The Controversial Race Scientist Who Exposed Jason Arday - Nathan Cofnas

You are the best in the world in terms of the research that's you do. Jason Arde has resigned following a row about plagiarism. This is breaking news Professor Jason Arde has been fined dead. What are the leading people campaigning against him was Nathan Kaffnor. A white Jewish man who is a white supremacist. This is a story of corruption, of people who knew the truth, who used to threat legal intimidation, to silence people and including journalists who tried to tell the truth. Nathan Kaffnor, welcome to Trigonometry. Trigonometry is proudly independent and sponsors like Hillsdale College make that possible. Access a free library of world-class educational courses at Hillsdale.edu/trigger. Many of you have commented that you are seeing too many ads in our videos. We've listened to your feedback and disabled YouTube ads in the middle of our interviews. Can we ask you a favor in return? According to our analytics, most of you who watch our show are not subscribed to the channel. Please help us to continue bringing you fantastic content by subscribing today, hitting that like button and leaving a comment with your thoughts on this video. Thank you for having me. You are of course the controversial race scientist who was involved in bringing attention to Jason Arde's various false claims about his work and other things. And you have now yourself become the subject of intense media scrutiny. And I'll be honest with you, in fact, I said this to you when we invited you on the show. The subject of your research, which we will talk about, is not something that we're desperate necessarily to cover on the show have ever been. Partly because it's one of those rare things where it's on the one hand extremely toxic and controversial. On the other hand, neither Francis or I are particularly qualified to assess the scientific accuracy of the racity of the things that you say. But we'll talk about it and see how we can discuss it. But the reason we had you on is I'm just not prepared to swallow the hypocrisy that's on display. Whereby we've just had a week since Jason Arde tragically took his own life, where we've been told that it was the media scrutiny and the criticism and the negative attention that caused him to do that. And yet the very people who've been talking about that and now doing exactly the same thing that they said is murderous to you. And I just saw, it's outrageous that you're not allowed to even express the things that you're trying to communicate and being shouted down. So that's why you're here. Thank you for coming on. Before we get into both Jason Arde and your research, can you tell us, can you give us a brief overview of your career today and how you've ended up in the position you've ended up? So to begin, I should say that I'm not here as a quote-unquote race scientist representing Kent University or as a my capacity as an employee at Kent University. Now, okay, my background is in the philosophy of biology. I'm interested in evolutionary theory and how it applies to various questions and science and philosophy. And that includes the question of questions concerning human evolution and how natural selection has created differences in the distribution of traits among human populations that have been separated for an evolutionary or a significant period of time. So that's a kind of long way of saying race differences. Now, that's not the only thing I work on, certainly, but that's, that's a less controversial stuff. Can you, can you tell us a little bit about your career? Because the scrutiny you're receiving now is not the first time perhaps unsurprisingly given there is the research that you've had various run-ins with various university authorities. Just tell us a little bit about how your actual career has progressed today. So my, my first mobbing actually was by the right, not the left. It was in 2018 when I published a critique of the evolutionary psychologist, Kevin McDonald, who argues that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy and that Jews are genetically and culturally adapted to undermine Gentile society for their own benefit. He was the intellectual godfather of the alt-right, which was sort of at its tail end in 2018 when I published the first academic critique of his theory. And it was retweeted by Jordan Peterson, who at the time was wrongly suspected of being sympathetic to the anti-Semitic wing of the alt-right. And then when he outed himself as not an anti-Semite, there was a huge backlash against him and then it turned on me. And then after that actually the, the leftists also pounced on me because they said that by responding to Kevin McDonald's theory, I was legitimizing him and anyway my, my own explanation for Jewish prominence in Jewish overrepresentation in certain fields was itself racist, so I was sort of getting it from both sides from from 2018. Then in 2000, December 2019 when I was a doctoral student at Oxford, I published a paper in a respected philosophy journal called Philosophical Psychology, where I simply argued that we ought to be allowed to study all possible causes of group differences in intelligence, including genes. And then this triggered a huge backlash. There's petition to retract the paper and it got very ugly and some, some activist scholars lobbied the editorial board to accept their comment on my paper bypassing the normal peer review process and then denying me the right of reply. And response to that, one of the editors in chief of Philosophical Psychology resigned in protest, the other then apologized for publishing the paper but was fired anyway. And there are a few more, there are a few more controversies between now and then, when I was the biggest one before the Ardae affair was when I was a lever-hume early career fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge. After I received my doctorate from Oxford, I published a paper, first I published my first essay on substack in January 2024, which was called why we need to talk about the right stupidity problem. And I presented several lines of evidence that the right people who, although I myself am on the right, people who identify as being on the right tend to be lower human capital than those on the left that elites lean overwhelmingly left and woke. And I had, even though I think woke is incorrect, I explained why this is the case and why what the political implications are. Now, no one at Cambridge had any problem with that. No one asks, well, how would a conservative student feel in your, you know, if they heard that you said conservatives have lower IQs, silence from Cambridge. Then a month later, I published an essay called a guide for the hereditary revolution, where I explained that wokeism is the ideology that stems from the denial of group differences, the only way to stop wokeism is to talk about differences. And it included a frank discussion of what the differences are and what the consequences would be in the United States if there were no affirmative action. What the consequences would be for representation of certain groups, particularly African Americans. And there was a huge backlash to that. And the university placed me under investigation for a year and a half, although ultimately exonerating the, my college, which was a manual college, terminated my unpaid affiliation with them on the grounds that my essay is or could be construed as a rejection of the values of diversity, equality, and inclusion. And I've sued them for belief discrimination. In that case, it's still ongoing. Okay, Nathan, before we, Francis, one second, sorry, before, before Francis gets into the Jason R.D. affair with you. Can I just ask a bit of a kind of personal like, why do you do this? Clearly you're going around upsetting everybody left, right, up, down, center with your opinions and the facts that you believe are important to bring to the table. What motivates you to do all of this? So the first, the understanding group differences, the simply the fact that there are different distributions and different means of socially relevant traits between different groups, besides being in my opinion intrinsically interesting and as a way of something that's key to understanding the evolution of intelligence and human evolution in general, is key to understanding so many social phenomena. Like the world makes no sense. If you think that the average person in the Congo is born exactly the same as the average person in Japan, the world makes no sense. It's very, the only conclusion is that there are some mystical forces of injustice that are permeating the earth and depriving huge groups of billions of people of the opportunity to reach their full potential. And if you're a morally sensitive person, then the most urgent task is to correct the environment, which in practice means white racism, colonialism, something like that and then bring about a quality of outcome. Create a world where everyone can achieve their their full potential. So there will be no peace until people learn to accept that certain different not all differences, but sometimes there are differences between groups on average that are no one's fault, that are simply the result of nature and we can learn to be okay with that. So Nathan, your name became intertwined in the mainstream with the Jason Arde case for obvious reasons, but before you published that substack, how did you first encounter Jason Arde in his work? Like many people, I read the headlines in 2023 when he was hired and touted as being this formerly illiterate, somebody who had various accomplishments, seemingly implausible accomplishments in athletics and other fields and was now the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge University and not only a professor, but a chair professor, the very exalted position. So I assumed that it was just a regular DEI hire and I didn't think much of it. Then on June 13th, I was contacted by a whistleblower on the faculty at Cambridge who told me that it has been known by the majority of professors at Cambridge for more than a year, that Arde is a plagiarist and a fabulous and totally unqualified for his job. But the the the the knowledge of these facts has not escaped Cambridge because everyone is intimidated by the administration, they fear being called racists or that the administration will retaliate against them if they say anything. There wasn't so much as a single tweet, even though thousands of people knew about this story. And of course, as everyone knows, there were journalists who tried to write about it, most notably Jack Grove at Times Higher Education, who were then shut down with threatening lawyers, defamation lawyers, who were making veil legal threats against if you would publish this information, your harming professor Arde and it's based on racism. Racism is the only reason somebody would criticize Arde. So I started looking into it after I got this tip and it was very easy to discover first the claims that Arde was making about his personal life were observed or impossible or contradicted publicly available evidence. Now in my exposé, I didn't take a definitive position on whether he had actually run 600 miles and six days and whether he had really been nonverbal until age 11. I just said like this doesn't seem to add up but I'm going to focus on the plagiarism and the quality of his work because that's something that I can say a comment on given the evidence available to me at this moment. And you have to note that when I published the essay on July 21st, it was very different on that morning calling Jason Arde a fraud than it is today. He was a respected professor with backed by dozens of prestigious institutions and Cambridge and all I knew is that somebody had tried to write about it and got shut down by legal threats which meant that they thought that the threats had some sort of merit. And who knows what Arde can do like he could get some fake doctor to claim that yeah I saw Arde and he couldn't speak until age 11 and you know then I'm in court under cross examination trying and having to prove a negative. So I thought that there was more than 50% chance that I would be dragged to court with a vexatious lawsuit either by Arde or Cambridge but it turned out that within a few days popular opinion kind of turned favorable to my position that Arde had in fact was a fraud. A few weeks ago we pointed you toward Hillsdale's free course on the Odyssey. The course has been so popular that when they told us they'd built a follow-up course on Homer's Iliad we wanted you to hear about it first. Hillsdale College's new free online courses taught by Professor Steven Smith. It's not a highlight reel and it's not Homer for beginners. It's a proper walk through the text, honor, courage, leadership, friendship, sacrifice and what it means to live a noble life. You come away understanding why a killer's real fight isn't with the Trozans is with himself. This is one of more than 43 courses Hillsdale offers on the Constitution, the Roman Republic, the American founding, Genesis the Second World War and more or build the same way taught properly and not dumb down. I couldn't recommend Hillsdale courses more highly. Go to Hillsdale.edu/trigger to enroll for free. That's Hillsdale.edu/trigger. So Nathan because people have been using this word plagiarism to describe Jason Arde's work, let's delve into that. Exactly what did he plagiarize and how many instances were there of this plagiarism? So in the expose I had been tipped off that there was plagiarism in the dissertation that he had copied extensively from another PhD student at Brunel University London. Paula's was Diet Myers. Her dissertation was published in 2009, Arde's in 2015. So that was what I started with. So I just ran his dissertation through copy leaks and then outpops, it flags a bunch of plagiarism not only to Paula but also to a bunch of other sources. So of course I had to check everything with myself manually. So I went through passes by passage. I put Arde's words on one side and then the plagiarized words which are either bipolar or somebody else on the other side and I just highlighted in yellow the verbatim text that was copied in green the lightly paraphrased text and there are there's now an industry of Arde plagiarism denial even some supposedly respectable people have participated in this. As Simon Barron Cohn says it looks to the naked eye like plagiarism. It looks to the naked eye but he was actually already investigated by Liverpool John Moore's university where he got his PhD and they said it wasn't plagiarism. So there but well yeah it looks like to the naked eye you see the plagiarism. So I don't know what else to say it's page after page of plagiarism. So that was from the dissertation. Now I also because you know I didn't want to go through everything that Arde has published. So on his his faculty website his Cambridge faculty website He has a section on his website called "Principal in Recent Publications." So these are the publications that he considers his most significant work on the basis of which he was hired to be a chair professor at Cambridge. And they range in publication date from 2018 to 2023. So that's the year he wrote his published his first paper to the year he got hired by Cambridge. So there are 10 papers there. I went through each one, considering whether it's plagiarized, if it's not plagiarized, does it employ something that could resemble scholarly methods? And also, was Arda actually involved in the writing of the paper at all, or was he one of 20 authors and with evidence that he wasn't really an active participant in any way? So like four, around four papers had plagiarism in them. The ones that were not plagiarized and that were appear to have been written by Ardae were auto-ethnographies, like he would just rail against his colleague who had microgressed against him with no real point or no scholarly kind of conclusion or methods or anything just saying people are racist against me. Or he would interview what he euphemistically calls a convenience sample, which actually just means his friends. For example, in one of his papers, he interviews three black or minority ethnic professors in the UK who are a convenience sample and in his network. So just three academics that he knows. He asked them questions, then he prints their answers, quoting them at great length, and then he has some commentary about how racism is a big problem and we need to continue fighting it. So this, you know, we're talking about a chair professor at Cambridge, and leaving aside that these are replete with typos. He doesn't really grasp principles of punctuation or spelling. It's just not something that any reasonable person could consider to be real scholarship. Okay, so there's a multitude of instances of plagiarism in his work right the way through his career. You then write this substack in July. What happens? Is it an instantaneous explosion? Is it a slow burn? Within hours, it was blowing up on Twitter. It's a juicy story. Now, the source, the whistleblower from Cambridge who contacted me thought that if I would write the story first, then the mainstream press would take it as permission to cover the story too. And that is exactly what happened. Were you surprised? Sorry, I was going to say, were you surprised by the reaction? Because this became the biggest story in the country. And I mean, look, I'm not denying that it's an important story, and we need to talk about the corruption within academia. But nevertheless, I mean, this was front page everywhere, went around the world. I had made messaging me from South America and France is what's going on with this. Yeah, but for me, the story was never about Jason Arde. I really don't care that an academic plagiarize. I don't care about Arde. I don't think that he's a terrible person. I mean, look, he did, he, he was guilty of some wrongdoing. It's not, it's not important really to me. I mean, the punishment that Arde received was totally disproportionate to whatever he did. The international humiliation and ultimately paying the ultimate price. For me, the story was about DI, the cover up, the fact that people think that DI means just increasing, looking for qualified applicants from different groups, when in reality it means Jason Arde and it means holding people to totally different standards or even no standards based on characteristics like skin color. So it went completely viral. It became the the breakout news story of that week. Everybody was talking about it. Then what happened? So a couple of weeks into it, I went to London and I did a bunch of interviews with including on mainstream outlets like Times Radio and I got a very positive response and actually at that time there were a number of journalists who were writing me out of the story in order to take credit for it themselves. So that, for example, a telegraph never mentioned my name until I think they have recently. So now people are saying, oh, Coffinist started this because it ended badly. And in fact, the British Union of Journalists published a statement as everyone knows Arde committed suicide and I think the 14th of August. So the British Union of Journalists published a statement on the death of Jason Arde which meant after they had written 249 articles about him, I wrote one article about Jason Arde which was really it was about him and about Cambridge and the cover-up, one article. The British press wrote 249 articles about Arde. Almost all of them just attacking Arde and picking apart his whole life since he was a child. Every lie ever told 249 articles in 22 days. Two thirds of those 249 articles were written after he already resigned from Cambridge. So there was really no more story because everyone on earth knew that Arde was a fabulous. But this statement by the British Union of Journalists mentioned one person by name to single out for criticism, which is me, for writing a totally 100% factual article, no credible person has accused me of even making one mistake in that article. And this is worth it. Sorry, I got it for it, Nathan. Well, now I've, because it ended badly for Cambridge. So Cambridge for two weeks, they said that this was a vial campaign. That's what they said about the people criticizing Arde, obviously insinuating that we're racist and the good law project and activist organization had this huge petition, which explicitly accused us of being racist. Then finally, they had to admit that Arde after setting him up, because Cambridge knew about Arde's plagiarism since at least 2023. Within months of Arde is being hired. If they didn't know about it before, there was another academic at Plymouth Marron University named Dave Harris, who sent them evidence of the administration evidence of Arde's plagiarism. That was in 2023. So they knew that side, the fact they must have known that he was unqualified because anyone can see that. That there was a huge scandal waiting to happen. And that Arde was being set up for humiliation, they definitely knew about his fabulism since at least a year ago, because that was when he submitted a complaint to, he reported that he had been attacked by a racist within knife in his Cambridge office twice. And Cambridge investigated and took it very seriously, but this racist could not be found on CCTV. So at least since then, they've known he's a fabulous. Probably earlier. And this, sorry, keep going. Yeah, and they chose to cover it up. They chose so they knew the truth. They came to the administration, knew the truth, and they decided to cover it up and intimidate people into not telling the truth. And when the truth came out, instead of saying, okay, you know, you got us, they imply that they say, we're vile, vile, storing up hatred against us, which has become very serious. Now, they have three years to figure out a solution. Maybe move Arde to a non-research position or something like that. Create another professorship for or public understanding of racism and academia where he doesn't, isn't expected to write serious papers or something, and then just park him there for the rest of his career, but their impulse was to lie and to remain committed to the lie of D.E.I. and the lie that Ardae, that's no black person, can do anything wrong. - Go ahead. - Yeah, so that being the case, everything that has happened now has happened. They printed, your name went public and everybody said, "Well, this is down to Nathan Coffness." I mean, this is where the story gets really ugly from your perspective, because there were demonstrations against you, which to me was just insane. So just explain to us a little bit of what it was like being in the eye of that media still. - So it was in everybody's interest not to take responsibility for their actions. There was Cambridge, who was most obviously at fault, if you're gonna blame somebody for what happened. Cambridge set Ardae up for humiliation. Then once Ardae became an embarrassment to Cambridge, they just stopped protecting him. And they said, "Okay, we're gonna place you under investigation." They didn't, Cambridge didn't learn anything new. Nothing changed, they already knew he was a plagiarist, they already knew he was a fabulous. So what changed in an August 5th, when they placed him under investigation, and then he resigned a few hours later? What changed was that they were embarrassed and they were protecting themselves. So they tell essentially Ardae to pack your things and go home, and then meanwhile, the British press is completely gratuitously writing article after article. Now, I'm not saying that the press doesn't have a right to cover public figures and say negative things about them, but you can still ask the question whether it was a nice thing to do, whether that was, whether they ought to have chosen to do, to do what they had a right to do. And really, so, but I think that what the press did can certainly be subject to moral, if not legal critique. I don't agree with shutting down the press, using the law to shut down the press, but morally, what they did was very questionable, but they don't wanna take responsibility for that. Cambridge doesn't wanna take responsibility for that. So who are they gonna blame? Well, you know, I'm the super stimulus scapegoat. Everything about me says, you know, scapegoat, it's a. - If you're on gold, you probably bought it for the same reason I did, because you looked at what central banks are doing to currencies and decided you wanted something they can't print. Good reasoning. But here's the thing nobody talks about after you make that decision. Your gold is just sitting there. It's not doing anything. You're paying to store it, you're paying to ensure it. And in the meantime, it earns precisely nothing. Until now, what you're about to hear is not a normal gold advert. Today's sponsor is Monetary Metals. They've figured out something that once you hear it, seems obvious, but almost nobody in the gold world is doing it. Monetary Metals connects gold owners with productive businesses, refiners, jewelers, companies that actually need physical gold to operate. Those businesses lease your gold and pay you a yield, not in dollars, not in pounds, in gold. So instead of your gold sitting in a vault, costing you money, it's out in the real economy, doing something useful. And you're earning more ounces of gold for it, up to 4% annual yield paid in gold. If you already own gold, this is the logical next step. Visit Monetary-metals.com/trigonometry or click the link in the description. See how your gold can stop costing you money and start earning you more gold. That's Monetary-metals.com/trigonometry. - Well, I think one of the things that says, "Scape got about your Nathan," is the area of research and the conclusions you draw from it, which is what I'd like to turn to, because I do think it's important, it's something that's come under a lot of attention in recent weeks because you're being blamed solely for Jason Ardit taking his own life. So let's talk about it. Let me summarize it as concisely as I can and you correct where you think I'm misrepresenting if I am at all, okay? So your central thesis, as I understand it, is that there are differences between different groups, including racial groups, in many things, including intelligence, which we'll talk about and define later. And that it's the failure to accept this reality that gives us wokeness, because if you live in a world where everyone believes what you call the equality thesis, which is the idea that all groups are effectively equal on average, there are no differences between Asians and black people and white people and Jews and so on. If everyone believes that and they look out at the world and they see that these different groups have very different outcomes on average, in certain fields in particular, then the natural conclusion from that is, well, if everyone's equal, but the outcomes are not, there must be something nefarious going on, i.e. institutional racism, structural discrimination, whatever label you want to put on it. And it's, therefore, naturally, our moral duty to address those things by D.I. other forms of wokeness, et cetera. And what you say is, because everyone believes the equality hypothesis or the equality thesis, which isn't true, that is effectively where we've ended up. And what we should be doing is going, looking at the reality of group differences, and then we'll talk about what policy prescriptions you advocate for on that basis. But if we just accept that their groups, the differ in terms of their intelligence and other factors in the same way that we might say accept physical differences between groups that clearly manifest and sporting achievements, for example, in sports like basketball, American football, et cetera. Then that would solve many of the problems that we currently got, socially and culturally. Is that a fair summary of your views? Exactly. I would just add an important qualification, which is that not all groups that races themselves are not homogeneous. So not all white populations of white people are identical with each other. Whites in Appalachia are not the same as whites in Massachusetts. And that's partly due to genetic differences. African immigrants in the United Kingdom are different from African Americans. And they have different outcomes and some respects, which are also due to genetic differences. So it's not saying that all black people are part of the same population with the same characteristics or whites or Asians. It's just a hereditary and perspective, a biological way of understanding how populations differ from each other. Explain what hereditaryan means to people who are not scientists. So hereditaryanism with respect to group differences refers to the idea that genetic differences play a non-trivial role in average differences in socially relevant traits, such as intelligence. That's it. And what is your claim about how significant the genetic part of it is versus cultural environmental, et cetera? I don't think hereditaryanism, to be considered hereditaryanism, it's just to be a significant amount. So what number you choose or how heritable exactly a trait should be for that to be considered hereditaryanism. I don't know. I think it should be the majority of differences. So over 15%. Yeah. So intelligence is over 50% heritable and the differences between groups are a reflection of that. So there are all sorts of subtleties that I'm leaving aside about how to calculate heredability and heredability of a trait is tied to a particular environment and a particular population that can change over time. But what I'm saying is that when raised under comparable conditions, you will tend to get certain patterns of differences between population representative groups of different races. OK. You have the same patterns of sub-Saharan African, European, East Asian, for example, will manifest all over the world. Even though when these groups are subject to very different histories, when they're living under different cultural conditions with different incentive, different economic systems, you always find the same pattern of differences. And that's for two genetic differences. OK. And so I'm just getting us to define the scope of what we're discussing and then we'll get into the different conversations about it. What is your claim about what the differences are between the various groups that you would classify? So the most significant is variation in general intelligence. So IQ score. IQ, there's a big discussion to be had about IQ. You know, many people think that IQ tests are just asking you to distinguish between different kinds of yachts or what kind of wine goes with with bass. And you know, but anybody actually looks at it for for five minutes can see that that's not true. It's these are IQ tests are asking you about rotating shapes, recognizing patterns. Now, there is a cultural component to your performance on IQ test, right? If you give an IQ test, there was an attempt by psychometricians to invent so called culture fair IQ tests that you could give even to a hunter getting a literate hunter gatherer. And, and just test their innate intelligence and we know that's impossible. It doesn't work. Your ability to take IQ test depends on your familiar familiarity with the concept of testing and all sorts of background cultural knowledge. But IQ test, test knowledge that is that anyone in to goes to public school in the United, in a country like the United States will have been exposed to and it's not just a bunch of culturally by a test of your cultural knowledge differences between individuals are meaningful. You really correlate with the wide range of life outcomes and not only in the classroom, but everything from your chance of getting into a car crash, your probability that you resort to criminal activity. And the differences between people are meaningful is not just a test of culture and there are stable race differences in. Okay, let me just summarize this in simple language for people listening and correct me if any of this is inaccurate, but what you're saying is intelligence test, yes, there's a cultural dimension, but and we'll delve into this because there's questions about this, but they measure your ability to reason effectively. In public school in a western society, maybe even most of the rest of the world, you have enough in you have been given enough to be able to take a test and for that score to be meaningful and that people who score higher or lower on IQ test, that correlates quite strongly with their life outcomes, both negative and positive. You score higher on an IQ test, you on average your lifetime earnings will be higher, you will be less likely to commit crime, you will be less likely to get into a car accident, and there's probably a bunch of other, a bunch of other metrics you could give us accurate so far. Yes, and so what are the racial differences in IQ then, so in the United States, the African American IQ is between 82 and 85. The average white IQ is 100, the average East Asian is a few points above the white mean. You'll hear some people say that the African American white gap has been closing in recent years, which is untrue, that's based on achievement tests, which are not IQ tests. The actual IQ tests, which are not measuring just acquired knowledge, but are measuring actual reasoning ability, continue to show approximately one standard deviation or 15 point gap between blacks and whites in the United States. So what about Hispanics and dash can Aussie Jews Hispanics are intermediate between blacks and whites, so 90s somewhere in the 90s. And, as can I see Jews, there's a huge debate about this and the online right, there are a lot of Jewish IQ truthers, but in reality, there have been some, some studies with very small sample samples may potentially unrepresentative, which showed extremely high. In plausibly high numbers, but the best IQ test studies for us can also have come around 110 to 112. Okay, so can I ask you some questions about the validity of IQ testing and the hereditary and notion more generally. So the first one I wanted to ask you is, if we accept that environmental factors will affect people, even if they have a certain biological predisposition, I'll give you an example of height, right, there are population genetics that determine height, but if you have a population that's consistently malnourished, you will get a population whose height is not the same as it would have been if they had been given proper nutrition. And you see this, for example, from what I understand in the difference between the average high of South Koreans and North Koreans, genetically the same, but different outcomes in terms of height, purely because of the nutrition that they've received for decades and over generations. So if a group of people are effectively given poor intellectual nutrition over generations, i.e. their denied access to education or have reduced access to education, they have a disproportion likelihood to come from to a single parent herd, they have a poor nutrition, which I imagine contributes ultimately if you particularly in childhood to somebody's life outcomes, et cetera, et cetera. And if this sort of environment is intergenerational locked in, wouldn't that have exactly the effect on people's IQ that poor nutrition intergenerational would have on people's height. Well, height is a good example of a trait, which is highly heritable, but is still malleable over time within the generation. So if you look within North Korea, height, actually in a country like North Korea would probably be less heritable than it is in the South, because the North has a class system where the party members or the people in the elites will have access to much better nutrition and then you have the rest of the population. So their height will be they'll be taller for environmental reasons than than the plebeians, but in South Korea, you know, everybody has similar access to food. So because variation in nutrition doesn't vary as much in the South, the it's only genes that will be left to explain the rest of the difference. So, you know, intelligence is the same way, you know, our grandparents would have scored lower like surprisingly low on IQ test, Isaac Newton would have scored like average on an IQ test. They just weren't familiar, not because they weren't didn't have the same genes for intelligence, they just weren't familiar with that they didn't have the training they to make the kind of sign the kind of classifications or scientific engage in the kind of scientific thinking that is tested by by IQ test. Well, that's what I mean, Nathan, that's exactly what I'm getting at. So if you're saying, well, the average black IQ is in the mid 80s and the average YQs in the hundreds wouldn't black people be just effectively intellectuals North Koreans in this comparison, whereby four generations, they have been denied the things that would have helped them improve their IQ. From nutrition to education to familiarity with testing to a safe environment in which to grow up and study to access to two parents who could look after you and give you the time and guidance to be able all of these things. Wouldn't that have a very significant detrimental impact on your IQs because let's be honest, you may have had the civil rights act in the United States, which is addressed formal as legal discrimination. But that's not to say that everybody gets the same start in life. And if you go around, you know, the black ghetto, you can clearly see that if I'd grown up in that environment, my IQ would have also been lower as a result of that. Well, these, these, this is the kind of thing that can actually be investigated. I mean, we one shouldn't just kind of rely on intuitions. I mean, of course, one can have intuition about what kind of hypotheses to explore, but then to conclude one has to explore it is what I'm asking it. So I would say this is the most studied question in the history of social science is the cause of the black, white IQ gap in the United States. We have every plot, remotely plausible hypothesis has been studied, has been tested multiple times at enormous expense. And the conclusion is early childhood interventions will raise IQ in the black population. And they can raise it significantly and over time, there's what's called the fade out effect. So IQ shoots up in early childhood and then they start getting lower and lower until finally in early adulthood, mean IQ after intensive intervention reverts to the African American mean. And there's been a very, there's been a cross-racial adoption study, the Minnesota study, the twins reared apart, which were black adopted children were raised by middle class white families. In childhood, their IQs were much higher and by adulthood, the fade out effect occurs. This is consistent with intelligence being much less heritable in childhood, the exact reason for that. And it's partly because childhood IQ tests are more likely to test acquired knowledge than general reasoning ability, which is compared to adult IQ tests. But anyway, when IQ is less heritable during the period of life when IQ is less heritable, you can increase IQ, but by early adulthood, everything that any intervention that we know how to make doesn't have lasting effects. Let me say this because I know I'm not alone, at some point your body just stops bouncing back the way it used to. You train hard, you travel, you push yourself and suddenly recovery takes longer. You wake up stiff, joints complain, skin hair nails, things don't look or feel quite right anymore. Many people listening to this know exactly what I'm talking about. What surprised me is that this isn't just getting older in some vague sense, a huge part of it is collagen. Your body starts producing less of it from your mid 20s onwards. Collagen is basically the glue that holds everything together. So when your level's dropped, you feel it everywhere. That's why I started using Bubs Natural's collagen peptides. And I've stopped with it. Since I've added it to my routine, recovery is noticeably better, joints feel stronger and my skin and hair have improved. I genuinely feel better now than I did a few years ago and that's not a placebo effect. It's fixing something fundamental. It's also effortless. I put it in my tea, coffee or any drink, no taste, no smell, no clumps. You forget it's even there. And Bubs isn't just another supplement brand. It was created in honor of Glen Bob Dockety, a former navy suit who was killed saving Americans in Benghazi. The brand is built around discipline, self-improvement and doing things properly. They also donate 10% of all profits to charity through the Glen Dockety Memorial Foundation. The product itself is clean, no sugar, no fillers, third-party tested, NSF certified for sport, whole 30 approved, sustainably sourced from grass-fed pasture-raised cattle. Over 100,000 people use it and it was named Best Collagen of 2024 by Health.com. If you recognize yourself in what I've just described, this is worth trying. Live better longer. For a limited time, get 20% off your entire order at bubsnatures.com with code trig or click the link in the description of this episode. That's b-u-b-snatures.com code trig. And when they ask where you heard about them, tell them trigonometry send you. On small for 20% off, use code [email protected]. OK. So IQ score. Many people think that IQ tests are just asking you to distinguish between different kinds of yachts or what kind of wine goes with fast. But anybody who actually looks at it for five minutes can see that that's not true. These are IQ tests are asking you about rotating shapes, recognizing patterns. Now, there is a cultural component to your performance on IQ tests. If you give an IQ test, there was an attempt by psychometricians to invent so-called culture, fair IQ tests that you could give even to a hunter-- in a literate hunter gatherer and just test their innate intelligence. And we know that's impossible. It doesn't work. Your ability to take IQ tests depends on your familiarity with the concept of testing and all sorts of background cultural knowledge. But IQ tests, test knowledge that anyone to goes to public school in the United States will have been exposed to. And it's not just a bunch of culturally by a test of your cultural knowledge. Differences between individuals are meaningful. They correlate with a wide range of life outcomes and not only in the classroom, but everything from your chance of getting into a car crash, your probability that you resort to criminal activity. Differences between people are meaningful. It's not just a test of culture and there are stable race differences in average scores. Okay. Let me just summarize this in simple language for people listening and correct me if any of this is inaccurate. But what you're saying is intelligence tests, yes, there's a cultural dimension, but-- and we'll delve into this because there's questions about this. And they measure your ability to reason effectively. If you've gone to public school in a Western society, maybe even most of the rest of the world, you have enough in-- you have been given enough to be able to take a test and for that score to be meaningful, and that people who score higher or lower on IQ tests, that correlates quite strongly with their life outcomes, both negative and positive. So if you score higher on an IQ test, on average, your lifetime earnings will be higher. You will be less likely to commit crime. You will be less likely to get into a car accident. And there's probably a bunch of other metrics you could give as accurate so far. Yes. Okay. So what are the racial differences in IQ then? So in the United States, the African American IQ is between 82 and 85. The average white IQ is 100. The average East Asian is a few points above the white mean. You'll hear some people say that the African American white gap has been closing in recent years, which is untrue. That's based on achievement tests, which are not IQ tests. What about Hispanics and Ashkenazi Jews? Hispanics are intermediate between blacks and whites. So 90s, somewhere in the 90s. And Ashkenazi Jews, there's a huge debate about this and the online right, there are a lot of Jewish IQ truthurs, but in reality, there have been some. some some studies with very small sample samples may potentially unrepresented, which showed extremely high and plausibly high numbers, but the best IQ tests studies for Ashkenazam have come around 110 to 112. Okay, so can I ask you some questions about the validity of IQ testing and the herediterian notion more generally? So the first one I wanted to ask you is if we accept that environmental factors will affect people even if they have a certain biological predisposition, I'll give you an example of height, right? There are population genetics that determine height, but if you have a population that's consistently malnourished, you will get a population whose height is not the same as it would have been if they've been given proper nutrition. And you see this, for example, from what I understand in the difference between the average high of South Koreans, North Koreans, North Koreans, genetically the same, but different outcomes in terms of height, purely because of the nutrition that they've received for decades and over generations. If a group of people are effectively given poor intellectual nutrition over generations i.e. their denied access to education or have reduced access to education, they have a disproportionate likelihood to come from to have intergenerational single parenthood. They have a poor nutrition, which I imagine contributes ultimately if you particularly in childhood to to somebody's life outcomes, et cetera, et cetera. And if this sort of environment is intergenerationaly locked in, wouldn't that have exactly the effect on people's IQ that poor nutrition intergenerationaly would have on people's height? Well, height is a good example of a trait which is highly heritable, but is still malleable, right, over time, within a generation. So if you look within North Korea, height, actually in a country like North Korea would probably be less heritable than it is in the South because the North has a class system where the party members or the people in the elites will have access to much better nutrition, and then you have the rest of the population. So their height will be taller for environmental reasons than the plebeians. But in South Korea, everybody has similar access to food, so because variation in nutrition doesn't vary as much in the South. It's only genes that will be left to explain the rest of the difference. So intelligence is the same way. Our grandparents would have scored lower, like surprisingly low on IQ tests. Isaac Newton would have scored average on an IQ test because they just weren't familiar, not because they didn't have the same genes for intelligence, so they just weren't familiar with that. They didn't have the training to make the kind of scientific kind of classifications or scientific engage in the kind of scientific thinking that is tested by IQ tests. So if you're saying, well, the average black IQ is in the mid 80s, and the average YQs in the hundreds, wouldn't black people be just effectively intellectuals North Koreans in this comparison, whereby four generations, they have been denied the things that would have helped them improve their IQ from nutrition, to education, to familiarity with testing, to a safe environment in which to grow up and study, to access to two parents who could look after you and give you the time and guidance to be able, all of these things, wouldn't that have a very significant detrimental impact on your IQs? Because let's be honest, you may have had the civil rights act in the United States, which is addressed formalist legal discrimination, but that's not to say that everybody gets the same start in life, and if you go around the black ghetto, you can clearly see that if I'd grown up in that environment, my IQ would have also been lower as a result of that. Well, this is the kind of thing that can actually be investigated. I mean, of course, one can have intuition about what kind of hypotheses to explore, but then to conclude one has to explore it is what I'm asking you. We have every remotely plausible hypothesis has been studied, has been tested multiple times at enormous expense. And the conclusion is early childhood interventions will raise IQ in the black population, and they can raise it significantly. And over time, there's what's called the fade out effect. So IQ shoots up in early childhood, and then they start getting lower and lower until finally in early adulthood, mean IQ after intensive intervention reverts to the African American mean. And there's been a very, there's been a cross racial adoption study, the Minnesota study of the twins rear to part, which were black adopted children were raised by middle class white families. In childhood, their IQs were much higher, and by adulthood, the fade out effect occurs. This is consistent with intelligence being much less heritable in childhood. The exact reason for that, it's partly because childhood IQ tests are more likely to test acquired knowledge than general reasoning ability, which is compared to adult IQ tests. But anyway, when IQ is less heritable, during the period of life when IQ is less heritable, you can increase IQ, but by early adulthood, everything that any intervention that we know how to make doesn't have lasting effects. The slightly different to what I'm asking you, because you're talking about early childhood interventions, what I'm talking about is attempting to explain the gap. And what I'm asking you is, isn't it possible that intergenerational deprivation in various forms would lead partially to an IQ gap, which you attribute to genetics? Well, in science, there's never a single experiment that proves the case. So you're looking at the totality of the evidence against the given in the context of a theory about what kind of explanation is plausible. I mean, people who promote like environmentalist explanations of race differences, we'll say some, for example, say that it's due to epigenetics. It's epigenetics. But then how come epigenetics doesn't affect Jews? Jews weren't affected by epigenetic, they in ghettos and concentration camps, pogroms, and no fact at all. And is that true? Isn't it true that Jews whose IQs were measured in the early 20th century, United States, called very low on IQ tests, same with Irish and other Italians as well. These were basically people who didn't speak very good English, and so they scored lower on IQ tests, because IQ test was designed for English speakers who'd had a certain type of education. There was a notorious statement by an early intelligence researcher in the 1920s who administered tests in English to some immigrants who didn't speak English, and then made some silly statement about how their IQs are very low. And he himself recanted and said that he made a stupid mistake. Henry, I've never seen an academic admit that he's wrong in such unequivocal terms. I cite him in my subsec essay, Thomas Solz, wishful thinking about race. But people. Yeah, I was very triggered by that, because as you know, I'm a big fan of Thomas Solz, but just come back to this point with me that if you have a population that have to live an intergenerational deprivation, poverty, poor education, etc, that is likely to a significant extent to affect their average IQs, even down the generations, particularly for the reasons that I gave, which is even today, when formal legal discrimination is no longer in place, that does not mean that everybody's starts in the same place. If you go to an inner city black school in some American cities, well, only 7% of kids can read to the right level by the time of the 13 or something. I don't remember the exact statistic, but something like that where you basically getting a terrible education, would that not affect your life outcomes, including as measured by a general intelligence test? Well, the adoption studies that I refer to look at kids who are adopted by basically at least lower middle class families, because you have to meet some conditions in order to adopt a child, and you have to have at least provide evidence that you can provide a stable home and a stable upbringing. So, you know, if you're running a crack house, then you would not be allowed to adopt a child. You wouldn't be part of the study. So, okay, so we know that if you're raised and at least the kind of middle class to upper class environment, the differences between your in parenting style or income or anything like that, that doesn't really have any detectable effect on your adult IQ. Now, if you're in a genuinely really deprived environment, it's very possible that that will, although Thomas Saul himself, who I disagree with him on that one point, he's obviously a brilliant guy. He himself came from an extremely deprived background. I mean, there are a number of other black luminaries intellectuals who did as well. I think Len Lowry also came from a deprived background, but yeah, I don't deny that that's a disadvantage in life to come from a very deprived background. Yeah, disadvantage is different point. I think the point I'm trying to make, and maybe what you're saying is there hasn't been enough research on this, but if you, I give you an example, and maybe scientifically, not accurate, but just my dad, so my grandfather grew up with that a dad who was killed in World War Two, right? My dad grew up with a dad who was kind of there and not there, and then I grew up with a dad. It wasn't perfect or whatever, but I can see the massive differences between all three generations, depending on whether they had a dad in the house, right? Now, and those, I don't know if those correlate to a lower or higher IQ, they probably don't, but the point I'm making is if your people, your group, as you talk about, four generations has been denied access to good nutrition, education, et cetera, et cetera. I think it's credible to assume that that would have an impact on UICU scores, particularly as you say, because they are somewhat culturally affected. Well, the thing is we have no memory of what happened. There's no biological memory of what happened two generations ago. There's some minor epigenetic effects that last one generation. It doesn't, there's no plausible evidence that that epigenetic effect. But that's why I brought up my dad and my granddad because my dad, I can see it in him, has in him the consequences of being raised by a dad who had no dad, right? Whereas I don't, and my children don't in the same way, if that makes sense. So you might not have a memory, but being raised by people who were themselves raised by people who experienced certain things and lacked certain things will have an impact on how you grow up. I mean, so, okay, I agree. One can can formulate hypotheses that seem intuitively right and maybe are consistent with anecdotes about people that we observed or our family. But then, then test, test the theory, like, okay, what if this theory been tested? That's what I've been asking you this entire time. Because for you to make the bold claims that you do, it seems to me that this is something that might be worth testing. So we have, for example, adoption studies where you're raised from early childhood by somebody who doesn't have all those experiences. So we also have regression to the mean, which is really impossible to explain on the environmentalist assumption. So if you, because a trait, your value of a trait is determined by both genes and either environmental or to kind of random environmental factors. So your particular your height, your IQ, is determined by a combination of those of those things. If you have a very, if you depart, if you're very far from the mean, then it's likely that that was due to, in part, to good, that's how you have a very high IQ. So that's probably due to a combination of genes for IQ and a very favorable environment for IQ. Now you're passing on only the genes to your genetic offspring. So their IQ is more likely to be closer to the mean than your IQ. So that's regression to the mean. And the same way, if you have a very low IQ, your, your children are more likely to be a little bit smarter than you. So African Americans regress to mean 85 and white Americans regress to mean 100. So even the children of high socioeconomic status black Americans tend to get lower scores on the SAT than white Americans or Asian Americans from low socioeconomic status. That is, I mean, that is impossible to explain on the assumption that this is some intergenerational inheritance, cultural inheritance, because that's just the biological thing. So yeah, that makes sense. I wanted to ask you about the genes part of this. So I went on Venice AI, which we use for researching things. And what it came up with is it says no specific genes have been found that explain the racial IQ gap. Genome wide association studies have identified genes correlated with educational attainment, but researchers, including some herediterians, note the polygenic scores derived from mostly European samples, don't reliably predict now comes across populations. And none of this research has found genes for IQ differences that track with racial categories in the way that the herediterian argument requires. Do you disagree with this? This is just to bamboozle people. I mean, there was a hope that this this issue could be resolved that we would just find, you know, single nucleotide polymorphisms that are associated with intelligence, and we would just check how they're distributed from one race to the other, and then that would be the end of it. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than than people hoped, and these genetic variants. So polygenic scores, so just looking at variants are associated with intelligence in one group, which allows you to predict the IQ or other or height or other traits, say within Europeans, who are generally the population that's most studied, and for which we have the most reliable polygenic scores for a variety of traits, they often produce invalid results or at least less valid results when applied to Africans or Asians, but these variants, they are different, but we know that there are genetic variants that are expressed in the brain that vary between racial groups. There are like what? Now, I don't do the, sorry, a fly been besieged by a fly, it's just landed in my teeth. Sorry. It's a very dramatic way of putting it nice. Well, anyway, at least the fly won't bother me anymore, so I think it's safe to drink the tea one. It's a very unscientific conclusion there, but carry on. What are some of the things that differ in brains between groups? I can't comment on the details of the science that's not my area. I'm not at the forefront of population genetics, but this is uncontroversial, just I'm just reporting uncontroversial results. It's well known that just a few months ago, David Rice Laboratory at Harvard published a paper in the journal Nature, so the most prestigious university in the most prestigious journal, showing based on an analysis of ancient DNA that there has been selection for genetic variants associated with intelligence and educational attainment in West Eurasians in the last several thousand years. So the idea that evolution stopped you know 300,000 years ago or or or something like that is just not consistent with mainstream science. Okay, there's a few other things I wanted to ask you. What do you think if you accept your thesis that these things are genetic presumably they're the consequences of evolution? Is that fair? Well, I mean evolution, something either natural selection or or some random random. I'm not a scientist, so I'm perhaps speaking imprecisely about this. But what I mean is these IQ differences are the result of adapting to different environments over very long periods of time. Is that accurate? Well, that that would be the difference between races would be due to adopt becoming adapted to different environments over long period of time. But of course you get different population differences between groups based on migration patterns. For example migration can be elite African immigration to the UK is highly selected. So you got. Yeah, after the reason black Africans, for example, do well in education in Britain is that we're getting the cream of the crop of the African continent who are coming here. So we're getting that self selecting high IQ population from a continent that you would argue on average has a lower IQ. Is that right? Yes, and it's unlikely to be cultural. Some people say, well, that's just African culture, but then why doesn't Africa, you know, have the same same results in Africa. It's just if you take very intelligent Africans and you you form a group of those those people, then you get high performing group. Makes sense. What would be the reason that certain groups would not evolve to have as high an intelligence as another group, for example, the two groups that you've talked about today. So when you speculate about this people will get angry and say that it's pseudo science and these ideas haven't been tested. I mean, this is the kind of thing that academics should be working on, right? That's such an interesting question. There should be a. There are theories that which and anthropologists and geneticists should collaborate to test what are the historical conditions that seem to have selected for differences in various traits, including intelligence, but also specific intelligences. So, you know, we don't have a huge amount of data to go on. It's been speculated. I mean, there's some primafacial evidence that encountering winter is is a relevant condition for selecting for certain kinds of intelligence that the challenge of dealing with a period of time where you have to prepare in advance for for winter where you won't have easy access to food that that that selects for intelligence farming also appears to select for intelligence. So things involving planning effectively, if you have to plan to survive, you're likely to evolve intelligence, whereas if you don't and food is ready available, you might evolve characteristics and traits that are helpful to hunting or gathering the food in the moment without necessarily evolving adaptations that are useful for planning for for for the entire year. Is that what you're saying? It seems very plausible that that's a big part of the story if not not necessarily the whole thing but a big part. Okay, and if I ask you, so there's obviously a big conversation in both the United States and Europe about the underperformance and education of poor working class white boys in particular. What would be your explanation? Would you say that they are genetically lower IQ or is that a cultural thing? Um, there may be some cultural aspect to it, but there are, there are, you know, this is also this is wokeism, just a you know, making whites into the victim, right? They're using the same woke logic as, you know, as blacks do in other context. So they're saying the whites are not doing as well as African immigrants, therefore whites are being discriminated against, but that's not necessarily the case. Like there are, there are genetic differences between people of different, you know, socioeconomic status, like that's not only. You can see how to somebody encounter encountering your views, it would seem counterintuitive to believe that if you said there's a massive racial gap between white people and black people and suddenly you have white people really underperforming in things that are highly IQ correlated. That would be odd, right? Well, I, I would hope people can, can appreciate a little bit of subtlety. But it's not, hereditarianism isn't saying that there's a, it's a law of nature that all groups of, of, of, of this ancestry, how, and ancestry, A, B and C have the same pattern of differences, like, under, under all conditions, right, because these populations can be divided into different, into smaller groups, like, again, whites in Appalachia are clearly different for, they have a different culture and, and that may have something to do with it, but they're not exactly the same on average as whites from, from, you know, I use the example of Massachusetts where all the fancy universities are or Connecticut. Right. Okay. It makes sense. So that all being the case, Nathan, we've prodded around and let's say that, that we, for the sake of argument, accept that your view of this is accurate. You mentioned right at the top of our interview that the reason you were doing all of this is that the world won't make sense. And in fact, you mentioned we won't have peace until we accept this worldview, which means that behind it, you have, I guess, a set of policy prescriptions to address the realities that you're pointing to. What is that set of policy prescriptions? What should we do about the fact that different groups have different average IQs and therefore different average life outcomes? Okay. Okay. Just before Nathan answers that question, I think there might be an interesting question to talk about classification. How do we classify groups? If someone brings us through. Yeah. So Nathan, here's my question to you. Everybody can now drink. So I'm like half South American, half British. I think people would look at me and say, Oh, he's white British. I'm not like, I've actually come from a very multiracial background. I'm impressed, as you can see. So my point is this, how do we classify certain people? If they're half black, half white, are they black? If someone's half Latino, half black or Puerto Rican, what does that mean? Because particularly when you're talking about Latin Americans and African Americans, there's a lot of racial mixing going on there. So, is Dutch the same language as German? I mean, they can sort of understand each other and, you know, it's how far do you have to go into the hills of Appalachia until hillbilly twang becomes its own dialect. Where does dialect and language begin? South Koreans in South Korea, they've borrowed thousands of words from English. And in North Korea, they've borrowed thousands of words from Russian. Are they speaking the same language? It's exactly the same with populations. There's no sharp lines separating English and Mandarin. And Mandarin uses some English words and vice versa. They borrow medical structures and expressions. But you can still say that Mandarin and English are different. It's not, it's not a meaningless statement. So I see race as being exactly the same way. They're populations that are distinguishable from each other, but there's overlap and they blend into each other and their populations that are combination of one population, the other. That doesn't mean that there isn't a pattern of differences that really exists in the world. categorize those patterns, whether, for example, you would categorized as white or something else, like whether I'm white, so the leftists say that I'm bad, I'm white, the right says that I'm not white, coughness isn't white, he's pretending to be white, he's a Jew. So it's not, there's no like objective answer to how to what I am, why I'm bad, right? It's just how you classify even languages, how you classify languages as a dialect, as a different language is reflects your kind of personal interests or political realities or whatever. But again, it's still the point isn't what words we use to describe or how we, where we draw the lines around this category or that category. The important point is that the underlying, the underlying reality, which is that there are patterns of differences. You said at the beginning of our interview that the reason that you're doing the work that you're doing and doing the research that you're doing is that you think there won't be peace and it's very difficult to understand the world unless we accept the thesis that you're putting forward. Let's say for the sake of argument, we accept the thesis that you're putting forward. If we were to do that, what would be the policy prescriptions to address the racial IQ gaps and to create a better society as you would see it? So the first thing most obviously is that you undermine the empirical premise of wokeism. So you make wokeism impossible. The world is no longer seen as permeated with the injustice of past or present racism. Now, I'm not saying that people need to turn on the television and hear about a lecture about red deterrentism every day or that this necessarily needs to be taught to elementary school students. But what my idea is that a critical mass of the elites will just kind of come to understand that this is the way it is. Even if they're not going around talking about it all the time and you know, I get all that and I totally get it. What let's what I'm saying is the elites and in fact the ordinary person has a broad understanding of what you're saying, which is when different groups have different outcomes, it's because of nature, it's not because of the system or the government or the man or the oppressor or whatever. Now what, we've you said yourself in one of your substags that if we were to have a purely meritocratic system, that would mean that there would be almost no black representation, for example, in academia. Likewise, there would be almost no ex-representation and why. If you had a purely meritocratic system, the world would look very unfair, quote, unquote based on the equality thesis that we currently hold. Okay, the world has accepted that you are right about this hypothetically. What do we do now in a society where these groups have such different outcomes? I should say an important qualification, it's not that there would be almost no blacks in higher education, it's just at that very highest level at some place like Harvard, it would be under one percent representation. There would still be brilliant black scholars, but there's no question. Of course, because there are outliers within every group, but what I'm getting at is you would have a society that is by your own assessment, very, very, there would be huge disparities in people being quote, unquote, represented in important fields of human endeavor, right? So now I, as a Birken conservative, don't really, I'm cautious about issuing recommendations about how society ought to be arranged in any great detail. I think that it's necessary to go through a process of absorbing this truth and then slowly adjusting the institutions to align with this new understanding. Adjusting in what direction? What would we do differently? That's what I'm asking. So my load star is meritocracy. I think that ideally, people should be treated as individuals, and that's an average. Everyone benefits when the person who is best qualified for a job is given the job. I do recognize there's a competing value, which is representation and people feeling that they're participating in society in a meaningful way and that their group and their interests are represented in a way that is visible to them. So that's a value that can be in conflict with the value of a pure meritocracy. And I think that one may need to find a balance between these things. So I've. So less DEI, but still some DEI? So there may be no DEI, because DEI refers to the ideology of addressing the history of injustice. So what I'm saying is not DEI. It's saying, look, it's like the United Nations every country gets one vote. Like that's not DEI. That's just. That's just, you know, everyone gets represented, even though. Yes, but the inclusion in the United Nations is based on identities, not based on your ability to do a job, whereas employment at a university is. And so if you only hire on merit, you are, as you said yourself, in direct conflict with representation. So you either have some thumb on the scale or you have a pure meritocracy in which, you know, representation goes out of the window. There'll be plenty of people who would be okay with that. I'm asking if you are. So I'm okay with some level of quotas or something like that. You know, in the case of the United Nations, I think it's very possible that. You know, if you took the. I think there are 193 countries in the United Nations and two observer states, if I remember correctly, if you. if you selected the 193 most able statesmen in the world to govern the world most effectively, and it was a meritocracy, it's very possible that Micronesia would not be represented that it would be mainly from the United States and China or something like that. But we record part of the. Okay, the United Nations is a special institution, so I don't want to push that analogy too far. I'm just saying in principle. Why can't you just say you want a meritocracy? What's the hesitation? Because I want to. Well, I want to talk to you as the logical conclusion of what you're talking about. Because there are two things that I recognize as being values, which are meritocracy and feeling represented. So those are two good things. Now the two good things, you can't have both of those things to the maximum degree at the same time. So right now we. are destroying the meritocracy in favor of feelings and pulling feelings and feelings of representation above everything else. And we're doing that under the banner of fighting injustice, which I say is largely imaginary. Not that there wasn't injustice in the past and all of that, but we're fighting the injustice that is affecting people today in the way claimed by the wokesters. So do you then believe in some quotas for Jews in the NBA then? I mean, this is kind of where. This is the thing that doesn't work about DEI. It's like you have quotas for some people, for some areas, but they only sort of work in one direction. You don't seem to have quotas for women to be been women and other things of that nature. It's all about certain types of jobs, but nobody seems to be advocating for more Ashkenazis or more Muslims or more white people in sports teams. Do you see what I'm getting at? Yes, I could. there could be a quota for a Jew in the. in the 100 meter dash in the Olympics, and then I could watch him coming in last in order to feel represented. But I mean, that. I don't think that that would make me feel very good, but the thing is. But this is my point, though. It's so unrepresentative. It's unhelpful, rather, but sport is an era where it actually objectively doesn't matter. If you add another lane for the Jewish guy at the end of the 100 meter final, and there's now nine guys, and all of them run it in under 10 seconds, and he takes about five minutes, like no one loses out from that. But when you have. I could do a solid four 20 seconds when I. I'm sure you could. If you have that in Where you have people like the person about whom we started this conversation who are teaching and doing research and indoctrinating the next generation. That is actually damaging, right? So I don't understand how anyone who could particularly with your worldview would come out and favor quotas. Well, quotas doesn't mean representation that's proportionate to the representation in the population. So 14% of blacks, so I'm saying the two values have to be balanced against each other. You have A is good, B is good, but you can't have both of them, you know, 100%. Okay, so what if you have 30% of B and 70% of A? So let's say the quota system is, you know, 3% black at Harvard, right? They'll get qualified people. They'll get good black applicants. They won't be ridiculously unqualified. And so you just want, but this is why I said you just want less DEI. You want DEI, but pulled back somewhat, right? But again, I don't call it DEI because DEI has the connotation of workers being based on. You want racial quotas that are not as extreme as what we have now. I'm saying you just want everyone to accept that the reality is there's big differences between different groups. Because this is the reason that nobody wants to touch this stuff, Nathan, is you're kind of advocating slightly less of what we have, but everyone to accept a really toxic thing to be part of the public discourse. That's why people don't want to talk about this. Well, if we don't talk about it, it doesn't seem worth the sacrifice. The alternative is that we perceive disparities as the result of injustice and that's wokeism and we'll be dealing with wokeism forever. That's also toxic. So which alternative isn't that in my opinion? The alternative is, the alternative is you say we're going to identify discrimination where it exists and eliminate it. But other than that, we will accept that people are going to be treated on their merits and whatever is the outcome of that is the outcome of that. And we don't have to get into trying to prove that some racial groups is more stupid than others because that seems to me like a very toxic path to go down from a just a communication perspective. Not least given that the outcome that you're advocating for is actually very tame based on the very strong claims you're making about human intelligence. Well, you can say that you would like to have a meritocracy, but what is the consequence? If we actually have your meritocracy, however it will be less than 1% black, people are going to notice that and then they're going to demand an explanation. And if you haven't say the explanation is different groups have different aptitudes for different things, end of story. Yes, but well, okay, so you you would say hereditaryanism and pure meritocracy, no quotas. Now, if people are willing, I wouldn't say hereditaryanism, I just say, look, different people have different outcomes for different things. All we can do is focus on, can we eliminate discrimination? Has this Jewish man not achieved his position in the 100 meter final based on merit or discrimination? We have found no discrimination against Jews in athletics. Therefore, we can conclude reasonably there's no Jews in the 100 meter final because whatever and we move on with our lives instead of delving into the stuff where we're really getting into the difficulties for most people of having this conversation morally. But we've seen that it doesn't work. We've been trying that then mainstream conservatives have been trying this approach for decades and we see that the vast majority of intelligent and morally sensitive people do think it's immoral emergency to correct the environment and achieve equal outcomes because they think that it's again, the average, the average African, the average Asian average European, they're all born with exactly the same potential. There's no reason that the whole world can't be turned into Singapore. It's just the most important thing is to figure out how to do that and so much moral energy is channeled into this hopeless project. And this whole idea about work is being over is just not this is just based on Twitter vibes. All the survey data shows that the opposite is true. The younger generations are far worse on every measure than the older gen X is worse than the boomers, millennials are worse than X, zoomers are worse than millennials by a long shot. This isn't going away. We can't just say, let's treat everyone as individuals and ignore this disaster of group disparities. It isn't working. And once the the boomer and gen X gatekeepers are phased out, it's just, you know, it's it's going to be really bad unless we find a new strategy. Okay, I mean, that's I think as a fair response. The only question is, how do you if you accept that the next generations are even worse, how do you persuade those people to believe that there's IQ differences between races that does not seem like a realistic prospect to me, how do you persuade the work 20 year old girl that what you're saying is true. There are many people who will not be persuaded by anything. That's just, but that that was true of the taboos of previous generations where people would not consider the the atheist. And the poke anti racist college girl today, who won't listen to anything about her editorianism in a previous generation, she would have hated you if you question Christianity or if you said that homosexuality should be okay. It's that these these taboos change over time. It's not the taboo of your generation of when it whatever generation one when his living in seems like a law of nature, but it really isn't. And you you defeat the taboo, you know, the Darwin himself said that when he first told his friend about that he had rejected the idea of special creation. As he said, it felt like I was confessing a murder to propose the theory of evolution was so outrageous in the mid 19th century. And now it's not controversial at all that you have to make the case and you have to explain the reasons why her editorianism is correct and persuade those who are capable of being persuaded. And the information will spread. So Nathan, the final question is always the same. I'm going to be honest with you. It feels a little bit redundant in this episode. But nevertheless, what's the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Nathan answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to go to triggapot.co.uk where you'll be able to see this. Has Jason or they become a martyr and so beyond criticism? An academia you survive by publishing, but you can only publish if you discover something will have positive results. This makes people very risk-averse as every project has to work from a master's to a postdoc. How can we re-include the ability to fail? What's the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? I don't know. I have to give the least surprising answer in the history of the show. We have to talk about her editorianism. Well, I'll tell you, I'll give you a little bit, maybe a more surprising answer, which is related to her editorianism. But was the title of my first substack essay, which was why we need to talk about the right stupidity problem. And the fact that resistance to wokeism has been so ineffective, and the fact that the right is totally unable to create serious effective institutions. This is something that people don't want to talk about on the right. Give us a little bit more of what you're talking about, Nathan, so what is the right stupidity problem? Exactly. I've heard, I've seen people on Twitter showing research to sort of support the anecdotal claim that basically the problematic people on the left are mentally ill and the problematic people on the right are stupid. Is that kind of what you're getting at? I don't know about the mental illness. I think it could be that leftist or just more likely to be diagnosed with mental illness because that's become like its own identity, kind of left coded identity. But definitely, there's a problem that the intellectual elites lean left and woke. Now there isn't a definitive study that proves that, but there's several lines of evidence that indicate strongly that this is the case in the General Social Survey, which surveys a representative sample of Americans regularly for the last few decades, finds that on abbreviated intelligence tests, very people who identify whites who identify as very conservative, do worse than those who identify as conservative, do worse than those who identify as liberals, and the very liberals do the best. It's consistent with, well, stereotype accuracy. So stereotype accuracy isn't proof, you can't prove something just by saying that it's a stereotype, but it is a generalization that stereotypes tend to be not totally based on nothing, and in the United States, the Republican Party is known as the stupid party, and the stereotype in other countries of right-wing parties is generally similar. You have the fact that conservatives have not managed to control one single serious university in the United States, and that includes bring a young university, which is still majority, non-conservative, and universities even in deep red states are still staffed primarily by liberals. This is not what you would expect. Now, okay, it's true that a lot of what goes on at the universities is insurious, it's just a bunch of left-wing activism, but still, there is real intellectual work being done that a lot of universities and conservatives are just not well represented, and if conservatives really cared just as much as liberals about knowledge and scholarship, and they were just as smart and capable as liberals, you would expect them to have at least one university, or even they could just create a new university. But even that is not something that they are seriously struggling with, and in terms of the intellectual culture on the right, it's just a disaster. I think people, now I think the right stupidity problem is related to hereditaryanism, because I think that without hereditaryanism, it's impossible to have an intellectually coherent right, that a right-wing philosophy that appeals to smart and intelligent people. I mean, okay, there are smart intelligent people on the right who deny hereditaryanism. They exist, but it's just statistically smart, morally sensitive, thoughtful people are more likely to be on the left and woke if they accept the equality thesis and the taboo on hereditaryanism. So that is actually a big taboo on the right, it's not a taboo on the left, but it's a taboo on the right to point out that conservatives can't, they have very little scholarship, they have very little art, you remember the, in order there was the, during an American football, they have the halftime show, where they feature, you know, some, the latest, you know, homosexual artists doing some flamboyant performances, I say, and so conservatives are very triggered by that. So they wanted to prove that they are just as good at art as liberals. So then there was the competing conservative halftime show and the, the star of the halftime show was this guy, it was beyond parody, he was like, I just want to wear my boots and walk my dog and did you see this? It was like, yeah, like last year, a year ago, and they said, how come anybody say that conservatives are not as good at art as liberals? Well, I think one of those things, I think Jordan, who you mentioned earlier, is described as the temperament, different smart people on the right tend to go into business, not academia, not least because from a financial perspective, that's a much smarter decision. You know, if you run a business and you're good at it, you're going to make way more money and have way more freedom than you would if you, if you became a professor at university. Right Nathan, well, thank you for your time. We're going to go to TriggerPods.co.uk now, where our audience will get to ask you their questions. What evidence would convince you that average group differences in cognitive ability are environmental rather than partly genetic? [BLANK_AUDIO]