Welcome to Keith's night. Don't tread on anyone in the
libertarian Institute today. I am joined by dr.
Wilfred Reilly a professor of political science at Kentucky
State University. He's the author of taboo, 10
facts. You can't talk about as well as
the book behind him. Hate crime, hoax, dr.
Riley, Thanks so much for your time.
Well, thanks, as always for having me on the show, Good to
be here. One of my favorite authors of
all time is Oh my soul. I follow you on Twitter, and I
know you like to discuss a lot of other research you've done on
his work. Yes.
So many books. The first one that came to mind
is the vision of the anointed self-congratulations, as a basis
for social policy. What do people need to know
about the vision of the anointed?
Well I think the vision of the anointed is probably the most
important, Thomas Soul book actually because it talks about
the phenomenon that we're seeing today.
A of sort of the universally wrong expert, what Tom Soul does
in the vision of the anointing is contrast to views almost of
human functioning. There's what he calls the tragic
Vision, which is the idea that human nature is hard to change
and knowledge is hard to get. So institutional rules tend to
exist for a reason to some extent.
This is chesterton's fence, kind of stuff.
I mean so one of the few debates I ever really lost was with a A
Jesuit priest, we were on stage, I think this was a men's club or
some similar event back in law school and the priest said, oh
you're one of those edgy new atheist guys, right?
I would imagine this like 2005, you don't think there's a God or
any source for these rules? These moral codes that were
discussing and I said some vertical live version of, yeah,
that's about right. I'm not sure.
I'd agree with that today. But the priest then said, well,
would you agree though that there are laws against things
like raping women in your tribe or unprovoked and cold-blooded
murder? Child abuse of the worst kind of
cross, almost every society. And I said, yeah, and the
audience said, yeah and he said, well, then regardless, whether
or not you believe in my version of God, doesn't it imply that
these are true to some extent, that it would be very foolish
for someone to remove that Norm whether or not you can explain
why it exists. Let me that's 10 points on the
debate board or whatever, but it's also just a valid point
that the institutional rationales that exist in society
usually exist, because they've been developed over a long Long
period of time by kind of social interplay between very
intelligent people. I mean the chesterton's fence
example, is very famously like a guy in the original example is
an upper class British man is walking through the woods and he
sees a fence. It's an old broken-down fence,
between two properties. And there are two responses, the
initial response is well, why don't I tear down that fence?
It's a bit of an eyesore, but then the second is well, why
don't I first figure out why the fence is there?
Go knock on the neighbor's door. We haven't talked in Obviously
have vicious dogs. Are there are there fighting
bulls in the yard. Like it would be very stupid
just to get rid of that as ugly as it is, without knowing why
it's up. So that's the tragic Vision that
human beings are not bad per se but flawed predatory monkeys.
It's hard for us to get in, believe knowledge, it's hard to
come up with totally original ideas and when you have
institutions, whether you're talking about the quantitative
Academy or the Catholic church or the family that it performs,
I'm fairly well for Millenia. You want to kind of treasure
those? You want to unpack and see why
they work is they do and whether they can be improved, but you
certainly don't want to destroy them rapidly.
So that that's one of the visions of humanity that he
outlines. And that's the basis I think for
a rational conservatism and going a little Beyond Soul here.
If you're thinking about how you would change in this world,
change would be incremental. I mean, if you think there's a
problem with racism you would take steps to within your
Society minimize racism. One thing I've generally done in
Boss roles is have people on the HR team, just blank out the
names on resumes, for example. So I have no idea.
I'm mildly racist. Is it turns out from the IAT
test and so on toward black people IE?
I slightly favored black people. I'm a black guy and I actually
don't think that's cool. Like, I'm mildly proud to be
black, quote unquote, but I mean, I live in Appalachia, it's
hardly a privileged white area. So I'm actually not at all
positive about the idea of discriminating against a poor
whites. So I just, I just take the names
off, I take the addresses off so I have no idea where this guy's
from all. I'm seeing is engineering
degree, Tulane, and such and such a year or whatnot, and
racism. Essentially, with that mild
incremental, change, becomes impossible.
I suppose that someone could have been a member of the Puerto
Rican, you know, political scientists Association or
something like that. There might be outlier cases but
80 Percent of the bigotry you could engage in is god with this
incremental change. So that that's what the tragic
vision would lead me and I think would lead most other people to
support but I've been rambling on about the tragic vision for
about 5 minutes that's actually not what Tom's Soul devotes the
book too. He says that the alternative to
the tragic compilation of knowledge over time.
Vision is the vision of the anointed which is the idea that
sort of we're in a new era, we have an academy that's able to
do things. It was not able to do before.
So knowledge is is being developed very rapidly and this
rapidly developed knowledge, allows us to change people, very
rapidly one. And it also makes experts far
far more intelligent than the majority of people.
So when you're talking to someone with a master's degree
in sociology, you're talking to someone who has the almost magic
knowledge that's coming out of this new field qualitative
sociology. So the vision of the anointed is
sort of we have new knowledge has now that we never had before
these knowledge has Concentrated in experts and these knowledge
has allowed the very rapid change of mankind.
So new knowledge concentrated at experts rapid, change of mankind
and these Visions lead to dramatically different
perceptions about outcomes. So if you believe in the vision
of the anointed, what you would want to do is allow the experts
from the studies fields from sociology from the newer fields
that were just developing to reshape the institutions that we
have in society the old and Sites of the Catholic Church are
copernican or Worse, right? They don't apply anymore to this
Brave New World, where we have the Marxist, dialectic and where
we have state and our and so on and what soul says to some
extent is that this is an empirical question.
You can look at whether the insights of Sociology are really
anything more than recycled human thought of the kind that
judges and, you know, women Circle leaders and so on have
been engaging in for a thousand years, he doesn't think they
are. I Either, but you can analyze
this to some extent and you can compare the results of policies
implemented using the vision of the anointed with the results of
policies implemented using the older tragic vision and so the
book is actually very empirical I mean it does this there three
or four major sections he looks at criminal justice policy.
For example, the vision of the anointed in this situation,
focuses on the idea that we now have these fields.
Ecology and psycho metrics that. Understand that there are
complex mental reasons. People commit crimes.
So, the way to reduce crime is to a improve Society so that
people no longer feel oppressed. And outcasts, and be
specifically treat the mentally ill to make them better people,
which should be easy to do, because of the new knowledge
that we have. And he contrast that with the
tragic Vision, which is that the way to reduce crime is to have a
policeman beat your ass if you commit crimes, like you get
Upside and you get tossed in the county jail for a couple days.
So is moving away. From the older model, IE
reducing the ability of the police to engage in corporal
punishment. Reducing the length of sentences
cleaning up. Jails, will that increase or
decrease crime? One of the points.
He says that I often die crib. Word-for-word often when I
debate online is, this is not a moral question.
It's an empirical question and so he spends about 40 pages on
this and obviously, as you know is an intelligent guy, that's
read some books in this. Field.
What happened was that when we move toward the theory of the
anointed that we should spend more money on social work,
Social Services sentences should be shorter.
We should convince people to Criminal Justice System wasn't
racist, what happened was that crime, surged dramatically it,
didn't drop it. All it turned out that the
majority of criminals mean, the the 60% majority of criminals
are still white, they had never found the criminal justice
system to be racist. The thing that was constraining
them was simply how Likely they were to be arrested or beaten or
locked up and as that likelihood dropped they began to engage in
dramatically more crime. So you saw Irish American,
Italian, American Hispanic Caucasian crime rate, surge even
among black criminals, I mean, there might have been, you know,
a sense of feeling that Justice had increased, but that was
counterbalanced by the idea that it was now easier to victimize.
And most of the victims turned out to be other black people.
So you saw black crime surge, so Soul points out.
And I mean, I'll kind of shut up after this, because we've gone
for A couple minutes on this but Soul points out that you can
just really measure this. I mean between 1963 and 1993
crime increased about five hundred percent.
We sometimes forget this but the new normal for Crime that those
of us that grew up in the 90s saw where people would get on
trains and you know musk Ali have sex in big cities or people
would paint graffiti. You walk up the stairs and New
York or even Indianapolis. There's graffiti all over the
walls. You know that that one movie
Kids the movie New Jack City that was a very new Era.
Even if it tough blacker, Irish neighborhood in the 1960s, you
would never see that police would prevent it fathers would
prevent it was, it was not a thing, you saw.
But we saw that for decades when we were kids and now we're
seeing it again. Following George Floyd, that's
that's a result of conscious policing decisions that were
made on the basis of these well-intentioned, but asinine
ideas. So the vision of the anointed
goes through this chapter by chapter, I mean it goes through
criminal justice but then it goes through sex education, it
goes to Economic Policy. So on down the line, it's a
fascinating book. There is a section here.
It says, the first order of business for the anointed has
been to turn the tables on society, which must itself be
made to feel guilty for what it complains of, in this section.
He talks about how whenever people see a problem, they will
blame society as opposed to the more tragic Vision, which will
blame the individual. It's amazing how the more you
blame society, the less each person feels like they have.
Vested interest. So you won't have the police
officers or the father's forcibly stopping people.
From, you know, doing graffiti on the subway, they'll just say,
gosh, the system really needs to change.
Well, my hands are clean because it's actually the system's fault
and colonialism and a number of other things, he then has a page
where he goes through a series of stages.
He says a very distinct pattern has emerged repeatedly when
policies favored by the anointed.
Turn out to fail. Well, this pattern typically has
four stages crisis solution, results and response.
Walk us through why this is important.
This is, this is my favorite graphic it again.
SOL, SOL is sometimes criticized for not being empirical enough,
this is a very empirical book so he breaks down the four stages
of every one of these proposals we just saw this with police
defunding. So the first stage is that you
identify some kind of Crisis that supposedly exists like
crime. Let's actually do police
defunding so the Crisis that supposedly existed during the
George Floyd. Jacob Lake, Michael Brown, early
years of the quote-unquote racial Reckoning was that there
was a mass wave of police killing young innocent men,
especially unarmed black man. I think that's a fair cross
racial summary of it. We saw these cases including the
three, I've mentioned Trayvon Martin, even Dylan Noble on the
white side. These are on TV everyday.
So this is the idea of the police are out here.
Massacring people, especially black people, especially on our
black. People the average liberal I
read recently, skeptic Research Center, I believe.
Thanks that between 1,000 and 10,000, unarmed black men, alone
are killed by police during a typical year, so this is the
crisis that is invented mainstream media outlets in
Gio's, Academia. All of these institutions
currently lead more than 90% to the upper middle class,
political left, and they all kind of transmute.
And they promote this story and we see this all the time from
Trump is Russian spy to, in a racial crime, against black
people to systemic racism in medicine.
These narratives come constantly down the pipeline.
And that's what that's what the triple 0 g is referred to in
this book. But so, in this particular case,
the storyline is in a 10,000 unarmed Brothers, a year, or
killed the reality, of course, was that this never happened.
That's a clause in Souls, great paragraph, describing the
crisis. He says, most of these crises
are not real by the 1950s crime in the USA.
Was it one of its lowest levels ever?
It was declining for black men. It was declining for Irishman.
It was declining for Italians. I imagine those three groups
probably accounted for half the crime in the country, at the
time, is declining for a Min overall, but you declare the
crisis. And in this case, we declared
that the crisis was Police Murder.
So, step two is the solution, you implement all of these
policies. I mean, over the past couple of
years, we've seen major police departments, like New York City,
which is often a Bellwether reduce their stops by between 35
and 50 percent. So that's the Adds to the
crisis. You quote, unquote, defund the
police cities. Like la like NYC.
This never reached the levels that right-wing media said it
didn't, but it was very real. I mean, you saw police
departments cutting their budgets by five by seven percent
more to the point. You saw them reducing infield
stops, which is really the key variable here by more than 30%.
So there's a direct response, like we're going to take those
officers on the street. We're going to put them out into
community policing, we're going to put them on sort of the
engaging, with black leaders beat because the The important
thing is that we stop massacring these innocent people, we
rebuild our relationship with the black community, and that's
when you'll see crime drop. So again, you have direct
counter predictions here, that can be measured the prediction
of those with the tragic vision. Is that criminals are in general
bad, people more than half of them, are whites and Latinos who
don't give a damn about any of this civil rights stuff.
And that when you stop policing in these diverse, some
neighborhoods are going to see a surgeon crime, that's the tragic
vision and to anyone's dada. Golf Course or the basketball
court or in the barbershop it would be as obvious as two.
Plus two is four, the prediction of the anointed is a little more
complicated. They always call our predictions
simplistic but it's basically that, you know, as people learn
to trust the justice system more and as the massacres stop people
would be more comfortable engaging with the police.
And the police would be freed from Simply harassing black
Innocents, to go, chase rapists and so on.
And so you'd see a drop in crime, and the Assumption there
is that the police do spend a great deal of time engaging.
Aging in racist, violence has nothing to do with police.
That's a baseline Assumption of the vision of the anointed
otherwise it doesn't make sense and so then you get into step 3.
So step two, the solution is cut the stops by half cut the
budgets by 7% devote the police to community policing, pure
anointed Solutions. Step three is you look at the
results and soul has a great line here where he says the
policies of the anointed or implemented and Lead directly
to, you know, - result Z like We've been told all along will
not happen but what everyone in the hood in the mostly Caucasian
suburbs. I do on the athletic fields that
have talking about knew what happened.
Everyone knew it, everyone called it.
And that's what happened. I mean in 2020 and 2021, we saw
murders soar above 20,000, murders of the most reliable
crime data for the first time since like 1994.
And I mean, that's the year before broken windows policing.
I mean, it's an unbelievable predictable.
Pattern. As soon as we stop doing the
things that we've been doing and black and poor white
neighborhoods crime, went back to exactly the point where it
was, except with a slight increase, the reflux, like the
six percent, or whatever increase in population.
It's exactly what you would have predicted.
If you were kind of a cynical businessman, on the tragic side,
the which I am. But anyway, so and then step
four is that the the anointed will deny that the obvious Is
the obvious pattern and we're seeing this now.
I mean, I frequently debate online, with I've mentioned, the
sociologist Rod G, the doctor - Iquitos some other people.
I don't think people are bad as men, but they're good
representatives of kind of the left-wing school on this.
The psychologist, Pat Lockwood is kind of in the middle,
sometimes jump in and what these guys will say is, well, it's
you're being too simplistic Riley.
Like, yeah, I know, we saw this. I know we saw these shifted
back, but you have to understand, they're also covid
effect. And so you tend to get lost.
Like to publish a research paper on this.
I'm probably gonna have to adjust for all this bullshit.
Forgive me like, you know, but was it, the disease affects, you
know, and five years later will know, of course, it was the fact
that we pulled back the police, but by then the story will be
gone from the headlines and you won't be able to get your paper
cited in the times or anything. So, it's just, it's just that, I
mean, first world problems there, that's the ultimate,
first world sentence. Like your paper won't get its
recognition, but I mean, like, it really is this consistent
pattern, right? It's just like we the anointed
says, one thing. Like teaching kids about
Hardbody raw, anal, sex is going to make them have sex less
because they will respect their bodies more in the understand a
range of options. And every one that hooked up in
high school straight or gay is like, no, it's gonna make them
have sex at parties. Now, that they understand how to
do this. The only reason even girl said
no to anal, was that lube. And so on wasn't involved, this
will dramatically increase the frequency of this type of Sex.
And the, this will then be tested five years later, you'll
look at reported rates of And of course Taipei among high school
and college women. It will have surged by 30% and
then there will be a series of denials about it.
How, you know, the feminism in our culture can also explain
this this occurred. That's just a sideline example.
What it relates to souls comment on sexual education.
He talks about STD rates in the book, like all of these things,
follow this same very predictable pattern.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this pattern is
predictable. He wrote a gun, another great
book called civil rights, rhetoric or reality.
And there's a section in here, where he says before crediting,
either political policy with economic gains, it is worth
considering what trends were already underway before they
were instituted in the period from 1954 to 1964.
For example, the number of blacks and professional
Technical and similar high-level positions, more than doubled.
The reason that's so important is because I'm ashamed.
Say it literally never occurred to me to say, well, what was
happening before the implementation of policy X
policy. Why I think soul is just so good
on issues like that, and it was just totally new for me,
anything with regards to civil rights or the ability to
empirically test theories that you learn from Thomas Soul.
Yeah. Well I think so.
No, I often say that for a tenure track professor at a
State University like I'm a Holiday - methodologist.
I mean I'm definitely good enough to get an academic or
think-tank paper published. I mean I know what I'm doing.
I think Souls about that same level.
His methods were used to be cutting edge.
He's still quite good, but he's moving on port age 90.
But I think that Beyond just the tricks because neither of us is
doing like regressions that take eight pages to print out, or
something like that. What's so great about so is that
he expand? I try to do this myself when I
teach methodology, I mean I am a professor of the subject as
well. So we both, you know what we're
doing. But I think what's so great
about souls that? He very clearly explains from a
pretty politically neutral standpoint.
I mean stole is on the right a little bit.
He's a registered political independent.
Just the tricks that everybody uses and how you can get around
these tricks and make accurate effective scientific
predictions. So I mean the first thing that
we talked about is the importance of effective
modeling. So we just went through his
model of how things almost inevitably collapse after
excited. So by the anointed, another
point that Soul makes that may be a question later.
So I'm not going to go out and go off on this for too long, but
it's just the importance of adjusting for things.
If you're doing regression which I think you he and I are all at
a level to do sort of analysis. You see in most serious papers.
What you're doing is trying to compare equivalent people so you
can see the effect of one thing like racism if that makes sense.
So I mean if you're running stata or are your Looking at
your dependent variable is for example, something like income.
And you might be interested in the impact of prejudice on
income. But to find that out, you're
going to adjust for age. The most common age for a black
man. As I always say, is 27 for a
white man. It's 58.
You're going to adjust for region minorities are far more
likely than whites to live in the south or the Southwest where
wages are far lower. This is mildly controversial but
you're going to have to adjust for test scores.
I think the gaps here. Cultural rather than genetic.
There's quite a lot of literature on both sides, but
the simple reality is that if your SATs 950, you're going to
have a different job than you would, if it were 11:18, those
are the averages for blacks and for I believe want to be Asian
groups respectively. So, when you adjust for all of
this so that you're comparing a black guy who's 27 went to U of,
I got an 11:00 lives in Missouri with a white guy.
Who's 27 went to U of, I got an 11:00 lives in Missouri.
If you see a 3% difference in income, there that's likely due
to racism. If you simply find an inn even
there, it's questionable or what fields are the two men going
through so on. But if you find an initial
starting point, thirty percent Gap in the wages of these two
guys. And that's as far as almost all
journalistic reporting and about half of the social science
papers ever, get that doesn't mean anything at all.
So one of the things I learned from solar just always adjust,
always be honest with it. Set up your model, explain,
what's in? In it and put in the variables
other than racism, that likely explain the gaps that you're
looking at. And in terms of the particular
question that you asked, oh yeah, pre-existing trendlines,
this is another one. Like, I guess the simplest way
to say this would be, what is your, what is your beginning
year? And why?
So you very often see when people are looking at the Civil
Rights Movement, you very often, see people beginning with the
year 1964, which of course was when we pass that great
accomplishment, the civil Where are the year 1967, which is when
affirmative action began. That was the national
Philadelphia plan under mr. Nixon and saying, well since
that point, black incomes have increased substantially at a
four percent annual rate. The problem with that as Soul
points out in the book is civil rights rhetoric and reality as
you said is that black incomes have been increasing at that
same four percent annual rate for something like 35 years.
Before this happen? The, the idea of the black
family is being entirely Southern and lower class, hadn't
been true for decades. He's I mean that's like Gunnar
myrdal era stuff. I mean, the Great Migration had
already happened. The Harlem Renaissance was in
the 1920s, blacks and many Northern cities made his men,
much as members of many oppressed white group, so, on
down the line, so, Obviously I do think the Civil Rights
Movement was useful, it did help out those brothers
quote-unquote, who are still stuck in the South who are
facing certain obstacles. But you can't just say what made
the African-American Community successful was a decision by the
government to pursue policy x. What actually made the black
community successful and indeed many of those white communities.
I describe the Irish, for example, migrated outside of the
tenement core areas of cities where there was very little for
them. I began to seek out jobs in the
suburbs. They began to explore
construction even farming. These are often very libertarian
individual choices by people that began to move these groups
forward. So I think again where you're
beginning, your frame has an effect on what you think groups
and countries should do going forward.
If you think that the government pulled black people or Irish men
out of poverty, by making major national scale moves your
assumption will be that with fur Example, Mexican Americans today
or something like that. That's what will be required.
It's always the state. We need to expand the state.
If you simply change your beginning year in the model and
realize oh the state had nothing to do with this.
The law was probably a good idea but 95 or whatever percent of
the increase came about due to Natural declines.
That bigotry and migration patterns that leads you to
totally different starting assumptions.
I mean, that actually began And a really valid conversation
where you can ask, does it make sense to take away people's
freedom of Association to produce the other three or four
percent in economic gains there? That's it.
That's a pretty significant question.
I mean, modern civil rights law dramatically limits, what you
can do, I couldn't operate a club.
If it used any kind of resources from a city, anything like that,
that catered to, for example, upper middle-class black men.
I mean, the moment it came out. That we had reject not that I
would probably but I mean the moment it came out that we had
rejected a Caucasian or Asian or something like that applicant.
I mean lat the lawsuits would begin.
The business would be destroyed again, not something I want to
do, but should you have the right to do that in the absence
of a formalized legal, right? That would be a conversation.
We could have right now, we can't and all that rests on a
misunderstanding of data. So the misuse of numbers and
these obscure social sciences is important One of seoul's great
intellectual contributions. I think is his ability to
analyze. The origins of what's referred
to as Black Culture or even the ebonics language finding the
origins in places like England. Are you familiar with his
General thesis in Black rednecks and white liberals?
Yeah, of course. So I think black rednecks and
white liberals is a really interesting book.
There's a deeper question. So culturalism, we write down a
few things, hey ve. So, first of all Tom's soul is
one of the most prominent Advocates of What's My
Philosophy, about most things in terms of human performance which
you could call culturalism. So, stripped of a few nonsense
philosophies in a feminist Marxism.
In the like there are pretty much three explanations Ins for
why we see gaps in performance between groups.
And by the way, you know, the even Candis.
And so on again, aside, gaps in performance between groups, as a
political scientist are a characteristic of every society
on Earth, you know, the Flemings and the balloons and Belgium and
the different groups in Nigeria, some of which have IQ scores 10
points above ours and some of which are still living a largely
tribal existence and now the wooded Northlands of the country
and so on, I mean, there there are massive differences.
In performance among people of the same race and of different
races in every country, I can imagine around the world.
I mean, I'm thinking about the, what does it pre booming, the
indigenous Malaysians and then the Chinese and Malaysia, you
know, the Indians there occupy a role between those two groups
and all these groups are I suppose racist toward each
other, but the government includes representation from all
of them racism, is almost by definition, not the reason for
these performance gaps. So, the idea that performance
gaps, Or unusual is just wrong. It's a provincial American idea.
I don't know any political scientist that takes it.
Seriously some sociologists do but leaving the academic
squabbling aside. Their three explanations for.
Why these gaps exist. One is what you could call
critical theory, which is sort of the candy and Elizabeth and
realism I just mentioned. But the idea is that some kind
of prejudice. Generally racial Prejudice on
the domestic front I guess you could argue class prejudiced
More broadly is responsible. So eeprom candy basically says
that all gaps in performance between any groups anywhere due
to racism. It's hard for me to take this
explanation, seriously for the reasons that I've just given, if
you, if you look overseas and how people perform and so on,
even in the u.s.a., I mean, for example, Asians earn 30% more
than whites do. And it's hard to say, well,
that's because this is an institutionally Korean
supremacist system. But decrypt model, The kind of
makes sense. If you apply it to whites and
blacks, it's essentially that all gaps are due to racism some
form of hidden sophisticated racism, the hereditary and model
is a bit clearer. It's the oldest of these models
and it is essentially the argument that gaps in
performance between groups are due to genetic differences.
So the reason that Asians score higher on IQ tests than white
who score more highly than an blacks who perform about equally
with Hispanics, who outscore natives is genetic differences
that there are gys style predictors of intelligence and
that those vary among population groups, that's hereditary anism.
And like I said, this is kind of the simplest of these theories.
I mean the reason there are more black guys in the NBA is a black
eyes, jump a little bit higher. The third theory of group
performance has fallen out of fashion for some reason, but to
me is by The most persuasive and it's called culturalism.
And the idea is that there may be some four percent genetic
differences between groups. But these tend to vary all over
the board, for example, whites have slightly better Vision than
blacks. I see no reason that if you're
looking at basketball, that would encounter being able to
jump one inch higher. You know, there's this broad
range of abilities among people and the differences seem to be
generally tiny. There's a famous that this is
just a sideline. It's kind of funny but there's a
famous study in the Journal of Urology where they actually
measured the penises of something like 2,000 men.
They wanted to test whether stereotypes about forgive me.
Dick, size were real and what they found was hilarious.
First of all, all the penises are on average about five inches
long and secondarily. There were no massive racial
group differences. I think black guys on average
were like five point, eight inches whites were like 5.6
Asians were like 5.3. So like there were there's a Gap
there. But the, the writer of the study
who is a woman very politely said men.
White might want to focus more on oral sex and physical health
than on directly competing. The racial gaps are little,
these are, these are all pretty much in the same range and
that's my opinion on the genetic stuff.
I don't think the racial the racism stuff is really worth
taking, seriously. In a lot of situations, I can't
imagine that the reason East Indians outperform whites is
that Society displays some kind of subtle biases.
Against whites and toward East Indians.
But the culturalist perspective is simply that on average.
In each group, there are differing percentages of people
with different interests and abilities and levels of training
as the result of a large number of different things.
I mean, what the founder culture was.
So the founder culture for black Americans came from the medieval
level Warrior societies of central Africa.
It was the iron using tribal city states that were defeated
by the Ashanti. Adame.
And there were shipped over here basically.
So that's, that's the Baseline some literacy, not much fighter
cultures. Generally, the males are the
people that came here. Then there's encounter culture,
which is the group of people that you run into when your new
space and this is where we're going to get into black rednecks
and white liberal seriously for a minute or two, then there are
kind of structural variables that don't have anything to do
with racism. So I think something that really
impacted the black community is that when we got to the north we
got to the North at almost exactly the same the same time
Northern cities moved to the left and stop kind of kicking
the white trash out of the Irish and the Italians, if you will.
So, there'd been brutal. Anti-crime.
Policies for a long time in New York, or Providence like Patty.
Wagon is a term that has a Genesis and that stopped when
black people got there. So, I mean, you saw black
migrants arrive from the south with a culture that was at least
on par with the Irish migrants. At the same time, people stopped
enforcing the law. So you start cloward and Piven
welfare, if you're familiar with that check started coming out
early in the 1970s, you couldn't have a man in the house to
receive what at the time, was a pretty good supplement of money.
And so, you saw black families collapse.
For this reason, I had nothing to do with racism, nothing to do
with genes between 1945 and 1985.
The blackie legitimacy rate went from about 10 percent to about
70 percent. So that's that's culturalism or
that systems theory, like they're all these things Tribute
to this founder culture and counterculture variables, other
than Prejudice, you'd have to throw in past bias.
I mean, I frankly assume Southern written X and blacks
hated each other as a great deal of black and back and forth
violence with them, getting the better of it.
So how does that does that contribute to your attitude
toward whites? Which we certainly see.
There's a large amount of black-on-white crime, it's never
discussed. So all of this makes the culture
that you have at a given time. So I'm a culture list, I mean
there might be two percent potential IQ differences cause
my G Jeans or racism or something, but I think when you
look at like levels of black crime in Baltimore like that,
something as the mayor of Baltimore, I think I could
reduce that by 90% if I were given full range to do so the
odds of that happening would given the methods involved and
so on are zero like 0.0% but I think that those cultural or
systemic variables are pretty key and kind of back on track.
I mean black rednecks is just Soul explaining culturalism and
he says this a very important point that Leaders like this
kind of trendy idea that Black Culture came from Africa and
that specifically, it came from the great powers of Africa, that
sometimes fought the British about evenly and that had the
cool kente cloth. And then that the, the dope
hats. I mean, like the Ashanti and the
banana and so on. And he points out that there's
no evidence for this at all. Like those are actually the
enemies of the people that became black Americans who beat
us and sent us over here. Like, there's very little by me
bluntly real. There's very little of the
language of those groups. Oops, in avf can American
vernacular English and doing a basic obvious analysis that I've
never seen anyone else to do. He Compares about 200 words in
white trash dialect. Like Scottish Highland redneck
dialect with African American vernacular English and he
actually finds the overlap. There's like 98.6% that these
two groups live next to one another and fought each other
for 200 years and began to behave very, similarly and
written X, quote-unquote, today, still have a Early High rate of
violence so on, but unlike their white competitors Southern
blacks migrated to the north to seek out specific jobs or what
we're becoming majority black cities.
So you took a culture, that would have been 90 percent.
Is problematic had Appalachian whites brought it up, but you
took it in massive numbers to Detroit, Memphis cities like
that, and that became Urban slum, culture, Urban slum
culture was Black, ex white redneck culture.
Stood two cities where the law was no longer followed and it's
a really Innovative explanation. I don't know whether it's
entirely true, but it's hard not to see a lot of that.
I mean, if you're on a bus with a bunch of hood, black dudes, I
mean, the language used, I'm finna get mines, is exactly what
you would hear in regions of Appalachia, where I travel right
hunt or something like that. So, it seems a lot more
plausible that that is the inspiratory or for violent,
Urban culture than the those characteristics somehow came
here. From long ago, African
populations. I love that you brought up a
cloward and Piven. Did you ever see Frances Fox
Piven? Debating Thomas, Soul know.
I pay a lot of money to see that though.
Know what was her side of the debate?
I mean that she was anointed policy.
We know didn't work. Yeah, so she was saying, well,
it was these affirmative action policies that black Americans
fought for for so long and he interrupts her.
He goes, no, damn it. That's the idea is that you put
in the mouths of black Americans, blacks have never
more than 30 percent supported. A b and c policy.
She is the perfect person for excuse me, for the anointed
Vision. I mean, every single
shortcoming. We are just like two pieces of
legislation and a few tax points away from just having a
solution. Speaking of the word solution,
one of my favorite quotes from him.
I want to say it's in a conflict of Visions where he mentions
that there are no Solutions only.
Trade-offs, I can find the page because I had forgotten that
What what does that mean? There are no Solutions only
trade-offs. Well I think that I'm glad you
brought that up because even as versus the idea of the anointed
versus the tragic Vision that maybe Souls best quote on
leadership, that may be the best quote on leadership I've ever
heard. Actually what it means is that
you can't directly solve problems.
Excuse me, without externalities that are massively - and this is
something people forget when you look at leaders especially young
and - you know, Junior Executives or just tenured
faculty, there's a desire to take this on and knock out this
problem. Like we're going to solve world
hunger and I used to feel this way, I mean I volunteered with
Habitat, for Humanity, the Human Rights Campaign, just so on down
the line, I actually love doing good works.
We just ran a GoFundMe page for a major health care procedure
through my Twitter, my social, but I think that as you get
older you understand that there's no such thing as Is just
solving a problem without externalities.
What you're generally doing is sacrificing a massive amount of
money or Freedom or something else to resolve the issue and
soul in his books. And yeah it is a conflict of
Visions. I believe explains how this
works in practice. So one of the things is Airline
safety like in the 70s and 80s, we honestly used to have very
poor Airline safety. You know there was a situation
where a baby was ripped out of his mother's arms, his mother.
By the way he's holding a drink. Like she's a nice lady.
It's The most the stories, but this one you could drink on
Poise. You still drink applies when you
drink a lot on planes. So, I mean, you imagine this
where you have the, the ashtrays and the arm rests and, you know,
everyone in the Rose, holding a martini glass, and you got a
baby just under your arm. Is this is old-school.
Aviation people like hooking up in the bathroom.
The pilot is sitting up there singing.
This is business travel at this point and they hit some
turbulent air and people get hurt like someone falls down
injures their leg and the baby. This is the important point is
Ripped out, the mother's arms thrown across hits, the cabin
door to that time is old school hardwood and is killed.
I assume horribly head shattered, probably blood and
brains on the ground, and the response to this is, well, we're
going to fix up a lot of this. We're no none of these Antics.
But even at the first level, even if you cut drinking on
planes by half, even if you made everyone sit down the entire
flight, you're massively inconveniencing hundreds of
millions of people. So I mean, I would say you can
put a dollar value on that, maybe fifty dollars per person
and you could ask whether The loss of one life every 10 years,
valued at the usual 10 million dollars by the actuaries,
whether that is worth that move, that sounds cold and brutal.
But I mean we don't Harden the tires of every car or lower the
speed limit every time someone's killed in an auto wreck.
So, even at that first level, do you make this massive move?
Do you remove the social amenities on planes?
Do you keep the seat belt? Sign fought on the entire
flight? Affecting people with bladder
issues. Do do all this in response to
one death but we didn't just do this.
I mean we Mandated the purchase of seats for infants, we
mandated strap Downs, with, can themselves be quite dangerous
for infants. I believe you have to use a sort
of baby seat on a plane, although they give it to you.
I don't know, I haven't flown with an infant, but I mean, all
of this stuff was done in response to the situation that
killed one person that hurt one person and soul points out that
the total cost of it was something like 1.8 billion, not
massive, but pretty high. I mean enough to affect the
ticket of everyone. Flying on that Airline by about
25 dollars. Let's Date for the next couple
of years, down the road and he makes the obvious point that if
even a thousand people didn't fly because of that, that led to
one death and obviously it would be more people than that.
Like if all tickets increased by dollar amount X more than $20,
more than 20 years ago and you had to buy separate seats for
infants doubling the cost of your flight and you are no
longer allowed to do certain things in the flight becomes
much more unpleasant. I think we've all flown modern
commercial you know non first class air Are tens of thousands
of people were probably like fuck it.
I'm going to drive the issue with this is that it's much more
dangerous to drive than to fly. The the range of negative
externalities had just skyrocketed sharply upward.
So in reality saving the life of the next baby and we've never
had a baby killed like that again although I will know we
had never previously had a baby killed like that was an unusual
freak accident but saving the life of the next baby.
Probably cost, 15 20 lives and that's what Is meant by there
are no Solutions, they're only trade-offs.
Do you, when you see the brain spattered against the bulkhead,
do you make some basic changes? Like, not allowing mothers with
babies, for example, to consume alcohol or monitoring that row?
Very closely. I mean, either certainly things
I would do, you know what that to happen, but do it again.
I've read different stories on this, I don't know.
No one's saying to the mother was drunk or anything like that.
We don't know the details of case.
But like, do you do something like that or do you on the the
other hand change, everything about the plane and raise the
price of the tickets and kill a bunch of people.
And I think a lot of people move toward option to they're saying,
I'm going to permanently fix this issue and that may not be
the best way to go about this, so that that's Souls Point.
Yeah, I have seen a number of examples of this one is to say
that, well, what we have are people that earn low amounts of
money, the way we solve this, Shoe is we raise the minimum
wage this way? No one's able to pay someone so
little. Well it turns out this increases
the likelihood of someone never getting a job opportunity in the
first place until they're much older, and then they're less
desirable. And since they never got their
foot in the door to get on the job skills, it's harder for them
when they get older to compete with other people.
So they have fewer skills, they have less money because it's
more expensive people like Amazon and Walmart could easily
grow. Smaller businesses can't
compete. So now, consumers have less
options. Now, employees have less places
to go. So the more you raise these
hurdles without ever, considering the secondary costs,
it's just such an important introduction into how you can
start to analyze things. There is another book.
Titled applied economics, Thinking Beyond stage one.
Where Seoul says, the voters political decisions involve
having a minut influence on policies, which affect many
other people while economic Session making is about having a
major effect on one's own personal well-being.
My understanding here is that he's saying, look, people are
ignorant about politics, but it's rational for them to do so
because you could spend thousands of hours and maybe
understand agricultural subsidies, but you're still
going to get a one in 100 million vote and that's not
really going to tip. And it even if your guy wins
because of your vote, he's probably a liar.
So people don't really get involved politically Lee.
What do you think about this as a potential explanation?
Rational this sort of rational irrationalities about why the
average person who might say, I love politics is still very
ignorant empirically. I think it's probably true.
I will say this is the last line.
I feel kind of guilty about my description of the, the mom and
the the previous scenario, like accounts of, you know, whether
all the people on this plane were drinking.
And so, on vary, from what I've seen, so no one's blaming her
for this. This Terrible accident.
The my point is just the over-reaction damaged, a lot of
people so but moving on, because that's pretty much it.
The thing about voting, I think that your point, your analysis
is good, voting is not actually, this is kind of taboo for
political scientist to say but voting is actually an irrational
waste of time. Most of the time to some extent,
you're very very unlikely to sway.
The result of an election by Your vote even when people talk
about very close, intense races. And so on Bush, V Gore.
I mean the margin and you're talking about one state, not one
of our three biggest, I mean the margin was 500 votes before they
got into the Chad's. There's a very, very little
chance. You personally are going to
impact an election. I vote as a kind of wrote civic
duty in the way I go to church on Christmas and Easter.
And I most political scientists. I know don't vote at all, to be
honest. So yeah, I think Sit when you're
saying that it's rational not to engage too much with the issues.
I think that's probably correct. The one issue with that though
is that in understanding what's going on in the world.
Also impacts almost literally everything else you do so for
example if you invest knowing that Jim Cramer is almost always
wrong or that climate change is not going to destroy the world.
World but that there are things people are going to do in
response. So I'm investing in Seawall
companies that kind of thing. I mean, that's all very useful.
So I mean that would require reading up on climate change or
reading up on the failures of the media, the Business Media
song. So, I mean, I've read both of
those books recently and they were fascinating and the same
thing really worth anything else just to minimize personal fear,
you know, you might be interested in looking at the
numbers on black lives matter, on the left, how many people
actually are? Killed by police officers or the
equivalent on the right. How many white women are raped
to death by gangs of black men or illegal immigrants and when
you realize that the number on both sides is 18 or something
like that. There's going to be a dramatic
effect on your personal mental health.
So I encourage people to get as much knowledge as possible.
I mean you you want to be aware that you generally shouldn't be
afraid. Most of the time you want to be,
you know, able to do other things like make money in the
market. Market.
You want to be able to judge a media and talk trash when you
watch political Sports media with your friends.
But you, I mean you want to be able to vote in local elections.
I mean, they a lot of these elections were things are
critical are, for example, School Board races where an
accurate understanding of the lies on both the left and the
right about CRT could help me pick a candidate.
And where the winning candidates going to get 12 votes.
I mean, so there's a lot to be said about gaining knowledge but
when it comes to voting and National races, I mean when
people criticize individuals for just In the donkey or the
elephant or not really going deep into the issues that are
being discussed, Ukraine. Yeah, that that's likely a
rational choice because quite frankly, whether Ukraine or
Russia wins is going to have no impact on your life whatsoever.
I mean, in the, at the presidential level, I mean,
Whether Kamala Harris or Rhonda Santa's I think biting and Trump
are both of that level of daughter and where they could do
real damage, but whether Kamala Harris are Rhonda Santa's wins
in most ways. If you're in an independent
state with a strong, Governor isn't going to affect her life,
very much. So, people behave appropriately,
they, they take the citizenship Duty, they walk into the booth
they spend four hours on it, but no, I mean, people don't deeply
prepare themselves for elections and that's because we're not a
city-state of 50,000 people. I mean, they're close to 400
million Americans. So wrote a book called knowledge
and decisions, tell me what what you think this means and if and
I hope I'm not repeating myself from the anointed book, but I
think this is a different analysis.
He says the use of knowledge in decision-making processes
affecting social well-being. Depends not only on the supply
of ideas which are usually abundant but on some process of
authentication to weed out and reshape those ideas in the light
of faith. Back from actual experience,
resulting from their application.
So how do we know if something is a tradition that's been
around for a thousand years? How do we know if that's the way
to do things versus a new way? Is there some system that we
could start embracing? So we could make sure we find
the balance between embracing tradition and still engaging in
progress. Well, yeah, I mean so I think it
one level one of the few things I've ever said it.
A speech that got me booed was that you need liberals and
conservatives? And I think the audience is made
up of a mix of liberals and conservatives and neither side
like that. So people just started sort of
jokingly but really booing and hissing but I mean the reality
is that that's true to some extent like the role of the
conservative is to defend and maintain working and functional
traditions. And the role of the liberal is
to propose new somewhat better ideas.
And both of these are obviously essential.
I mean, you know, 1500 Norman England.
Lynn was a very functional Society.
Produced Noble Knight, some of the most beautiful art we've
ever seen, but at the same time, I don't think anyone today would
say that there were no ways to improve on that Society with it
hereditary semi absolute monarch and so on down the line I mean I
averaged the GDP per capita is probably on the order of a
thousand dollars. Almost 70 was a peasant farmer
and tapeworms were real issue so that Duality is necessary.
To some extent. The I tend to lean more toward
the conservative side, because most new ideas are new,
mutations are very bad. So, I mean, generally, when the
intelligent left suggest an idea like, why don't we defund the
police and transfer, that money to social workers.
It's a parent for a series of logical reasons that this idea
is bad. And why this idea is bad and the
goal of the kind of quantitative serious business.
Agricultural so on, right? Has to be to smack, that idea,
down knock it off the stage. Move on people often ask is the
left ever lost a battle in the culture where?
Yeah, they lose almost all of the battles in the culture War
actually, the only problem is that the media is so complicit
with the political left that then they're immediately memory
hold. But, I mean, anything from the
teaching of hard, gender ideology to kids, which is about
to become a defeat at least in the heartland of the USA to
defunding the police, where, you know, have mr.
Biden standing on stage as saying, we support research.
Refunding. The police at a higher level
than ever before. All of those were left block,
cultural, and political defeats. So that's, that's the role of
the right saying, no, we run the models, you're not moving
Society forward doing this. Even the idea that masking
should become a permanent thing after covid is something that's
supported by more than 40% of left-wingers.
It's absolutely not going to be tolerated by sort of the
business class, the mainstream, right?
Is stop that. So, that is a culture War
defeat. You might see a few isolated.
Images, you know putting masks on the poor little bastards for
a year or two but it that's not going to be what they would have
liked it to be which is what you see if you do business in
Singapore, or Hong Kong people walking around with the cuffs on
their face for six months out of the year.
So the goal of the left is to propose, new ideas, the cup on
your face, the goal of the right is to strike down the bad ones
but obviously there are good left-wing ideas.
I mean, so for example, I don't think gay marriage is something
that the mainstream right is going to attempt to strike down
again. I certainly would not be part of
that campaign. I don't think that there's much
to gain from it. I mean, to the extent that
Eileen libertarian, I don't, I'm not sure.
I think the state should be involved in marriage in the
first place, but that's that is not a thing that appeals much to
me or that would improve life for my country, man, you know.
So every now and then, they get one, right?
And we move forward. What soul is saying.
I think and knowledge and decisions is one of the books.
I've only read once. It's not a book I've engaged in
at Great length. But yeah, I mean, he's obviously
saying that there has to be a way to look at or to review the
thousands or the millions of ideas out there that are taken
seriously across the philosophies across the
religions, across the political perspectives, and decide which
ones have worked and which ones to pursue going forward.
I mean, looking at this from a sinner right perspective in the
sense of when we should Ange what we already have?
My comment would be that it's fairly easy to review, how
effective systems are to some extent.
How content do most people say they are with the current
Constitution, how happy your most people in traditional
marriages and so on. I mean, if you ask people about
features of their marriage, I mean, this is something that
happened during a feminist movement in the 70s, which do
people dislike. And I mean, when that actually
occurred women strongly opposed the idea that they weren't
allowed to do things without their husband's consent, so
until 1973 as crazy as this sounds, you needed your
husband's formal signature onto documents to take out a credit
card. As a woman.
I believe even men needed their wife to consent for certain
kinds of credit certain sorts of loan arrangements and couples
did not like this, especially women, I'm sure were
disadvantaged so that that was changed.
The law was changed, Banks. Gradually dropped this policy.
You saw some young newer Banks spring up, the didn't require
this and that was, that was removed.
So I think that feedback from People about which ideas
working, which ideas don't is still the best way to determine
which ideas are successful. This actually gets into all the
books we've been talking about so far.
In fact, because I again in a tragic Vision guy, I think that
the best process of review is broadly sourced national public
what. I'm grappling for a word here
but involving all of the people capitalist might be the word.
Someone with the vision of the anointed, would probably say
that the the best review of whether a policy work is a small
panel from the anointed. I don't I don't think that's the
case and to give an example of this in practice, right?
Are you familiar with Rotten Tomatoes The found viewing
website? One of the there's a weird
phenomenon that we're seeing on Artie right now especially when
it comes to quote unquote content where a whole community
of Wikipedia Style. Movie nerds has grown up around
Rotten Tomatoes. My partner is in it and every
time I He comes out. Thousands of people will watch
either the fell more the bootleg and they will brutally review
it, good or bad and they will upload that review within a day
and that the Rotten Tomatoes is known for that films, have a
million reviews and the audience scores range from like six
percent to 100 percent, the audience scores are almost
entirely accurate. In my opinion, I fall within
five points of every audience score for a movie that I watched
recently, which is what you'd expect with a source pool of a
million. That's not even a random sample.
It's just a Ation, you know, I mean so the other the flip side
though, is it Rotten Tomatoes, still uses another metric, which
is the hundred fifty film review columns in the country and major
Publications and they are always wrong.
There's always an incredible dichotomy between the film
reviewers standard and the audience is standard.
So, with the recent conservative documentary, what is a woman,
which is hilarious, which I strongly recommend watching,
whether you're cheering for, Matt Walsh for his It's just
funny. It's him talking to gender
experts. Some of whom are quite witty
themselves about these basic questions.
Like, do you think a person with a vagina is a female and it's
laugh out loud hilarious. I think wall school.
Also gets the better the exchanges, but it's obviously
very Politically Incorrect. So if you go to Rotten Tomatoes
audience score for what is a woman I think is 93% critics
score is like, 12% or something. But they're only three critics,
I mean, see, you see the Difference between the anointed
review or a small number of people are taking into account.
What they must say, current social mores will they lose
their job? So on and then the audience
score were a million people. And I would bet this pool
includes many of the same critics under pseudonymous
Twitter style. Handles is giving their actual
opinion. So I think that when we judge
ideas one, you simply ask pollster style questions about a
Praxis or a process or a situation like marriage and see
what people say. Two.
I think that the larger the group of respondents you have
and the more representative it is the better.
So this I guess is an idea that I share with soul and I maybe
even extending a little bit from.
So knowledge, rests within the body of the intelligent people
knowledge isn't some unique thing that's contained within a
hidden Ivory Tower Elite at all when you look at the group of
people I mentioned basketball or golf or The Barber Shop earlier.
When you look at the group of grown men in the occasional, A
woman that would be in those situations and they're obviously
female equivalence all over the board but I mean like a local
lawyer farmer deacon at a popular black church.
I mean, a school teacher, a coach, I mean, it's a group of
quite intelligent, people sharing positions, a couple
salesman a criminal. I mean, it's a group of people
that are that have different takes on life and they're all IQ
105 plus that have things to say.
And there are hundreds of rooms like that hundreds of these
local salons around the country. And The world.
And I think that the sum total of intelligence in those, local
salons is dramatically larger than the sum total of
intelligence within a few isolated forums that produce
media. For example, like there are
there is more intelligence in the entire city of Frankfurt, is
Chamber of Commerce. Then there is in one academic
department at my University and I'm not insulting either of
those, but it just seems self-evident.
I mean, one includes the mayor, the chief of police on the line
but we've been trained to look at the second as kind of the
source of real knowledge. And I think it's a problem.
A couple of more of my favorite Soul quotes.
It's funny, you mentioned gay marriage.
So I just thought I'd get this one.
This is from looking for that elusive escalator to success.
He says the very same people who say that government has no right
to interfere with sexual activity between consenting
adults. Believe that the government has
every right to interfere with economic activity between
consenting adults. It's just those quick one-liners
that I love from Soul and then I know we're running up on the
clock here. Thank you so much.
Our time. And then, in basic economics, he
says, in short people tend to do more for their own benefit, then
for the benefit of others. However, unattractive, greed,
maybe it is likely to move food, much faster, saving more lives.
So what he does here is, he says, this is something that
applies to people, not businessmen, not White's, not
politicians. So whether it's Bernie Sanders
or Jeff Bezos or your neighbor human beings are.
Constantly looking to profit, even if it's psychic profit,
even if there's no money involved, people are looking to
increase the benefits and decrease the costs.
So one of the primary arguments in favor of doing something as
well. This or that shouldn't be for
profit, or this should be done by the public.
All you're changing are the incentives, it's the same race
of people, whether a weather. Bernie Sanders has a job in the
public sector or the private sector.
Or if he's in a quote nonprofit, in all of these situations, the
incentives change, but it's still human beings trying to
increase the amount of profit they have.
That's why it's no surprise that when you get someone like fauci
a public servant didn't feel the need to apologize after.
He told everyone to wear masks, and then stopped wearing masks
when he went on 60 Minutes and said, masks are useless, and
then he came out and said, masks should more or less be
mandatory? So the public servant myth that
At Soul, refutes just using economics.
He doesn't even get political about it but he takes Universal
truths and applies them consistently.
So those are just so many of my other favorite ones when it
comes to other things you've learned from Thomas Soul, any
final, thoughts wellö, comment on that.
At that point you made first. Um, yeah, I think that's a very
critical point because when we talk about religious divine's
for example and we talk about people like fauci.
Who's one of my least favorite public figures in the Modern
era. There's there's a tendency to
describe these people as well, at least they're not greedy, at
least their their self. They're not self-serving, at
least, they care. And I think that's a wild
misunderstanding of human nature.
People who go into Power politics care, about power or
about other people's money. They don't care about their
money, but that's not more. Honorable, I mean fauci makes
five hundred thousand dollars a year.
So if OG is primarily motivated by a high salary taken from
others, Or by the power to make an entire nation knuckle under
and walk around with diapers on their face.
That doesn't necessarily make him a better person.
In fact, I'd say the reverse, then me being motivated by the
desire to pick up a few million, a year, in the markets that I
mean that that argument is nonsensical the it reminds me of
the Brahmin kshatriya conflict in India was talking to a good
buddy of mine who's East Indian once.
And I was looking at, like the hierarchy of classes and it's
the, the top three are essentially the priests and
writers the Warriors in the wealthy.
Engines and those three have competed about equally and every
society throughout history. So I said who decided to rank
them 1 2 and 3. And he was like well the priests
wrote the books, so they put themselves first and I kind of
flipped a coin for the next one and it's a joke but it's pretty
much accurate. Like the people saying that
public service is uniquely honorable are the people writing
you know the latest edition of haggle man's MPA their writing
the public service textbook. So I mean that that's a bad
idea. I agree with soul that it's not
a Realistic idea. If you look at the things that
bureaucrats compete for. I mean, in Britain, it used to
be a Knighthood over here. It's the lifelong pension.
I mean, I have great respect for our soldier but he never talked
to one of the military boys. He's on about a year nineteen.
I mean, they're they're number one motivator might not be
defending the country. It might be getting that last
year and and then cashing out at 105 percent of what you made
while on the forces and nothing wrong with that.
You at least did an honorable thing for much of your life
there. But there are clear motivations
Whatever that pension payout figure would be there is I'm
sure but there are clear motivations for why people are
doing what they're doing in every field not just in, you
know, filthy business. So I think that's absolutely
correct. One of the big problems with the
bureaucratic NGO sector actually, is that there's no
equivalent of profit. That's a sentence is actually
worth repeating. There's no equivalent of profit.
So as a ruthless amoral greedy, businessman, it's pretty easy to
see how good I'm doing and whether people should invest
with me, if I go Go to that business or whatever.
How much money did I make? I mean, last year, how many
books did I sell? If you're thinking about
publishing me as Harper instead of regnery or whatever?
Whatever, that's publisher would be there.
These quantitative metrics. Thank you.
I see that book up on the screen taboo still has still a
best-seller. I don't think we're doing,
pushing them out on a day-to-day basis, that level anymore.
But, I mean, just those are the metrics.
But what is the metric for a charity?
What is the metric for fauci? Is it How many people died
because there's so many ways to dodge around that.
What they'll say invariably is, it would be even more if we had
an implemented. My lockdown policy.
So on, so agent for the response.
Yeah I'm sorry. It's stage for the response from
this new. Yeah great thank God.
We did this or else. Imagine how many people would
have died. What we saw that with the covid.
Catechism? Right?
Where like people were once we saw the vaccines really didn't
work. Now, I will say, they stopped
severe illness, they stop death. If you're an elderly person, go
get Vaccinated. But like didn't work in the
sense of stopping you from getting covid and getting very
sick, which was the promise. Once we saw this, we started
seeing the covid catechism where people would come out and say,
yeah, I got covid again despite being vaccinated, but thank God
for, you know, my two shots and then my three boosters and petzl
Ovid because otherwise this could hypothetically have been
much worse and it was just pure Tom's Soul like the entire
thing. Although again, you're probably
healthier knew what about the entire thing.
Our part. But here's what you're saying.
It would have been dramatically more of a disaster.
So, yes, that was five choose entire pitch.
That's what Burke's said in every one of these cases, the
reality though is that there's no way to know whether that's
true or not. So it's in fact, very hard to
hold bureaucrats to any reasonable standard.
So I in fact rank the bureaucrat as one of the lowest forms of
Power Player life. The motivation isn't their own
honest money, it's either taking your money or having power over
you and there's no real way. Way to hold them accountable.
And that's, that's something that we need to work on.
Even in Academia. We can be held accountable.
What's your number of Publications people?
In that General free-flowing, bureaucratic space.
It's almost impossible. And that that really is an issue
for society. I think that the growth of mass
bureaucracy actually is a major problem.
It's one of the major characteristics of Empires on
decline. If you look at, for example,
education or medicine over the past 50 years, one of the things
that's almost lost The whole debate about why does this shit
cost so much? You know, is it corporate greed?
You know, is it failure of the clientele, the really demand a
product or to seek out Alternatives?
You know, one of the things that's lost in this whole
conversation is just that the support staff.
In those areas has grown something crazy, like, 5,000
percent. So in the schools, we've seen
like a 6% increase in student numbers, 12 percent increase in
teachers and multiple hundred percent increase in bureaucrats,
overseeing Greek, life, and admissions, Mental health.
So on down the line. So that is it's hard to track
and I don't see much purpose to it that turned into kind of a
sideline rent but it's an issue. Yeah.
And one more thing on the black rednecks and white liberals
because I see this as such good news, but of course when you
give people good news, it takes away a large amount of meaning
that that they have. So it's not that.
Well blacks are inferior or blacks just need to sit around
and wait for whites to stop being so racist.
Or else you guys got nowhere to go?
It seems like if I had to summarize.
They had originally embraced sort of the capital theory of
build your skills and make exchanges, and now much like the
Japanese did in America and had higher incomes.
And now, it seems much more of the political Theory.
We have to get involved in politics and increase wealth
redistribution. It went from wealth creation to
wealth redistribution. It was like, originally, the
mindset was Booker, T. Washington.
And now it's like Marc Lamont Hill, just a total Hustler who I
can't stand. It seems like this was the big
shift starting, I think sold the year he pinpoints in dismantling
America. I think it's 1968 where they
focused instead from increasing their skills and and capital
investment, same with whites, I guess.
And now they focus on much more about what we got to get someone
elected. So you can sort of develop this
anointed class is that accurate and is there anything?
Else we could learn from Souls of culturalism contributions.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's quite
accurate. One of the things that's kind of
weird is that culturalism doesn't really have a home right
now. I'm hoping to bring it back
supported by Bob, Woodson, Glenn Lowry and a lot of other
powerful people in the black and fat better East Asian
communities. But I mean, Amy Chua.
I mean, a lot of people have made these points Roland fryer,
but culturalism began. I think in the modern sense as a
response to the sophisticated hereditary.
Arianism of people like Arthur Jensen in the late 1950s and
60s. You started to see a lot of what
had previously been almost, you know, black guy and Republican
yelling at each other in the social science journals, getting
formalized into coherent theories.
So Arthur Jensen, studied young children in poor areas, where
different groups were represented around the country
and came to the conclusion. Which no one really disputes
that there are differences in tested IQ between members of
different groups. At the time I think blacks were
very well about a The eight many white groups were well under 100
as well. That's that's the white Norm.
So the idea became there might be genetic barriers here that
are going to prevent these kids from accomplishing certain
things and soul and others started pointing out that that
doesn't seem likely to be true by the time Seoul reached his
Peak when he was doing most of his writing, the black IQ had
risen to about 85 86, which is what a Charles Murray admitted
it was in the bell curve. I will tell you right now, it's
91 or 92. To there's considerable fluidity
with IQ and a complex way that no one really understands.
But if you look at Marie's latest book while facing
reality, he just notes in passing without really saying
much about this, that his black IQ estimate is 91 his Hispanics.
IQ estimate has gotten up to 93. So these minority IQs of 70, I
mean, her something in the distant past but Seoul said,
well, I don't think that's true. I mean, we're seeing these jumps
from the 78 to 92 and there's obvious whether or not there's a
three-point Gap. Let's even say imats five-point
Gap in the end with everything adjusted for.
There's clearly a massive role for culture here.
So let's look at what's needed and he starts talking about some
of the things we still talk about today, Father present, in
Black communities and the era of the welfare state, we need to be
utterly honest about that number of books in the home.
We find that black parents for whatever reason don't read to
their kids. In the same way that white
parents do. The one exception is southern
white Appalachian parents who test identically two black
parents average IQ for whites and West Virginia. 92.5 so books
in the home, dad, what grades do your parents, demand?
Even, barely literate. Asian families to mayonnaise in
school. That's one of the most
fascinating things I've stumbled across.
What's the number of hours of Television.
You watch in a day, how much do you study every day?
So, so pointed out. Like look, there's no genetic
way that an IQ is going to jump from 80 to 93 in 15 years and
there's not so we need to look at what's happening.
What's predicting this And so that's where the cultural is
model comes from. That's been advocated for by
Walter Williams, John McWhorter, Glenn loury.
I mean, dozens of just heavyweights in the game,
Dickens and Flynn Nisbet over on the hard psychometric said, the
problem is that right now, the political left is moved a long
way away from John McWhorter. And Dickens and Flynn, who would
be considered Heretics today. So culturalism doesn't really
have a natural home. I mean now it's kind of on the
center, right? I'd say most American Enterprise
Ketut guys, are culturalist Murray himself, maybe when he's
never, really said whether he's a culture hereditary?
But, and although I have my suspicions, I guess I like the
guy. But I mean, this is problematic
to. Oh yeah, the reason for this is
that the modern left is at least pretending to believe that
things like IQ and race don't exist at all.
So I mean, when you say my race needs to engage in X tactics to
improve IQ. It'll hereditary would say,
well, that sounds like the old debate.
Yeah, try it out. Let's compete with each other in
the papers. But I'll leftist today would
say, well, no, your race doesn't exist and IQs not real.
So you're kind of seeing an odd reluctance to listen to what was
traditionally the most influential of these paradigms.
It's kind of funny, but I guess there's nothing to do.
But just keep saying obvious fact, that means at a level,
this is Galileo, shit, like it still moves, like if you study
for tests, you'll do better on them.
I mean, it's one of the most Located conclusions in the
social sciences and you can't make it go away by not
replicating. It this happens all the time by
the way. Um I mean like people ask me
like I mentioned talking to G or keto or intelligent men and one
of the things they would say as well other than you and fryer
why are there no scientific papers that say this?
And the answer is because there are very few scientists that are
on the center, right? And they're going to study this
like it's you trying to get fired, you know?
I mean so it's just if you take a paper, I read a paper recently
that looks At whether there's a connection between police stops
and miscarriages. So like this paper looks at they
find that in neighborhoods with high police activity, there are
higher rates of miscarriage for black women.
There are there are three major problems with this.
I'll ask can you guess what they are?
So I'm trying to think of going back to my Roland fryer here.
So as far as what would cause more police means that there are
more conflicts settled. Violently more violence is leads
to an increase in anxiety. There four miscarriages are more
likely to occur s OK like random intelligent guy from a different
scientific field figured out the yeah okay it took 10 seconds go
on there's more second one would be Police feel like they'll have
more leeway. If someone cannot pay a lot of
money for a lawyer and take them to court, which takes the police
men away from his job for a day therefore is more likely to
patrol lower-income neighborhoods because there'll
be less resistance and lower-income, people are less
likely to have nutritious Foods, what's makes them less healthy,
which increases the likelihood of miscarriage?
And then yes good okay. Yeah I mean so that that took
that took a minute. Well done sir.
No I mean that's that's essentially correct.
Yeah I mean and you it's good that you did get the one that
involves potential police abuse. Like I mean I could see some bad
cop saying, who are these bitches going to tell after you
know, a rough arrest but realistically, yeah, the two
things that they didn't adjust for.
Our the fact that people in violence slum areas are
different behaviorally from people and upper middle class
suburbs. So to see how much of a role
stress over all played. You'd have to adjust for diet,
exercise sexual activity, drugs and alcohol obesity, all that
stuff. They don't adjust for any of it.
And you'd also have to look at the source of the stress, which
would be a secondary question. Like, do you attribute this
primarily to policing to Crime to domestic violence?
What you'd probably find is that the police are in the
neighborhood in response to very high levels of crime and
domestic violence in the neighborhood, right?
So the police themselves would be like the 8th or 9th highest
cause of crime there. Or it causes stress there.
So, yeah, I mean, a lot of this stuff is of this kind where
people very definitely have a goal that they want to prove and
it's and it's not even fraud academically.
Like these people did prove there's a connection between
living in a high crime, neighborhood and miscarriages,
it's good paper. The problem is that the police
element the racism element is totally disproven unless you
first adjust for diet and exercise and sexuality and
obesity and crime and all these other things that they didn't or
that they couldn't. And that's Then you see more and
more and more again and that's why I think you know, the basic
advice from the OG about how to skeptically approach.
This stuff is more useful than it's ever been exactly and soul
gives the great example he goes, we could look statistically it
turns out ref blacks were only 13 percent of the American
population, yet they get called for fouls in the NBA about 80 90
percent of the time, this has to be the result of racism.
Look at the inequality. Well, there's a An important
step you missed, Which percentage of people are
actually involved in this activity.
Before, discussing what happens in the activity are saying men
are 50% of the population, yet, 95% of those who are on death
row, or in prison. Therefore, we have a big sexism
against men problem. Well, you forgot to adjust for
who's actually committing the crime.
So, so many good things that could decrease.
The amount of cultural tension. I want to give you the final
word but I just have to say my other favorite Soul.
Quote. He says, the reason so many
people misunderstand, so many issues is not that these issues
are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or
analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally
unsatisfied, they want villains to hate and heroes to cheer and
they don't want explanations. That don't give them that.
That is it that actually may be my last word.
I think that's a great summary of souls work.
People don't want an emotionally unsatisfying factual explanation
that that sums up pretty much what the ogs been talking about
for 50 years. And I think that's very correct.
I mean, so again, when people point to things like that
policing and miscarriages paper and saying and say Why are you
just denying that all? This sociology has found
something. I don't deny that, I think it's
found the best thing that you could find if you're unwilling
to test out any hereditary in' or culturalist, or anything else
explanation because those are evil evil evil and they have
cooties. But to actually find truth
you've got to look at the evil evil evil and it has cooties
stuff to it's obvious to most smart people that for example,
Ibrahim candy is just wrong that stuff with no hate for the
mankind of sounds dumb so you can either play along and act
like you believe this and fall behind the Chinese or you can
follow some of the basic techniques that Tom salt
suggested 40 years ago and maybe find the truth.
And I think that's the last line for me, go go forth and do good,
maybe find the truth. The books are hate crime hoax
and taboo. 10 facts, you can't talk about by dr.
Wilfred Reilly of Kentucky, State University.
Links will be in the description below, dr.
Riley, thank you so much for your time.
Well, thank you for having me on.