00:04:03.320Can you tell us a little bit about your career?
00:04:06.440Because the scrutiny you're receiving now is not the first time, perhaps unsurprisingly,
00:04:12.400given the areas that you research, that you've had various run-ins with various university authorities.
00:04:18.240Just tell us a little bit about how your actual career has progressed today.
00:04:23.020So my first mobbing actually was by the right, not the left.
00:04:27.820It was in 2018 when I published a critique of the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald,
00:04:38.760who argues that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy and that Jews are genetically and culturally adapted to undermine Gentile society for their own benefit.
00:04:50.980He was the intellectual godfather of the alt-right, which was sort of at its tail end in 2018.
00:04:57.820when I published the first academic critique of his theory.
00:05:04.060And it was retweeted by Jordan Peterson,
00:14:02.720There were journalists who tried to write about it, most notably Jack Grove at Times Higher Education, who were then shut down with threatening lawyers, defamation lawyers, who were making veiled legal threats against, if you would publish this information, you're harming Professor Arday, and it's based on racism.
00:14:26.460Racism is the only reason somebody would criticize Arday.
00:14:30.000So, I started looking into it after I got this tip, and it was very easy to discover first the claims that Arday was making about his personal life were absurd or impossible and or contradicted publicly available evidence.
00:14:53.000evidence. Now, in my expose, I didn't take a definitive position on whether he had actually
00:15:02.340run 600 miles in six days and whether he had really been nonverbal until age 11. I just
00:15:09.520said, like, this doesn't seem to add up, but I'm going to focus on the plagiarism and
00:15:15.500the quality of his work, because that's something that I can say a comment on, given the evidence
00:15:25.000And you have to note that when I published the essay on July 21st, it was very different
00:15:37.340on that morning calling Jason Arde a fraud than it is today.
00:15:43.320He was a respected professor backed by dozens of prestigious institutions and Cambridge
00:15:51.060And 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, right?
00:16:05.160Like, he could get some fake doctor to claim that, yeah, I saw Arde and he couldn't speak until age 11.
00:16:12.440And, you know, then I'm in court under cross-examination trying and having to prove a negative.
00:16:18.200So I thought that there was a more than 50% chance that I would be dragged to court with a vexatious lawsuit, either by Arday or Cambridge.
00:16:31.060But it turned out that within a few days, popular opinion kind of turned favorable to my position that Arday had, in fact, was a fraud.
00:16:48.200A few weeks ago, we pointed you toward Hillsdale's free course on the Odyssey.
00:16:52.140The course has been so popular that when they told us they'd built a follow-up course on Homer's Iliad,
00:18:23.320So I just ran his dissertation through copy leaks, and then, you know, out pops, it flags
00:18:30.540a bunch of plagiarism, not only to Paula, but also to a bunch of other sources.
00:18:36.780So of course, I had to check everything with myself manually. So I went through passage by passage, and I put Arde's words on one side and then the plagiarized words, which are either bipolar or somebody else on the other side.
00:18:54.340And I just highlighted in yellow the verbatim text that was copied, in green the lightly
00:23:34.340Were 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. It went around the world. I had mates messaging me from South America and Francis, what's going on with this?
00:24:00.220Yeah, but for me, the story was never about Jason Arday.
00:24:08.060I really don't care that an academic plagiarized.
00:27:40.860They said that this was a vile campaign.
00:27:45.000That's what they said about the people criticizing Arde,
00:27:47.540obviously insinuating that we're racist.
00:27:50.340The Good Law Project, an activist organization,
00:27:55.420had this huge petition which explicitly accused us of being racist.
00:28:03.100Then finally, they had to admit that Arde, after setting him up,
00:28:09.500Because Cambridge knew about Arde's plagiarism since at least 2023, within months of Arde's being hired.
00:28:20.040If they didn't know about it before, there was another academic at Plymouth Marathon University named Dave Harris who sent them evidence, the administration evidence of Arde's plagiarism.
00:28:31.560That was in 2023. So they knew. Beside the fact they must have known that he was unqualified because any anyone can see that, that there was a huge scandal waiting to happen and that our day was being set up for humiliation.
00:28:48.840They definitely knew about his fabulism since at least a year ago, because that was when he submitted a complaint. He reported that he had been attacked by a racist with a knife in his Cambridge office twice, and Cambridge investigated and took it very seriously.
00:29:09.320but this racist could not be found on CCTV.
00:29:13.120So at least since then, they've known he's a fabulous,
00:32:46.500well you know i'm i'm the uh super stimulus scapegoat everything about me says you know
00:32:55.460scapegoat it's uh if you own gold you probably bought it for the same reason i did because you
00:33:02.820looked at what central banks are doing to currencies and decided you wanted something
00:33:07.220they can't print good reasoning but here's the thing nobody talks about after you make that
00:33:11.700decision your gold is just sitting there it's not doing anything you're paying to store it you're
00:33:16.420paying to insure it and in the meantime it earns precisely nothing until now what you're about to
00:33:22.420hear is not a normal gold advert today's sponsor is monetary metals they've figured out something
00:33:28.420that once you hear it seems obvious but almost nobody in the gold world is doing it monetary
00:33:34.180metals connects gold owners with productive businesses refiners jewelers companies that
00:33:40.420actually need physical gold to operate those businesses lease your gold and pay you a yield
00:33:45.940not in dollars not in pounds in gold so instead of your gold sitting in a vault costing you money
00:33:52.340it's out in the real economy doing something useful and you're earning more ounces of gold
00:33:57.780for it up to four percent annual yield paid in gold if you already own gold this is the logical
00:34:03.540next step. Visit monetary-metals.com slash trigonometry or click the link in the description.
00:34:10.540See how your gold can stop costing you money and start earning you more gold. That's
00:34:15.120monetary-metals.com slash trigonometry. Well, I think one of the things that says
00:34:20.400scapegoat about you, Nathan, is the area of research and the conclusions you draw from it,
00:34:25.020which is what I'd like to turn to, because I do think it's important. It's something that's come
00:34:29.420under a lot of attention in recent weeks because you're being blamed solely for Jason Arde taking
00:34:37.200his own life. So let's talk about it. Let me summarize it as concisely as I can, and you
00:34:44.420correct where you think I'm misrepresenting if I am at all, okay? So your central thesis,
00:34:49.780as I understand it, is that there are differences between different groups, including racial groups,
00:34:55.340in many things including intelligence which we'll talk about and define later and that it's the
00:35:02.720failure to accept this reality that gives us wokeness because if you live in a world where
00:35:09.180everyone believes what you call the equality thesis which is the idea that all groups are
00:35:13.600effectively equal on average there are no differences between you know asians and black
00:35:18.980people and white people and jews and so on um if everyone believes that and they look out at the
00:35:24.840world and they see that these different groups have very different outcomes on average in certain
00:35:30.880fields in particular, then the natural conclusion from that is, well, if everyone's equal but the
00:35:36.460outcomes are not, there must be something nefarious going on, i.e. institutional racism,
00:35:43.460structural discrimination, whatever label you want to put on it. And it's therefore naturally
00:35:49.660our moral duty to address those things by DEI, other forms of wokeness, etc. And what you say is,
00:36:00.320because everyone believes the equality hypothesis or the equality thesis, which isn't true,
00:36:05.560that is effectively where we've ended up. And what we should be doing is going,
00:36:10.520looking at the reality of group differences, and then we'll talk about what policy prescriptions
00:36:16.980you advocate for on that basis, but if we just accepted that there are groups that differ in
00:36:22.740terms of their intelligence and other factors in the same way that we might say accept physical
00:36:28.020differences between groups that clearly manifest in sporting achievements, for example, in sports
00:36:32.700like basketball, American football, etc., then that would solve many of the problems that we
00:36:39.780currently got socially and culturally. Is that a fair summary of your views?
00:36:43.800Exactly. 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.
00:37:10.380um uh african immigrants in the united kingdom are are different from african americans
00:37:19.420and they have different outcomes in some respects which are also due to genetic differences so it's
00:37:26.520not saying that all black people are part of the same population with the same characteristics and
00:37:32.980or whites, or Asians, it's just a hereditarian perspective, a biological way of understanding
00:37:41.660how populations differ from each other.
00:37:44.220Explain what hereditarian means to people who are not scientists, Nathan.
00:37:48.140So hereditarianism, with respect to group differences, refers to the idea that genetic
00:37:54.800differences play a non-trivial role in average differences in socially relevant traits, such
00:39:42.360Even though when these groups are subject to very different histories, when they're
00:39:46.020living under different cultural conditions, with different incentives, different economic systems,
00:39:51.860you always find the same pattern of differences, and that's for two genetic differences.
00:39:59.740Okay. And so I'm just getting us to define the scope of what we're discussing, and then we'll
00:40:05.100get into the different conversations about it. What is your claim about what the differences
00:40:10.240are between the various groups that you would classify?
00:40:18.120So the most significant is variation in general intelligence, so IQ score.
00:40:27.300IQ, there's a big discussion to be had about IQ.
00:40:32.160You know, many people think that IQ tests are just asking you, you know, to distinguish between different kinds of yachts or to what kind of wine goes with bass.
00:40:50.620And, you know, but anybody who actually looks at it for five minutes can see that that's not true.
00:40:56.700It's, these are, um, IQ tests are asking about rotating shapes, uh, uh, recognizing patterns.
00:41:07.180Now there, there is a cultural component to your performance on IQ tests, right?
00:41:12.440If you give an IQ test, there was an attempt by psychometricians to invent so-called culture
00:41:18.760fair IQ tests that you could give even to an illiterate hunter-gatherer and just test
00:41:35.220Your ability to take IQ tests depends on your familiarity with the concept of testing and
00:41:41.160all sorts of background, cultural knowledge, but the IQ tests.
00:41:48.760test knowledge that anyone who goes to public school in a country like the United States
00:41:59.680will have been exposed to. And it's not just a bunch of culturally by a test of your cultural
00:42:06.620knowledge. Differences between individuals are meaningful. They correlate with a wide range of
00:42:16.000life outcomes. And not only in the classroom, but everything from your chance of getting into a car
00:42:25.760crashed, your probability that you resort to criminal activity. Differences between people
00:42:34.020are meaningful. It's not just a test of culture. And there are stable race differences in average
00:42:43.840Let me just summarize this in simpler language for people listening, and correct me if any of this is inaccurate, but what you're saying is intelligence tests, yes, there's a cultural dimension, and we'll delve into this because there's questions about this, but they measure your ability to reason effectively.
00:43:00.720If you've gone to public school in the Western society, or maybe even most of the rest of the world, you have been given enough to be able to take a test and for that score to be meaningful.
00:43:13.960And that people who score higher or lower on IQ tests, that correlates quite strongly with their life outcomes, both negative and positive.
00:43:23.440So if you score higher on an IQ test, on average, your lifetime earnings will be higher, you will be less likely to commit crime, you will be less likely to get into a car accident, and there's probably a bunch of other metrics you could give. Is that accurate so far?
00:43:58.060The average East Asian is a few points above the white mean.
00:44:05.080You'll hear some people say that the African-American white gap has been closing in recent years,
00:44:13.640is untrue. That's based on achievement tests, which are not IQ tests. The actual IQ tests,
00:44:23.480which are not measuring just acquired knowledge, but are measuring actual reasoning ability,
00:44:30.440continue to show approximately one standard deviation or a 15-point gap between blacks
00:44:37.640and whites in the United States. And what about Hispanics and Ashkenazi Jews?
00:44:42.200hispanics um are intermediate between blacks and whites so 90s somewhere in the 90s and uh
00:44:53.200ashkenazi jews uh there the uh there's a huge debate about this and the uh the online right
00:45:03.920There are a lot of Jewish IQ truthers, but in reality, there have been some studies with very small samples made potentially unrepresentative, which showed extremely high, implausibly high numbers.
00:45:25.440but the best IQ test studies for Ashkenazim have come around 110 to 112.
00:45:36.720Okay. So can I ask you some questions about the validity of IQ testing and the hereditarian
00:45:46.180notion more generally? So the first one I wanted to ask you is,
00:45:51.100if we accept that environmental factors will affect people, even if they have a certain
00:45:58.640biological predisposition, I'll give you an example of height, right? There are population
00:46:05.000genetics that determine height. But if you have a population that's consistently malnourished,
00:46:10.660you will get a population whose height is not the same as it would have been if they had been given
00:46:15.640proper nutrition. And you see this, for example, from what I understand in the difference between
00:46:20.860the average high of South Koreans and North South Koreans, North Koreans, genetically the same,
00:46:26.280but different outcomes in terms of height purely because of the nutrition that they've received
00:46:31.640for decades and over generations. If a group of people are effectively given poor intellectual
00:46:40.800nutrition over generations, i.e. they're denied access to education or have reduced access to
00:46:47.080education. They have a disproportionate likelihood to come from, to have intergenerational single
00:46:53.480parenthood. They have a poorer nutrition, which I imagine contributes ultimately, if you, particularly
00:46:59.020in childhood, to somebody's life outcomes, et cetera, et cetera. And if this sort of environment
00:47:05.300is intergenerationally locked in, wouldn't that have exactly the effect on people's IQ that
00:47:12.560poor nutrition intergenerationally would have on people's height?
00:47:17.080Well, height is a good example of a trait which is highly heritable, but is still
00:47:23.160malleable over time within a generation.
00:47:27.620So if you look within North Korea, height actually in a country like North Korea would
00:47:35.140probably be less heritable than it is in the South because the North has a class system
00:47:41.540where the party members or the people in the elites
00:47:46.080will have access to much better nutrition,
00:47:48.940and then you have the rest of the population.
00:55:11.960IQ, there's a big discussion to be had about IQ.
00:55:17.960You know, many people think that IQ tests are just asking you, you know,
00:55:23.960you know, to distinguish between different kinds of yachts or to what kind of wine goes with bass.
00:55:36.900And, you know, but anybody who actually looks at it for five minutes can see that that's not true.
00:55:42.920It's these are IQ tests are asking about rotating shapes, recognizing patterns.
00:55:53.340Now, there is a cultural component to your performance on IQ tests, right?
00:55:58.660If 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 an illiterate hunter-gatherer and just test their innate intelligence.
00:56:19.940your ability to take IQ tests depends on your familiarity with the concept of testing and
00:56:26.820all sorts of background cultural knowledge. But IQ tests test knowledge that anyone who goes to
00:56:41.840public school in a country like the United States will have been exposed to. And it's not just
00:56:49.920bunch of culturally by a test of your cultural knowledge. Differences between individuals
00:56:56.880are meaningful. They correlate with a wide range of life outcomes, and not only in the classroom,
00:57:05.840but everything from your chance of getting into a car crash, your probability that you resort to
00:57:16.240criminal activity. Differences between people are meaningful, it's not just a test of culture,
00:57:23.440and there are stable race differences in average scores.
00:57:30.400Let me just summarize this in simpler language for people listening, and correct me if any of
00:57:34.800this is inaccurate, but what you're saying is intelligence tests, yes, there's a cultural
00:57:39.280dimension, and we'll delve into this because there's questions about this, but they measure
00:57:44.800your ability to reason effectively. If you've gone to public school in the Western society,
00:57:50.040or maybe even most of the rest of the world, you have enough, you have been given enough
00:57:56.660to be able to take a test and for that score to be meaningful. And that people who score higher
00:58:02.380or lower on IQ tests, that correlates quite strongly with their life outcomes, both negative
00:58:09.080and positive. So if you score higher on an IQ test, on average, your lifetime earnings will
00:58:14.740be higher, you will be less likely to commit crime, you will be less likely to get into a car
00:58:19.540accident, and there's probably a bunch of other metrics you could give. Is that accurate so far?
00:58:26.180Yes. Okay. So what are the racial differences in IQ then? So in the United States, the African
00:58:34.140American IQ is between 82 and 85. The average white IQ is 100. The average East Asian is a few
00:58:47.340points above the white mean. You'll hear some people say that the African American white gap
00:58:57.760has been closing in recent years which is untrue that's based on achievement tests which are not
00:59:04.960iq tests the actual iq tests which are not measuring just acquired knowledge but are
00:59:14.720measuring actual reasoning ability continue to show approximately one standard deviation
00:59:21.040or a 15 point gap between blacks and whites in the united states
00:59:25.200And what about Hispanics and Ashkenazi Jews?
00:59:29.600Hispanics are intermediate between blacks and whites, so 90s, somewhere in the 90s, and Ashkenazi Jews, there's a huge debate about this in the online right.
00:59:50.120There are a lot of Jewish IQ truthers, but in reality, there have been some studies with very small samples made potentially unrepresentative, which showed extremely high, implausibly high numbers.
01:00:11.660but the best IQ test studies for Ashkenazim have come around 110 to 112.
01:00:22.940Okay. So can I ask you some questions about the validity of IQ testing and the hereditarian
01:00:32.400notion more generally? So the first one I wanted to ask you is,
01:00:37.320if we accept that environmental factors will affect people, even if they have a certain
01:00:44.860biological predisposition, I'll give you an example of height, right? There are population
01:00:51.220genetics that determine height, but if you have a population that's consistently malnourished,
01:00:56.880you will get a population whose height is not the same as it would have been if they had been given
01:01:01.860proper nutrition. And you see this, for example, from what I understand in the difference between
01:01:07.080the average high of South Koreans, North Koreans, genetically the same, but different outcomes in
01:01:13.860terms of height purely because of the nutrition that they've received for decades and over
01:01:19.660generations. If a group of people are effectively given poor intellectual nutrition over generations,
01:01:28.980i.e. they're denied access to education or have reduced access to education, they have a
01:01:34.820disproportionate likelihood to have intergenerational single parenthood. They have
01:01:41.200poorer nutrition, which I imagine contributes ultimately, particularly in childhood, to
01:01:46.120somebody's life outcomes, et cetera, et cetera. And if this sort of environment is intergenerationally
01:01:53.340locked in, wouldn't that have exactly the effect on people's IQ that poor nutrition intergenerationally
01:02:56.360the it's only genes that will be left to explain the rest of the rest of the difference
01:03:00.680so um you know intelligence is the same way you know our our grandparents would have scored lower
01:03:13.160like surprisingly low on iq tests isaac newton would have scored like average on an iq test
01:03:19.460because they just weren't familiar not because they weren't didn't have the same genes for
01:03:25.880for intelligence so they just weren't familiar with that they didn't have the training they
01:03:30.020to make the kind of um sign the kind of classifications or scientific engage in the
01:03:37.620kind of scientific thinking that is tested by by iq tests well that that's what i mean nathan that's
01:03:45.200exactly what i'm getting at so if you're saying well the average black iq is in the mid 80s
01:03:50.840and the average YIQ is in the hundreds,
01:03:53.960wouldn't black people be just effectively
01:03:56.880intellectual North Koreans in this comparison,
01:04:00.160whereby for generations they have been denied
01:04:03.120the things that would have helped them improve their IQ
01:04:06.380from nutrition to education, to familiarity with testing,
01:04:11.020to a safe environment in which to grow up and study,
01:04:14.300to access to parents who could look after you
01:04:17.200and give you the time and guidance to be able...
01:04:19.160all of these things, wouldn't that have a very significant detrimental impact on your IQs?
01:04:25.580Because let's be honest, you may have had the Civil Rights Act in the United States,
01:04:29.980which has addressed formalized legal discrimination.
01:04:33.480But that's not to say that everybody gets the same start in life.
01:04:36.940And if you go around the black ghetto, you can clearly see that if I'd grown up in that environment,
01:04:43.180my IQ would have also been lower as a result of that.
01:04:46.260well these these this is uh the kind of thing that can actually be investigated i mean we one
01:04:53.360shouldn't just kind of rely on intuitions i mean of course one can have intuition about what kind
01:04:59.660of hypotheses to explore but then to conclude one has but has this been explored is what i'm asking
01:05:05.400so i would say this is the most studied question in the history of social science is the cause of
01:05:12.560black-white IQ gap in the United States. We have every remotely plausible hypothesis has been
01:05:21.680studied, has been tested multiple times at an enormous expense. And the conclusion is
01:05:30.080early childhood interventions will raise IQ in the black population and they can raise it
01:05:40.480significantly. And over time, there's what's called a fade-out effect. So IQ shoots up in
01:05:52.800early childhood, and then they start getting lower and lower until finally, in early adulthood,
01:06:00.880mean IQ, after intensive intervention, reverts to the African-American mean.
01:06:07.920And there's been a cross-racial adoption study, the Minnesota study of the twins reared apart,
01:06:21.980where black adopted children were raised by middle-class white families in childhood.
01:06:30.000Their IQs were much higher, and by adulthood, the fade-out effect occurs.
01:06:35.700This is consistent with intelligence being much less heritable in childhood.
01:06:43.020The exact reason for that is partly because childhood IQ tests are more likely to test acquired knowledge than general reasoning ability, which is compared to adult IQ tests.
01:06:57.340But anyway, when IQ is less heritable, during the period of life when IQ is less heritable, you can increase IQ. But by early adulthood, any intervention that we know how to make doesn't have lasting effects.
01:07:16.780It's slightly different to what I'm asking you, because you're talking about early childhood
01:07:21.220interventions. What I'm talking about is attempting to explain the gap. And what I'm asking you is,
01:07:27.180isn't it possible that intergenerational deprivation in various forms would lead
01:07:33.780partially to an IQ gap, which you attribute to genetics?
01:07:37.660well there look in in science there's never a single experiment right that proves the case
01:07:48.280you're looking at the totality of the evidence against kind of the given in the context of
01:07:57.580a theory about what what kind of explanation is plausible i mean people who who promote like
01:08:06.720environmentalist explanations of race differences will, for example, say that it's due to
01:08:14.820epigenetics. It's epigenetics. But then how come epigenetics doesn't affect Jews? Jews
01:08:22.840weren't affected by epigenetics in ghettos and concentration camps, pogroms, and no effect
01:08:29.860at all so and uh is that true isn't it true that jews whose iqs were measured in the early 20th
01:08:37.300century united states scored very low on iq tests same with irish and other italians as well these
01:08:44.160were basically people who didn't speak very good english and so they scored lower on iq tests
01:08:48.820because iq test was designed for english speakers who'd had a certain type of education
01:08:53.580There was a notorious statement by an early intelligence researcher in like the 1920s who administered tests in English to some immigrants who didn't speak English and then made some silly statement about how their IQs are very low.
01:09:09.460And he himself recanted and said that he made a stupid mistake. I've never seen an academic admit that he's wrong in such unequivocal terms.
01:09:22.300I cite him in my sub-stack essay, Thomas Sowell's Wishful Thinking About Race.
01:09:29.580Yeah, I was very triggered by that because, as you know, I'm a big fan of Thomas Sowell.
01:09:33.360But just come back to this point with me that if you have a population that have to live
01:09:39.180in intergenerational deprivation, poverty, poor education, etc., that is likely to a
01:09:46.080significant extent to affect their average IQs even down the generations, particularly
01:09:51.680for the reasons that i gave which is even today when formal legal discrimination is no longer in
01:09:57.760place that does not mean that everybody starts in the same place if you go to an inner city black
01:10:02.640school in some american cities where only seven percent of kids can read to the right level by
01:10:08.240the time of their 13 or something i don't remember the exact statistic but something like that where
01:10:12.660you're basically getting a terrible education would that not affect your life outcomes including
01:10:17.920as measured by a general intelligence test uh well it might so this this the adoption studies
01:10:24.240that i referred to look at uh kids who are adopted by basically at least lower middle class families
01:10:34.880uh because you you have to meet some conditions in order to adopt a child
01:10:39.920uh and you have to be have a at least provide evidence that you have can provide a stable home
01:10:46.400in a stable upbringing. So if you're running a crack house, then you would not be allowed
01:10:53.500to adopt a child. You wouldn't be part of the study. So, okay. So we know that if you're raised
01:10:58.920in at least the kind of middle class to upper class environment, the differences between your
01:11:06.640in parenting style or income or anything like that, that doesn't really have any detectable
01:11:13.020effect on your adult IQ. Now, if you're in a genuinely, really deprived environment,
01:11:19.160it's very possible that that will... Although Thomas Sowell himself, who I disagree with
01:11:25.300him on that one point, he's obviously a brilliant guy. He himself came from an extremely deprived
01:11:31.020background. I mean, there are a number of other Black luminaries, intellectuals who
01:11:38.360did as well. I think Glenn Lowry also came from a deprived background. But yeah, I don't deny that
01:11:45.440that's a disadvantage in life to come from a very deprived background. Yeah, disadvantage is a
01:11:51.280different point. I think the point I'm trying to make, and maybe what you're saying is there hasn't
01:11:54.960been enough research on this, but I'll give you an example, and maybe scientifically not accurate,
01:12:03.740But just my dad, so my grandfather grew up without a dad who was killed in World War II, right?
01:12:10.760My dad grew up with a dad who was kind of there and not there.
01:12:33.020But the point I'm making is if your people, your group, as you talk about, for generations has been denied access to good nutrition, education, etc., etc., I think it's credible to assume that that would have an impact on your IQ scores, particularly, as you say, because they are somewhat culturally effective.
01:12:52.720well the thing is we have no memory of what happened there's no biological memory of what
01:13:01.300happened two generations ago there's some minor epigenetic effects that last one generation it
01:13:09.140doesn't there's no plausible evidence that that epigenetic effects but that's why i brought up my
01:13:17.940my dad and my granddad because my dad i can see it in him has in him the consequences of being
01:13:25.300raised by a dad who had no dad right whereas i don't and my children don't in the same way if
01:13:33.700that makes sense so you might not have a memory but being raised by people who were themselves
01:13:39.080raised by people who experienced certain things and lacked certain things will have an impact on
01:13:44.500how you grow up i mean so okay i agree one can can formulate hypotheses that seem intuitively
01:13:52.740right and maybe are consistent with anecdotes about people that we observed or or our family
01:13:58.580but then then test test the theory like okay what about this theory been tested is what i'm that's
01:14:04.920what i've been asking you this entire time uh because for you to make the bold claims that you
01:14:09.560do, it seems to me that this is something that might be worth testing.
01:14:14.600So we have, for example, adoption studies, where you're raised from early childhood by somebody
01:14:22.600who doesn't have all those experiences. So we also have regression to the mean, which is
01:14:29.240is really impossible to explain on the environmentalist assumption.
01:14:36.060So if you, because a trait, your value of a trait is determined by both genes and either
01:14:51.960environmental or kind of random environmental factors.
01:14:55.860So your particular, your height, your IQ is determined by a combination of those, of those things. If you have a very, if you depart, if you're very far from the mean, then it's likely that that was due to, in part, to good, let's say you have a very high IQ.
01:15:20.460So that's probably due to a combination of genes for IQ and a very favorable environment for IQ.
01:15:29.640Now, you're passing on only the genes to your genetic offspring.
01:15:36.380So their IQ is more likely to be closer to the mean than your IQ.
01:17:26.040I mean, there was a hope that this issue could be resolved, that we would just find, you know, single nucleotide polymorphisms that are associated with intelligence, and we would just check how they're distributed from one race to the other, and then that would be the end of it.
01:17:46.920But it turned out to be a lot more complicated than people hoped.
01:17:52.880And these genetic variants, so polygenic scores, so just looking at variants that are associated
01:17:58.100with intelligence in one group, which allows you to predict the IQ or height or other traits,
01:18:05.540say within Europeans who are generally the population that's most studied and for which
01:18:12.900we have the most reliable polygenic scores for a variety of traits, they often produce
01:18:21.020invalid results or at least less valid results when applied to Africans or Asians.
01:18:31.160But these variants, they are different, but we know that there are genetic variants that
01:18:42.760are expressed in the brain that vary between racial groups uh there are like what no i don't do
01:18:51.100the uh i'm sorry a fly i've been besieged by a fly which just landed in my tea but okay sorry
01:19:00.320that's a very dramatic way of putting it now uh well anyway at least the fly won't bother
01:19:09.440bother me anymore. So it's, I think it's safe to drink the tea.
01:19:15.320It's a very unscientific conclusion there, but carry on. What are, what are some of the things
01:19:20.420that differ in brains between groups? So I can't, I can't comment on the details of the science.
01:19:27.100That's not my, my area. I'm not at the forefront of, of population genetics, but this is
01:19:35.880uncontroversial, just, I'm just reporting
01:20:29.900is just not consistent with mainstream science.
01:20:33.720Okay, there's a few other things I wanted to ask you. What do you think, if we accept your thesis that these things are genetic, presumably they're the consequences of evolution? Is that fair?
01:20:53.180Well, I mean, evolution, some either natural selection or some random drift.
01:20:59.900Okay, 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?
01:21:13.920Well, that would be the difference between races would be due to becoming adapted to different environments over a long period of time. But of course, you get different population differences between groups based on migration patterns. For example, migration can be elite. African immigration to the UK is highly selected.
01:21:36.960So 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?
01:21:58.940Yes. And it's unlikely to be cultural. Some people say, well, that's just African culture. But then why doesn't Africa have the same results in Africa? It's just if you take very intelligent Africans and you form a group of those people, then you get a high-performing group.
01:22:18.200Makes sense. What would be the reason that certain groups would not evolve to have as high an
01:22:30.360intelligence as another group? For example, the two groups that you've talked about today.
01:22:37.880So when you speculate about this, people will get angry and say that it's pseudoscience and
01:22:43.520these ideas haven't been tested. I mean, this is the kind of thing that academics should be working
01:22:47.480on, right? That's such an interesting question. There should be theories that which anthropologists
01:22:55.400and geneticists should collaborate to test what are the historical conditions that seem
01:23:04.800to have selected for differences in various traits, including intelligence, but also specific
01:23:10.240intelligences so you know we we don't have a huge amount of data to go on it's been speculated and
01:23:21.700there's some prima facie evidence that encountering winter is is a relevant condition for selecting
01:23:51.300Farming also appears to select for intelligence.
01:23:59.460So things involving planning, effectively.
01:24:02.220If you have to plan to survive, you're likely to evolve intelligence, whereas if you don't and food is readily available, you might evolve characteristics and traits that are helpful to hunting or gathering the food in the moment without necessarily evolving adaptations that are useful for planning for the entire year. Is that what you're saying?
01:24:23.880It seems very plausible that that's a big part of the story, if not necessarily the whole thing, but a big part.
01:24:30.480Okay. And if I ask you, so there's obviously a big conversation in both the United States and Europe about the underperformance in education of poor working class white boys in particular. What would be your explanation? Would you say that they are genetically lower IQ or is that a cultural thing?
01:24:53.760There may be some cultural aspect to it, but there are, you know, this is also, this is wokeism just, you know, making whites into the victim, right?
01:25:07.880They're using the same woke logic as, you know, as blacks do in other contexts.
01:25:15.060So they're saying the whites are not doing as well as African immigrants, therefore whites are being discriminated against.
01:25:37.100But you can see how to somebody encountering your views, it would seem counterintuitive to believe that if you said there's a massive racial gap between white people and black people,
01:25:45.940and suddenly you have white people really underperforming
01:25:50.560in things that are highly IQ correlated,
01:31:44.400The world is no longer seen as permeated with the injustice of past or present racism.
01:31:54.740Now, I'm not saying that people need to turn on the television and hear about a lecture about hereditarianism every day or that this necessarily needs to be taught to elementary school students.
01:32:08.540But 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.
01:32:21.520and you know i get all that nathan i totally get it what let's what i'm saying is the elites and
01:32:27.120in fact the ordinary person has a broad understanding of what you're saying which is
01:32:31.780when different groups have different outcomes it's because of nature it's not because of the
01:32:36.660system or the government or the man who or the oppressor or whatever now what we've you said
01:32:41.860yourself in one of your substacks that if we were to have a purely meritocratic system that would
01:32:47.120mean that there would be almost no black representation, for example, in academia.
01:32:53.320Likewise, there would be almost no X representation in Y. If you had a purely meritocratic system,
01:32:59.360the world would look very unfair, quote unquote, based on the equality thesis that we currently
01:33:06.700hold. Okay, the world has accepted that you are right about this, hypothetically. What do we do
01:33:12.800now in a society where these groups have such different outcomes? Well, I should say an important
01:33:18.200qualification. It's not that there would be almost no blacks in higher education. It's just at that
01:33:24.920very highest level at some place like Harvard, it would be under 1% representation. There would
01:33:30.880still be brilliant black scholars, but there's no question about it. Of course, because there are
01:33:35.040outliers within every group. But what I'm getting at is you would have a society that is, by your
01:33:40.920assessment, there would be huge disparities in people being, quote-unquote, represented
01:33:50.320in important fields of human endeavor, right?
01:33:53.720So now, I, as a Birkin conservative, don't really...
01:34:02.680I'm cautious about issuing recommendations about how society ought to be arranged in any great detail.
01:34:14.920I think that it's necessary to go through a process of absorbing this truth
01:34:21.520and then slowly adjusting the institutions to align with this new understanding.
01:34:29.280Adjusting in what direction? What would we do differently?
01:43:43.820mainstream conservatives have been trying this approach for decades. And we see that the vast
01:43:49.880majority of intelligent and morally sensitive people do think it's a moral emergency to correct
01:43:55.940the environment and achieve equal outcomes, because they think that, again, the average
01:44:05.180African, the average Asian, the average European, they're all born with exactly the same potential.
01:44:12.100There's no reason that the whole world can't be turned into Singapore.
01:44:17.060So it's just the most important thing is to figure out how to do that.
01:44:23.100And so much moral energy is channeled into this hopeless project.
01:44:30.620And this whole idea about wokeism being over is just not, this is just based on Twitter vibes.
01:44:39.800All the survey data shows that the opposite is true. The younger generations are far worse on
01:44:48.760every measure than the older. Gen X is worse than the boomers. Millennials are worse than X.
01:44:57.800Zoomers are worse than millennials by a long shot. This isn't going away. We can't just say,
01:45:06.040let's treat everyone as individuals and ignore this disaster of group disparities, it isn't
01:45:14.000working. And once the boomer and Gen X gatekeepers are phased out, it's going to be really bad
01:45:27.260unless we find a new strategy. Okay. I mean, I think that's a fair response.
01:45:34.520The only question is, if you accept that the next generation is even worse, how do you persuade those people to believe that there's IQ differences between races?
01:45:45.680That does not seem like a realistic prospect to me.
01:45:48.340How do you persuade a woke 20-year-old girl that what you're saying is true?
01:45:55.840There are many people who will not be persuaded by anything.
01:45:58.760Uh, that's just, uh, but that was true of the taboos of previous generations, where
01:46:06.400people would not consider the atheist, uh, woke, anti-racist college girl today who won't
01:46:17.140listen to anything about hereditarianism, uh, in a previous generation, she would have
01:46:23.580hated you if you questioned Christianity or if you said that homosexuality should be okay.
01:46:30.780These taboos change over time. The taboo of your generation, of whatever generation one is living
01:46:38.540in, seems like a law of nature, but it really isn't. And you defeat the taboo. You know,
01:46:45.900Darwin himself said that when he first told his friend about that he had rejected the idea of
01:46:55.820special creation, as he said, it felt like I was confessing a murder. To propose the theory of
01:47:04.180evolution was so outrageous in the mid-19th century. And now it's not controversial at all.
01:47:12.400You have to make the case, and you have to explain the reasons why hereditarianism is correct, and persuade those who are capable of being persuaded, and the information will spread.
01:47:29.820so Nathan the final question is always the same I'm going to be honest with you it feels a little
01:47:35.280bit redundant in this episode but nevertheless what's the one thing that we're not talking about
01:47:41.260that we really should be before Nathan answers the final question at the end of the interview
01:47:46.740make sure to go to triggerpod.co.uk where you'll be able to see this has Jason Arday become a martyr
01:50:55.020So stereotype accuracy, you can't prove something just by saying that it's a stereotype, but
01:51:00.780it is a generalization that stereotypes tend to be, you know, not totally based on nothing.
01:51:06.800And, you know, in the United States, the Republican Party is known as the stupid party.
01:51:11.820And the stereotype in other countries of right-wing parties is generally similar.
01:51:16.300You have the fact that conservatives have not managed to control one single serious university in the United States, and that includes Brigham Young University, which is still majority non-conservative, and universities even in deep red states are still staffed primarily by liberals.
01:51:42.480this is not what you would expect now okay it's true a lot of what goes on at the universities
01:51:49.720isn't serious it's just a bunch of left-wing activism but still they are there is real
01:51:55.520like intellectual work being done at a lot of universities and conservatives are just not
01:52:00.100well represented and if conservatives really cared just as much as liberals about
01:52:06.140knowledge and scholarship and they were just as smart and capable as liberals, you would expect
01:52:13.880them to have at least one university or even they could just create a new university. But even that
01:52:19.840is something that they're seriously struggling with. And in terms of the intellectual culture
01:52:27.400on the right. It's just a disaster. Now, I think the right stupidity problem is related
01:52:39.640to hereditarianism because I think that without hereditarianism, it's impossible to have an
01:52:45.160intellectually coherent right, a right-wing philosophy that appeals to smart and intelligent
01:52:51.880people. I mean, okay, there are smart, intelligent people on the right who deny hereditarianism,
01:52:57.380they exist, but it's just statistically smart, morally sensitive, thoughtful people are more
01:53:05.580likely to be on the left and woke if they accept the equality thesis and the taboo on hereditarianism.
01:53:16.900So that is actually a big taboo on the right. It's not a taboo on the left, but it's a taboo
01:53:22.240on the right to point out that conservatives have very little scholarship. They have very little
01:53:29.240art. You remember the... In American football, they have the halftime show where they feature
01:53:39.500the latest homosexual artist doing some flamboyant performance, as I say.
01:53:48.200And so conservatives are very triggered by that.
01:53:52.780So they wanted to prove that they are just as good at art as liberals.
01:53:57.840So then there was the competing conservative halftime show.
01:54:01.180And the star of the halftime show was this guy who was beyond parody.
01:54:07.220He was like, I just want to wear my boots and walk my dog.