's say, the five-year and the 20-year future of Los Angeles and California? Looking at the San Fernando Valley, from the 2000s, the San Fernando Valley is a huge suburb part that's contained within Los Angeles on the northwest side, and so the San Fernando Valley was turning more and more Latino but from 2010 up through 2010 but from 2010 to 2020 the Latino percentage really only went up about another two percentage points and so it kind of looks like the Latino tide in the valley has crested basically because it's extremely expensive what appears to be

continuing is you know what I might call the peoples of the three defunct empires moving in Ottoman Persian and Russian empires so you get you get an ever-increasing number of people from Russia what exact ethnicity within within Russia is kind of – this is not always clear. You get a lot of people who might be half Jewish, a quarter Armenian, a quarter Russian or something like that and speak Russian. You get lots of Persians, some Muslim, but not that many – very few real fundamentalist Muslims who are into female modesty want to move to Los Angeles. They can tell that this isn't gonna work. You know, our daughters are going to be out of control right away. So you get more Persians from the more secular elite, you get a huge

fraction of the Jewish Persians in the world. You know, then you You get Israelis, Armenians, you know, Central Asians are coming. Just a huge variety of people who aren't Western European, who, you know, Boomin Bak would have considered in the Caucasian super race extended all the way from Morocco to Bengal. But Joe Biden just announced last week, we now have their own racial category Middle Eastern and North African. Oh, yeah. So nobody seems to have any clue what what the social constructionist implications of this are. I believe that when the government makes up categories and says, Oh, if you're in this racial category, you get jobs and money. And if you're in that category, you don't that that actually does socially construct reality to a fair extent. But nobody else

seems to take that terribly seriously. So anyway, we've got these groups broken out. In general, you know, probably the old concept of the second world plays, is playing a pretty big role in Los Angeles increasingly, that there's all sorts of people whose fathers like spent their days like staring out at satellite pictures of Lockheed and Burbank and figuring out exactly the right place to drop a bomb on them and then going to Warner Brothers and then try to get videos of Warner Brothers movies from Burbank and so the kids show up in Burbank because it sounds pretty cool. I live in North Hollywood and it tends to attract people from around the world who are like oh it's like Hollywood except it's north and it's like yeah well sort of yeah kind of

weather's nice so you know who else do you think the um um a friend from from that region asked me if you think the Irving California model where it's mostly Asian because they they keep some kind of private business model do you think that that can be a future path or will be a future path for California? Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I mean, it's kind of the bunch of tech billionaires from Silicon Valley are trying to, to reproduce an Irvine in the northeast, most remote corner of the San Francisco Bay Area. Yeah, out over the Sacramento River. And we'll see. It's a real challenge within California to, to get really anything done. I mean, yeah, Irvine is a big plan community that some incredibly rich family, they owned it all. So they, so they built it on a 1960s

kind of modernist model. And it's proven highly attractive to East Asians. So it's schools have super test scores and no crime. And you know, it's a nice place. Can, can you start over again like like Andreessen and the widow Jobes and so forth are trying to do in the in the Bay Area you know good luck to them awesome I hope they succeed so it's kind of exhausting to me to think about just just how much politicking you have to do to get anything built in Southern California Yes, I think maybe they should do it in Suriname or the tropics. Sorry, go on. Yeah, yeah. I mean, basically, the thing about liberal progressive coastal California is that since about 1969, it's really been focused on let's keep everything the same.

this this place was great let's not build high rises let's not build more let's just keep it the way it was i mean i i can vaguely recall from my childhood this this this big change in the intellectual atmosphere or the political atmosphere around 1969 living in the san fernando valley but i've reaper gone back and i've figured out it had to do with a giant project called the beverly hills country club and not up in the hollywood hills above the flatlands where i live and dean martin was going to be the the president of the beverly hills country club so they so they got together a giant amount of money for the biggest golf course development project of the 60s and they knocked down all these ridges in the hollywood hills to get in the flatland to

build a golf course and housing and so forth and way back in the 60s interestingly rich people weren't as rich so where did they get the money well they got it from the Teamsters pension fund and the problem with the Teamsters pension fund I think I think Jimmy Hoffa was in jail at this point and the guy who's in charge was even even crooked or Hoffa had the courage to occasionally stand up to the mafia. So basically, you had a bunch of guys with names like Ice Pick Willie that were skimming all the money on the Beverly Hills Country Club. And then the residents of Beverly Hills eventually kind of revolted. And partly because it was so mobbed up. And partly, what they used was the new environmental ecological jargon to say, you know, why are we doing this? Before 1969, the feeling among

people who'd lived through the depression in America was that anything involving bulldozers was good for the economy, and we desperately needed to do projects that were good for the economy. And then at that point, the people of Beverly Hills started looking around going, you know, the economy is pretty good, especially here in Beverly Hills. What do we need this for? And so the whole project was was stomped on and and just died And so for about 15 years my dad and I we'd go hiking we'd look down into this canyon And it was just dirt and weeds Just this giant portion of the Hollywood Hills and finally if we figured out we got the whole backstory Behind ice pick Willie and in all the other parts of it But yeah, that's basically, the people of Beverly Hills decided to become liberals in

1969, basically to keep Beverly Hills the way it was, which was nice. Same with the growth in ecological thinking, really in California started with the Santa Barbara oil spill. The people of Santa Barbara said, do we really need offshore oil drilling? Isn't life really nice in Santa Barbara? How is our life being made better by offshore oil drilling? So yeah, so basically everybody, California progressivism is basically about keeping things the same the way it was when you first showed up. So it's been like that for a half century. You know, maybe it'll change, maybe it won't. Steve, this is very interesting. I could listen all day to about old California, old Los Angeles. I love it. To me, it's extremely glamorous. You know, when I was a small boy and I knew

My family was going to immigrate to America and I thought we would end up in California and I had these images that I would be, yes, I'd be in Los Angeles, there'd be palm trees, I'd have a gun in my hand, I'd join a gang, you know, I thought, my parents were horrified to hear this, but yes. Listen, Steve, do you have time for another segment? I have some more things to ask you. Sure. Is it okay if we take a quick smoke break? Okay, very good. We'll take a quick smoke break and we'll be right back. Welcome back to the show. We are here with Steve Saylor. And by the way, if you have not yet, you should get his book Noticing, which is appropriately titled as I can vouch for Steve being the most consummate noticer of our age. So you can get it from Passage Press. And I will

post it on my account after I post this show. Steve, welcome back to the show. We've had many disagreements in the past. I want to bring up one and get your thoughts on it. You've mentioned that black athleticism has been a part of your awakening, not only to racial differences but also to the fact that liberal orthodoxy on the egalitarianism, racial egalitarianism and other such dogmas is false. But I don't disagree with you on the fundamental thing, but I do think that black athleticism is overstated and I want to very quickly make the case about why and then, you know, you respond as you see fit. But basically, if you look historically, so the case, as I understand it now, is that in short distance, let's say 100 meter, 400 meter fast running, let's say 50 meter to

100 meter, people of West African descent overwhelmingly do well, present a super majority of gold medals and so forth, world records and so on. And also, it's just a stereotype that seems to be true that if people look at American sports, they're overwhelmingly dominated by blacks, the NFL, the NBA, especially and so on. I just think that this is somewhat distorted by the age of steroids and so very quickly I'd like to make the case about why. If you look historically, there have been some mentions about, let's say, sub-Saharan West African black being physically stronger. So I mentioned Schopenhauer earlier in the show. He's one example but there are many others. just has a casual aside about that.

But there have not been many stereotypes actually about their signature achievement, as you see it, which is being especially fast. That's not been part of the historical understanding of them. And if you look at, let's say, before 1950, there aren't really many records of West African descent people being especially fast. Second, if you look at the physique of sprinters, they tended to be a lot wider over over the course of my lifetime. It used to imagine that a good sprinter would be six feet tall and 160 pounds and now you see there are no sorts of different sizes but yeah you might see somebody's 5'10 and 200 pounds or 10 pounds they've gotten jacked whereas they used to be you know kind of wiry and thin and I knew a champion sprinter at

the college level he was a white Polish guy and he he had the typical old sprinter like pre 1950s physique of very wiry and thin that used to be the case for both white and black sprinters before and it still is actually for white and Asian sprinters But but black sprinters especially have gotten very jacked You know over time and so there's an argument that I've read that West African descent people tend to be more responsive to steroids and also resistant to testing which is to say let's say if you if a white or Asian takes steroids they would readily test on a you know on a test whereas let's for physiological and yes racial differences reason a West African black would confound the steroid test and I'm I'm wondering you know I'm wondering about this.

By the way, for the audience to know, a professional athlete, when they take steroids, they're not taking the same thing a trucker does to get big biceps, they're not like injecting trend. They're very different steroids that you don't have access to, they do it for long-term benefit, but still, you know, for physiological reasons as well as actually for cultural slash political reasons in the United States, blacks, according to this argument, would de facto be allowed to take steroids. Steve, I know you've mentioned Serena Williams' story especially, where she's locked herself in a bathroom to protect herself from getting tested for steroids. If a white athlete did that, it would be a multi-week big story and so on, as it was by the way with Russia, who got kicked out of the Olympics.

And I just want to tell the audience, again, you can dismiss this as conspiracy theory. The two times I was banned from Twitter was precisely over commenting on this. The United States is, especially for whatever reason, very sensitive about this matter, about if you point out that black athletes take steroids and are allowed to get away with it. Another aspect of this argument, Steve, is – sorry to keep going, I just want to make the full case and then you respond, is if you subtract American sports from the equation, so NFL, NBA, blacks still do quite well as, again, I'm not denying that they have an edge in the physical performance, so forth, but they don't have this overwhelming dominant edge when you consider, for example, soccer, which is the most important sport worldwide,

the highest remunerated, the most glory you get from soccer. It's not especially expensive to train for soccer, you know, like, slum kids in Brazil use soccer and there have been famous black players, of course, like Pele, but overwhelmingly soccer is a South European, let's say, descent dominated sport where blacks still do well, but not like in the NBA or NFL. And so I'm wondering, again, if this, you know, black dominance of sports is a relic of A, American political correctness, and B, the steroid thing I mentioned, which is also racially explained but in a different way. Would you mind commenting on this? Yeah. I mean, I think this is a very intriguing theory, and it's somebody who knows vastly

more than I do about it, should really look into it. I mean, to go back, I mentioned seeing O.J. Simpson rush for 238 yards in 1968, and O.J. was just extraordinarily fast and strong for a football player in 1968. He was a legend about a month into his college career. Um, all right now was OJ Simpson taking steroids in 1968? And uh, that's, that's a good question. I mean another question I've thought about is when I was a kid in the 1960s and seventies, uh, Southern California was kind of the head, kind of the dominant sports athletes of the country, especially a college football with USC and even more so a college football with basketball with UCLA. UCLA won like 10 national championships in 12 years. Southern California was also huge in Olympic sports. Now, is there a

possibility that the use of steroids spread across the country in kind of a patchwork fashion over the second half of the 20th century and different places became more sophisticated about using steroids in different sports. And I think the answer is yes. I think what it appears but all this is extremely hazy is that anabolic steroids started out in weightlifting, Olympic weightlifting in the 50s, both in the U.S. and Soviet Union, probably spread to Olympic track and field events like the shot put by the later 50s. And then the question is, when did it get to sprinting first? And I think and then that and is that is the is the growth of steroid use among sprinters related to how for some from the 1920s in through about

1960 sprinting in America was pretty equally balanced at the high end between blacks and whites. For example in 1936 Jesse Owens famously won four gold medals at the Olympics. Yes. But like in 1956 Bobby Joe Morrow, a white guy from Texas won three gold medals in the Melbourne Olympics. In 1960, a white guy named Dave Syme missed winning the gold medal in the 100 meters by a few inches to a West German white sprinter. Dave Syme's grandson is Christian McCaffrey, the NFL superstar running back. So, um, um, all right, so what you got there is you got, wow, there's really fast blacks, there's really fast whites. It's, it's kind of balanced, probably per capita. There's more excellent, uh, black sprinters. Uh, if you look at baseball, uh, probably the greatest

all-around baseball player of the post-World War II era was Willie Mays, who's still alive today, but that's probably for his career. If you probably look at peak performance of that arrow, it was probably his white counterpart, Mickey Mantle, who could probably hit the ball further and was maybe slightly faster on the base paths. Mays was more durable than Mantle, and he's kept himself in better shape and didn't drink as much but it's um you know it's it looks like yeah well you know blacks are really good athletes or are they as overwhelming as it became so that and the answer is something might have changed in the 1960s I'm thinking for example about the 1968 Olympics The U.S. track team went down to Mexico to high altitude and won a ton of gold medals

and set huge numbers of records in the sprints in part because they're running at high altitude with less wind resistance. But it was a famous kind of black power moment, the two guys who medaled for the U.S. in the 200 meter, John Carlos and Tommy Smith, they put their heads down and raised black power, fists in the air during the national anthem and so forth. Now the question is, why was this American team doing so extraordinarily well? America's been excellent in track and field for a long time, but suddenly in 1968, you seemed to have this change to kind of black dominance and amazing performance. Well, one of the things I found out was, was that the team doctor for the track, U.S. track team and the assistant coach was a doctor in Southern California

who was a public advocate of using steroids to get better at sports. I found a bunch of articles from this gentleman from the 60s. He conducted experiments like giving a Southern California high school football team steroids in the mid 60s. He was employed by UCLA at the peak of UCLA football's challenge to USC. Looks to me like you see other things going on at this time. For example, Wilt Chamberlain was famous for his enormous height. Seven foot one, 240 pounds. Very, very strong. Maybe the strongest guy in the NBA, but in 1968 he got traded from Philadelphia to the Los Angeles Lakers and he spent the summer hanging out at Muscle Beach in Venice, California. And when he showed up to play basketball he'd put on 40 pounds of muscle and went on to be this, you know, extraordinary figure,

just a giant and got himself roles in Conan the Barbarian movies and so forth out of it. O.J., would Wilt have tried out steroids which weren't against the law at the time? There wasn't any specific rules against him. Yeah. Well, I think Wilt was a real, he was a curious creative guy who liked trying different things all the time and he tended to get bored easily. So the idea that like, Oh wow, there's this whole muscle beach culture of weightlifting and you know, they've got some other stuff going on as well. Uh, would OJ have like, uh, taken, uh, if, if he was told by guys on the USC track team, well, yeah, Yeah, actually O.J. was on the track team, and in fact O.J. helped set a minor sprint relay record in, I think, 1967, involving a bunch of, at least one Olympic star.

And you know, was this in the culture at the time? Yeah. All right, so the question then is, is this emergence of black dominance of sprinting and some other positions, would this have happened without the influence of steroids? And the answer is, I don't know. I mean, it could be that if African-Americans were, in the 1950s, were really good, but they, at speed, but they weren't quite as good as they were in the late 20th century. Is that just because they were better fed in the late 20th century? They had better coping, you know, the decline of segregation, all sorts of reasons. And those are good arguments, but also the idea that, yeah, it's kind of, I mean, we kind of saw somebody do an experiment with this in the late 90s. The best baseball player of the early 1990s

was a guy named Barry Bonds. And Barry kept on being just a fantastic baseball player through the middle 90s, except all these other guys like Sammy Sosa and Maguire were getting more fame for hitting giant, unbelievable numbers of home runs. And people like Stephen Jay Gould were saying that, you know, Sosa and McGuire brought the innocents back to baseball and so forth. As far as we can tell, finally, about 1999, Barry Bonds says, well, screw that. I'm going to show you what a real great baseball player can do when he's on steroids and, you know, then just set, just did bizarre things statistically in his late thirties, just kind of made a joke out of the game. So the problems are we don't really know that much about the prehistory of steroids in American sports. We know a little bit.

We know the LSU all-white college football team won the national championship in, I think, 1958, after they hired a strength coach, a local gym owner, who said, hey, you guys can take this Diana ball stuff. It really works. And then the same guy showed up at the San Diego Chargers in the AFL in 1963, I can recall, in the mid-'60s, a little kid watching a video of a player, a lineman named Ernie Ladd for the Chargers who was 6 foot 9 and 325 pounds, which is really big. Probably Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was probably another center of steroid culture, maybe the great Pittsburgh Steelers of the 70s, maybe not. Pennsylvania. Yeah. You know, Pennsylvania was sort of the center of American weightlifting. You know,

The Hollywood people got into steroids early at Muscle Beach for movies and sword and sandal movies and the like. Now, what we don't have is really any studies of different racial reactions. It's probably the thing we haven't studied anymore. I will link them. Part of the reason I make this argument is I think there are studies about how certain West African blacks can confound steroid testing more than others, but I didn't know Pennsylvania was... This is very interesting. Look, part of the argument that I forgot is that Jamaica plays such a huge role in sprinting and Trinidad and Tobago. And so the Caribbean and the United States do very well, whereas West Africa, much less so. And so, again, this goes to the question, is it the breed of tribes that ended up in

Jamaica or is it rather that Jamaica has a very strong steroid program the way East Germany did for swimmers? Yeah, I mean, the Caribbean is tied into American college track and field recruiting, whereas West Africa is not. Nigerian runners seem to get caught a lot by steroid tests. Does that suggest to me that they're necessarily taking more or that they just don't get good advice from their coaches? The Nigerian runners who get caught tend to complain that like, you know, if we had really competent coaches like America and Jamaica, we wouldn't get caught. I mean, all right, so one of the things was, I think you can see in the historical record is in the year 2000, the heroine of the American track team was Marion Jones,

she won a whole bunch of gold medals. And but, you know, her husband was put her on the track team, and then he got in trouble for steroids, and then she got in trouble for steroids and she ended up going to prison in 2005 for various scandals tied to steroids. That's pretty amazing that the U.S. sent one of their Olympic heroines to prison over all this. At that point, American sprinting seemed to kind of stabilize in terms of its performance and the Jamaicans kept on getting better. My thought is if I was the Attorney General of Jamaica and my staff came to me and they were like, you know, we should do a big sting operation to catch our own heroes for cheating the Americans. And I'd go, you know, that's really not the highest

thing on my priority list. So, yeah, I think, you know, the Jamaicans aren't probably aren't going out of their way to test that carefully. But it's also probably Usain Bolt was, you know, clean or juiced was probably the greatest sprint talent ever, and then, you know, it probably would have come out about the same number of gold medals, just what the record times are and so forth. No, of course. He didn't even look that jacked up compared to one of his teammates who won the silver medal in 2012, who kind of looked like Ben Jonson. Yes. No, I just want to tell the audience in general regarding steroids, it's not like you take a pill and you get results just like that, like a magic thing. people, even for just normal, let's say, body builder who takes steroids, they have to do

a lot of natural gifts and do a lot of work to get to that impressive condition, even with steroids. Yeah, I wrote a column once called The Republican Drug that these performance-enhancing drugs, One of the reasons they're seductive is because they're not magic. They let weightlifters lift more weights, but it still hurts, it's still exhausting. You can keep going longer, but it lets you do more work. It would also be interesting, I mean a study I'd like to see is, is there influence on political views from what type of exercise you do, I would not be surprised if lifting weights pushes people to the right and distance running, jogging, pushes them to the left. I don't know why, you know, no biochemical clue, but that would not at all be surprising to me. Yes.

No, I think that's, excuse me, I'm coughing and drinking bottled champagne. You see what I do for sure, I'm sorry. But no, that's probably correct, although a friend online, Yougipious, I don't know if he'd call himself Frightwing, he's a long distance runner, but I think that assessment is true. And by the way, Paglia has in, I think, Sex, Art, and American Culture, I think that's the collection, she has a very nice essay about a bodybuilder, it's a review of a book about a bodybuilder, how that represents self-overcoming, but Steve, I want to change subject, if you don't mind, because we're talking this, but there is Arthur Gobineau, he's one of my favorite I assume maybe you don't approve of him. He's let's say the father of steampunk 19th-century scientific racism and

I wanted to get your opinion on him, but in particular on I'm going to read for the audience. It's a short passage about Racial mixing and he's not completely, you know, it's not that he's against it or for it He's not completely negative on it. He sees the advantages of certain type of racial mixing I wanted to ask your opinion on this. Let me just read this. Okay, so I'm reading now from from Gobi No It would be unjust to assert that every mixture is bad and harmful if the three great types had remained strictly separate the supremacy would no doubt have always been in the hands of the finest of the white races and The yellow and the black varieties would have crawled forever at the feet of the lost of the whites

As such a state is so far ideal, since it has never been beheld in history, and we can imagine it only by recognizing the undisputed superiority of those groups of the white races which have remained the purest, it would not have all been gained. The superiority of the white race would have been clearly shown, but it would have been bought at the price of certain advantages which have followed the mixture of blood. Although these are far from counterbalancing the defects they have brought in their train, yet they are sometimes to be commended. Artistic genius, which is equally foreign to each of the great types, arose only after the intermarriage of white and black. Again in the Malayan variety, a human family was produced from the yellow and black races

that had more intelligence than either of its ancestors. Finally from the union of white and yellow, certain intermediary peoples have sprung which are superior to the purely Finnish tribes as well as to the Negroes. I do not deny that these are good results. The world of art and great literature that comes through the mixture of blood, the improvement and ennoblement of inferior races, all these are wonders for which we must be thankful. The small have been raised. Unfortunately, the great have been lowered by the same process. And this is an evil that nothing can balance or repair. Since I am putting together the advantages of racial mixture, I will also add to them that is due the refinement of manners and beliefs and especially the tempering of passion and desire.

But these are merely transitory benefits, and if I recognize that the mulatto who may become a lawyer, a doctor or a businessman is worth more than his negro grandfather who was absolutely savage and fit for nothing, I must also confess that the Brahmins of primitive of India, the heroes of the Iliad and the Shahnameh, the warriors of Scandinavia, the glorious shades of noble races that have disappeared, give us a higher and more brilliant idea of humanity and were more active, intelligent and trusty instruments of civilization and grandeur than the people's hybrid a hundred times over of present day. And the blood even of these was no longer pure. So I end reading, and look, there's a lot of it in what I read that is offensive and

that I know you don't agree with, but the concessions he makes, the fact that he says even the great races of the past that are gone that he praises were no longer pure, and the fact that he says that artistic genius and refinement of manners and these types of things in the arts are the result of racial mixture from so-called father of racism and in particular racial mixture between white and black, I think is very interesting. I was wondering if you'd comment on just that. I mean, the 19th century had a lot of emphasis on the purity of descent, which in an aristocratic society makes sense that you, you know, why do you get to live in the big castle, or my father lived in the big castle and my grandfather and so forth, and how do your great-great-great-grandfather

win the castle, with the battle axe, or with the battle axe. So as the aristocratic principle is being challenged by republican, democratic, socialist, communist ideas, then there's more encouragement to come up with some justification. In terms of, we've done, you know, there's a certain amount of research nowadays on inbreeding versus hybrid vigor and the answer is both are kind of over, can be overstated. you don't have to worry about inbred breeding that much as long as you're not marrying like your second cousin or especially your first cousin or closer. You know, marry somebody from the next valley over and that'll be fine. Now, I mean, in the past, you know, Cavalli Sforza, the population geneticist, did a study of where people in villages in the mountains of Italy,

how far away they found their spouses, and when buses were introduced, you know, it got quite a few more miles away. It was just a distant ancestor of my wife, Life was considered a huge romantic in his village outside of Rome because he courted a girl a thousand meters up the mountainside and nobody else went that far. But on the other hand, yeah, it's just basically one generation can get rid of the downside of inbreeding. Hybrid vigor, yeah, if you're, if you're highly inbred, then hybrid vigor is good, but doesn't seem to matter a huge amount once you start marrying somebody from 10 miles away rather than half a mile away. Yes. So Cochrane and Harpending did a quick study, literature review, and they wanted to see

if there were fertility problems or benefits with either inbreeding or hybrid vigor, distant racial crosses. And their conclusion was neither one, just anything in the reasonable range comes at about the same level of successful fertility. I think maybe the Icelanders did something about third generation, the third cousins being the most compatible. But I don't All right, so who is Gobineau talking about? I mean, there's a handful of major figures in European culture like the novelist Dumas and to a lesser extent his son, another novelist Dumas and Pushkin who were part black. Yes. I mean, American jazz originating in New Orleans around 1900, it's tied in to, it's tied into a fact that's, that's pretty interesting that in the later 19th century, about in the city of New Orleans,

about a dozen rich men, rich white men over a period of a couple of decades paid to send their, their mulatto sons to Paris to to study musical composition at the highest level. And some came back to New Orleans, some came back, some... Sorry, when was this? Around when was this? Probably 1875 to 1900 or so. And so, New Orleans then, you know, its popular music was connected to one of the state-of-the-art cultural capitals of Europe, Paris, and probably the, you know, the greatness of American jazz has a lot to do with this. Now, but is this a nature connection or a nurturer? I think the nurturer side is clearer. Nature, you'd have to look into it more than I ever had done. So, I mean, those Those are some examples. I'm not coming up with a giant number, and I'm wondering if

Gobineau is using terms like black, you know, to the way we do, to sub-Saharan, or he's just, you know, treating Italians as black or something. No, no, no, he's not. He's definitely, like, he was ambassador at one time to Tehran and one, but he was also ambassador to Haiti, and so he has some very marked statements on Haiti that actually I should post. But no, he had very certain unusual views on sub-Saharan blacks. But at the same time, he liked mulattoes, he liked Dominican Republic, because in a a very famous passage. He compares the Dominican Republic to Haiti. And he, you know, like many French, if I may, like many French men, he liked mulattas and he did not like Russians, you know, so that's, no, no, he meant, in the modern sense where you get noticed over

the years that like the kind of black nationalists who were kind of into hotep egyptian you know the pharaohs were black type thing we tend to like read some archaeologists from oxford in 1890 who's talking about the the blacks of ancient egypt and what they just basically means is the you know they're somewhere from the south of England. I mean, if you looked at sports, would you see some sort of racial cross advantage? I mean, I've argued, we might be starting to see that among NFL quarterbacks. NFL quarterbacks have been dominated by whites, but as whites are slowly giving up on putting their sons into football because of the concussion problem, you're starting to see more and more of the top draft picks in the NFL be like half black,

half-white quarterbacks like, you know, the great Patrick Mahomes, you know, is that background. And yeah, it sort of seems like, you know, he looks like he got the best, the best quarterbacking genes from both races. So that's a possibility. I don't see it all that much, but the NFL one would be pretty interesting. It could be developed. No, what you said about jazz especially is interesting. I know a jazz musician who mentioned that the early jazz was influenced by Scriabin who lived in Paris in the early 20th century and was highly colorist, you know, in music and some of his chords got transferred to jazz. I mean, who knows? That's very interesting. I mean, conversely, has African American music gotten better as it's gotten blacker or was

it really, really good for two-thirds of the 20th century when it was mostly inspired by blacks who wanted to impress whites. And then, you know, I can recall, you know, hearing in December of 1979 the first Top 40 rap hit on AM radio and thinking to myself, wow, that's really a catchy novelty style. I bet this is going to be popular. We're going to hear this kind of yap music for the next 12, maybe even 18 months before blacks get bored with it and move on and invent something else fun and interesting and you know, that was a long long time ago and things don't change that much anymore. I mean we have less of a cultural intermixing anymore. I mean when Prince did his Super Bowl show in the rain about 20 years ago,

he tended to pick as his cover songs to play ones that were like covered by black artists and written by white artists like Proud Mary and All Along the Watchtower and you know maybe it was just random but it was I also think I suspect Prince was sort of sent trying to send a message like yeah actually you know white and black pop music is pretty is pretty good when we're kind of inspiring each other across racial lines? Yes, actually, I think my friend the bureaucrat even made the point that that rap is mostly for white audiences at this at this point in time and actually blacks listen to something that media hides from from public consciousness because it's absolutely retarded. I don't know what exactly it is,

but it's this this kind of bizarre music. But look, we don't need to go there, Steve. I've been keeping you a while. Before we go, I wanted to ask you, since we're on the subject of mixing, do you have thoughts or remembrances or ideas on unusual mixes? We have a common friend, our friend Hakan, he asked me, you know, he said you might know about things like, like Jewish Yanomami mixture or such things. I mean, globalism is leading to unprecedented things, you know. Do you have thoughts on such things, you know? Oh, I think I'll leave it to Hakan. He's definitely the expert on any kind of questions, but best to him. Let's hope he comes back. But there is a movie about something that could have happened in in this sense, keep the river on your right or keep the river on your left.

It's one of these titles. And it's about a neurotic New York Jewish guy who goes to Amazon and, you know, ends up having intercourse of all kinds with cannibal Indians, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's, yeah. Actually, I did write about an anthropologist who was not, not the famous French-Canadian-American one, but who was a grad student for that fellow, who studied the Yanomami and he fell in love with the Yanomami girl. And, and then they moved to, they got married and moved to New Jersey. So there was like a documentary about, about their son and it was, and then he's going back and visiting the Amazon that he's not familiar with. He kind of liked it. Yes. So that so yeah, that might be who Hakan is thinking about. About 10 years ago, I can't recall the name.

No, but that could be the Kwisatz Haderach. No, that's very interesting. Steve, it's been a great pleasure having you on. I've kept you on a long time. I think it's been well over two hours now. I don't want to. I don't want to abuse your company, but I much appreciate and I hope you will come back to Caribbean Rhythms whenever you want. Yeah, that'd be great. Well, let me just throw out a plug for my anthology, Noticing. Just Google Noticing, Passage Publishing, Sailor with an E, Paperback, and so it's available now. Get there in a few days, $29.95. But yeah, it'll be fun to come back. Very good. I will link your book at the end of when I post the show, Steve. Thank you so much. What a beautiful romance. Romeo and Juliet, Yanomami, and so forth. Thank you.

I hope you come back, Steve. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure having you on. All right. Thanks.