 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to simulation. I'm your host on sake and we are still on site in Manhattan in New York City, New York. We are now going to be talking about all things race gender We're gonna be talking about universities diversity school system the foundation of truth and We have Heather McDonald joining us. Hello. Hi Ellen. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming on to the show again We did a Skype call for the first time, but we're really excited to have this chance in person to talk to you a Little bit of background on Heather. Heather is a scholar in race relations immigration policing colleges the universities She's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute contributing editor at City Journal and she's the author of the war on cops the burden of bad ideas and most recently the diversity delusion How race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture So I'm really excited to be talking about this This is a pressing topic the foundation of truth is extremely important and we want to understand the nuance of what's going on here so let's talk about things on like a big history perspective because we find ourselves as stewards of earth as humans and We are trying to figure things out populations been hockey sticking up. We now have all 7.7 billion people We are facing exponential technologies across every single industry We really need to be building up this foundation of truth. What is your thought? What are your thoughts on the current state of humanity Well, I it's hard for me to address the entire globe, but I can tell you what's going on in the West which is a concerted attack on enlightenment notions of reason of objectivity of the search for truth and a effort to return us to a tribal mentality that is destructive and a source of inequality ignorance and violence we've been Playing with fire, I would say in the West for the last 50 years or so in cultivating recultivating tribal hatreds that Was one of the great triumphs of the Western nation state to overcome the pettiness of tribe versus tribe and Also, one of the triumphs of the enlightenment to say that human beings possess a capacity for reason That is not limited by Ethnicity or nationality, but it's something that all human beings can aspire to whoa, okay, we have a lot of Gratitude to give to a lot of what the West has achieved in the last several hundred years The United States in just the last 240 years has went from Went from 13 colonies to 50 states across spanning from sea to shining sea and we have a tremendously high standard of living now There's a lot that the individual and capitalism has actually accomplished in raising the baseline of living for a lot of people around the world and At the same time there are some ways to potentially figure out how to Ray Dalio and Warren Buffett have said. Yeah, we've we've definitely see Bill Gates as well have said that we've Taken that we've actually got a lot of success out of capitalism But now it's time for us to somehow restructure and return Things back to raising the baseline up. So it's kind of we're still figuring out how to best Move forward and maybe like a capitalism 2.0 or whatever with exponential technology Heather you, you know, you're really a strong advocate for these Western principles and ideals that have built this civilization that we're typically not so Aware of tell us about those principles and ideals Well, I think The the West has been the source of the concept of individual rights of human dignity that is Universal rather than limited to a clan and those ideals of universal rights Are simply foreign to cultures today. I mean, it's really quite astounding that left-wing academics spend all of their time Directing their ire against what I would say is phantom misogyny and patriarchy, let's say in the West When females here are the freest they've ever been in human history There's not a single barrier that I've ever faced in my life and I do not think I'm idiosyncratic in other parts of the world Females are still whipped in public for not covering their bodies in rural Nepal Females who are menstruating have to occupy huts Away from their families because their view is unclean just recently The New York Times reported on another female from Saudi Arabia who escaped to try and live a freer life in the West away from the Misogyny that characterizes Many Muslim countries today good luck staging a gay pride march in Uganda You know Malaysia parts of Indonesia Are still flogging homosexuals Egypt is about to recriminalize homosexuality. So the blindness of the whole diversity bureaucracy to the enormous differences in freedom personal liberty between the West and Third-world countries is simply stunning and and what we enjoy here today is the product of a Philosophical tradition that dates at least apparently in Athens and the the use of reason to try and interrogate human Assumptions that we see in the the platonic dialogues the extraordinary Philosophical tradition that came out of Plato and Aristotle moving through the Middle Ages obviously taking a big detour in in metaphysics and theology but but pressing ahead still with a reverence for learning and and again for me the high point in Sending us to this current path of extraordinary abundance is the Enlightenment ideals We had the growth of empiricism in the Renaissance with Francis Bacon saying that You know we need a natural science that is going to try and use reason to unlock the mysteries of nature all of these things are Extraordinary and and have given us Freedom from want from disease that was would have been unthinkable a mere 300 years ago in this is a Tremendous progress that we've now mentioned several times needs to come with more gratitude to the people that Got us here and to the economic and political Systems that helped us get here and the greater that we can identify that and really give our our empathy and our Gratitude for that the more we can really connect with the abundance that we truly have now And you actually even when pointed out that this is not just a single Country in one part of the world that still has issues with treating women or people that just think differently than than they do of of Poorly you actually said this is in in Indonesia still in parts of Asia parts of Middle East parts of Africa this it this extends past past just one isolated Instance is still going on around the world and in order to raise the baseline of acceptance of tolerance of of Love and compassion for each other we it's really important to build on this foundation of science that came from this period of the Enlightenment this foundation of truth and a lot of what is our University system our collegiate system is supposed to be the cutting edge of truth That's how we that's how we're supposed to be building children at a studying that cutting edge in whatever discipline They're seeking to study, but there's this new sort of bureaucracy that's come into play the diversity bureaucracy and You list so many examples in the book across different collegiate campuses that where the diversity bureaucracy is now taking millions of dollars multi-million dollar bureaucracy and There's a certain aspect to this which which is which is that you we consider okay now Now it does somebody come from well first. Let's start Before we get into these examples it does Tell us about the the diversity Bureaucracy and what that's doing to the foundation of truth in in the university system Well, the diversity bureaucracy is just a grotesque waste of resources if you want to know why College tuition is so obscenely expensive look no further than these metastasizing Cinecures the the vice chancellor for equity diversity and inclusion at UCLA the University of California Law Los Angeles Averages over at four hundred thousand dollars a year for absolutely nothing These these bureaucracies are premised on the idea that colleges are Lethally sexist and racist that students of color and females are literally at threat of their lives on a college campus This is a complete Insane Narcissistic delusion there has never been an environment more tolerant of precisely those traits that can still get you Stoned or killed in other parts of the world than today's American college campus so these diversity bureaucrats who are multiplying at a alarming rate Are dedicated to a fiction and they are cultivating in students evermore arcane species of self-involvement to think of themselves at at risk to think of themselves as victims of racism and sexism Whereas in fact they are the most privileged human beings in history because they have at their fingertips The thing that Faust sold his soul for which is knowledge They are surrounded by caring open-minded liberal adults who want all of their students to succeed They the faculty Every single faculty search at a college campus is one desperate effort Defined remotely qualified females and and faculty of color who've not been snatched up already by better endowed Institutions and far from discriminating against so-called underrepresented minorities in student admissions That is blacks and Hispanics virtually every selective college today employs vast Racial preferences to admit underrepresented minorities So the idea that colleges are infected by systemic bias is a complete untruth and yet That is the premise of these bureaucracies, but As as much as these bureaucracies deserve to be condemned and extirpated root and branch They are just part of an entire ideology of victimhood that exists throughout the faculty It's not just the bureaucrats the Large swaths of the faculty are also devoted to cultivating this idea that the West is uniquely the source of all things evil in the world bigotry sexism patriarchy rape culture you name it And so you've got a double whammy there where from the moment a student steps on campus his freshman orientation is inevitably going to feature little seminars in white privilege and toxic masculinity his residential advisors the the students who are supposed to be You know overseeing dormitory life They are inevitably wildly lefty And and in classes all too often students are taught to read the greatest works of Western civilization through the lens of racial and gender victimology There's a lot of scientific Valid Evidence to take from these works and really powerful stories to take from these works and not just Push them to the side because they were written by someone. It's insane. It's absolutely insane I am so grateful that I was in college in the 1970s before feminism and multiculturalism attacked the canon So while I wasted vast amounts of time trying to master a Particularly arcane literary theory called deconstruction or post-structuralism Something that I now regard as a dead end intellectually. Nevertheless We were reading the greatest works without anybody thinking to complain about the gonads and melanin of their authors So my freshman year in my major English poets class. I read Chaucer Spencer Edmund Spencer's fairy queen Milton's Paradise Lost Wordsworth Wallace Stevens the romantic poets Shelly Keats and My ears were filled with beauty with the beauty of Milton's comas the extraordinarily erotic sensual writing of book four of Paradise Lost and I Wasn't given an excuse to reject these works simply because they weren't written by a female I can think of nothing less relevant to whether a book is worth reading Than the race and gender of its author. Yeah the the the message of the writing as you read it Whether or not you know the gonads or the melanin of the hot there is the most important thing is what you can actually take from the writing and I think that's super important to start seeing things in that light because that way there's like you have said also There's science is science if you it doesn't matter what your skin color or religion or race is Gender is just Contribute to science. Yeah, there's no. Yeah, there's no Female physics. There's no there's none of that just contribute to science to that foundation Well, you're speaking now idealistically and of course now well we've we Since the 1980s at least we heard about multicultural math and there was in fact for K through 12 this idea that math should be somehow Taught to try and close the skills gap with blacks and whites in some kind of black way That was specious back then and it remains specious today but but yes what our greatest risk we're facing now is that the STEM departments and universities that is the science technology engineering and math are now being invaded by this absurd diversity ideology and You have Department after department saying we're not going to hire the best scientist We're gonna hire the best female scientist or the best black scientist. That shouldn't matter You have the National Science Foundation, which is the nation's premier funder of basic research It's a government agency created by Congress in 1950 to support Non-applied research in the science and It now is committed to the diversity ideology to argues that the only good science is diverse science It's ridiculous. I don't care if the lab that Finally breaks through on the causes and cures for Alzheimer's is all female all male all Asian or all Jamaican I don't care That's a universal language. They should be the best and China in the sciences at least remains committed to meritocratic hiring if we continue down this path of putting excellence below Some kind of gender and race Proportionality in our science labs and hiring we are going to lose our competitive edge and this is a Destructive point of view that is not limited to university campuses It's also in the private sector now where you have the big Silicon Valley tech firms Firing people if they challenge feminist orthodoxy, there's a lawsuit that's been fired filed against YouTube and Google by a former Manager in the HR department who refused to go along with the mandate to interview only Females blacks and Hispanics for entry-level engineering jobs so These Google and YouTube were willing to turn their backs on what may be The best engineering talent if that talent was white male or Asian This is reckless to say the least There's so many ways to go with this. I want to I'm glad you mentioned corporations in the way that the product from the university ends up then coming into the corporate environments and continuing that this type of behavior into the corporate environments, right? so, okay, so we start we want to start by talking about STEM because This is one of the most important fields for our future across the world is figuring out how to Properly engineer and design the future technologies that are going to be influencing the exponential technology Next couple of decades so we want to be at the forefront We want our children to be at the forefront children around the world. We want to be at the forefront and we We see here's in it. Here's here's an issue. Here's a way to frame the issue that I think makes it relatable across people's minds is that We've never wandered 50% of the military to be female. It's just a nonsensical statement If only that were the case. Sorry. Yeah, I mean You're you're operating from a position of rationality In fact we the military now has been overtaken by gender politics as well I've always said we're never gonna have a female in the NFL because Americans understand that football is important, but we'd now Have the preposterous idea of females in infantry ground combat units, which is just completely blind to the inherent Differences between male and female the structure of their pelvis is bone structure muscle structure as well as to the inevitable Introduction of arrows and its disruption to combat unit cohesion of having Integrated ground combat unit. It's it's it's absolutely preposterous So no, there's that the military is not free from this in fact It has now massive diversity bureaucracy. It has gender quotas everywhere And everybody's not being packed off to implicit bias training and microaggression training So your your presupposition was an understandable one, but I'm afraid you're behind the times Alan Yeah, and and just to take that again in another hopefully relatable way is that Men there's no there's no lobby for there to be 50% of men in nursing good point. Well, exactly. I mean it's an interesting Asymmetry Any disparity that favors females is regarded as natural nobody complains obstetrics gyn 83% of OB gyns are female now Nobody says well, there must be anti male bias But anything less than 50 50 proportionality male female if there's less females is inevitably and irrevocably Attributed to anti female bias The females now dominate in the university. They dominate the student body. They're vast way over the majority of male students They dominate in the administration. They dominate in humanities and social science fields again. That's all seen as perfectly fine but Let there be any field that is Gender-neutral gender-blind that nevertheless for a variety of reasons that we can go into Does not have 50 50 that is only explainable by bias Yeah, that that mentality itself is non multivariate. It's unidimensional. It's just looking at One thing and seeing it as oh, it's bias. It's discrimination and When there's thousands millions of variables to actually calculate to be able to understand things so so we must then Maximize the equality of opportunity for everyone on the planet as quickly as we can to where people can pursue whatever they find Most meaningful or interesting but not forcibly Put people into 50 50 divides across all these sub identity categories So just pursue what you find most meaningful and will and everyone on the planet will hopefully have that equality of opportunity Very soon We've been doing a good job as we indicated in the first portion of getting people up to that to that stand Well, it's very interesting because there's something called the equality index. It turns out that females in the most gender equal societies which are Basically the northern European societies rate the highest they have the lowest rate of going into stem fields the more options Females have the more they go towards their natural inclinations, which is towards more human-centered Hands-on relational work work that is traditionally viewed as having You know changing the world for the better social meaning I happen to disagree that being a computer coder does not have social meaning or does not change the world for better but but the traditional way is you know being a social worker or You know the certain aspects of the health care system and It's in places where females have less freedom where they have higher rates of going into stem So this isn't to say of course that there are not individual females that are every bit as Abstractly driven for the master abstract fields as males. We're talking averages here And that is one explanation for why there's not 50-50 parody in stem other explanations are the Different distribution of the the variance of high-end and low-end math skills It turns out that at the very low end of math cluelessness males predominate They're the the worst math dummies and at the very high high end of math skills males predominate Again, there's there's always Exceptions to this but in the United States for every 2.5 males at the point oh one Percentage of math genius for every 2.5 males. There's one female another distinction is Females with high-end math skills tend to also have Very good verbal skills giving them more career options the math the males with the very high end Math skills are not as good verbally. So they are sort of forced to go into a Sort of geeky field So identifying again just so many variables exactly go into this calculation. It's not just unit dimensional So I want to also make sure that we come to what you initially said in that segment where you where you started identifying that The the the youth that are going to these young adults that are entering into the collegiate systems Actually have the most the least bigotry ever ever on collegiate campuses There's nobody that is trying to withhold the voting rights or trying to withhold rights to enter into any sort of establishments of any sort that the the the quality of of Emotional care and presence and lack of hatred that is available there at the universities with the professors with the counselors with the peers Pure networks there is just high. It's the highest. You're absolutely right again the faculty are Liberal they want all of their students to succeed in particular Females and so-called underrepresented minorities. There are no barriers The students have access to libraries that would have driven the Renaissance humanist mad With envy and desire. They can read every book that has ever been written. This is just an Unbelievable treasure You can walk into the library. Nobody is holding you back and yet Females and so-called students of color are being taught By the diversity bureaucrats and by far too many professors to seed blocks And they're being given a chip on their shoulder rather than being given an adult perspective on their Enormous privilege They're being taught to see barriers where none exist and that chip on their shoulder follows them into the Non-academic world after they graduate and prevents them from seizing the boundless opportunities that are available to them Yes, okay There's I want to enter that subject and I want to also mention how the there is some sort of an issue with the Way that you know as Jonathan Hyde points out that we're just Coddling the mind from the youth and we're not letting an immune system build up And if we're not letting the kids face adversity ever then they're not going to be prepared they're gonna want to flag every microaggression as Some sort of an issue that needs to be dealt with at a at a governmental or political level of sorts instead of Approaching it as something that they can overcome that hey like you know, why did you like why did you say that or let's talk about this? Let's have a civil discourse. Let's grow and evolve our ethics together is now out the window It's reporting and flagging people and getting a boost from doing that Which is very strange and then you started indicating at the at the end of the of the segment the the the goal the mentality of setting goals and achieving goals is now taking a back seat to talking about how I've suffered in my life and It's unfortunate because the people that actually suffered are the ones that the hundred billion people that lived and died before us that suffered for electricity and well running water and food ubiquity and and That we didn't have penicillin that couldn't fly around and airplanes around the world These are the people that suffered It's absolutely true. It's absolutely true. I could not agree more. I I respect Jonathan Hates in Enormously I respect his heterodox Academy Norse. This is an extremely vital Institution nevertheless, I have taken issue with his analysis of what's going on. He does see the College hysteria as primarily a psychological phenomenon one of over parenting helicopter parents Coddling of students. I see it as an ideological one the the demographics don't quite work out because It is not the case sadly that on average Black and Hispanic kids are over-parented. There may be some in the elites that are some parents there that are mimicking the same parenting behaviors as as white parents and Asians to a lesser degree But the problem mostly with black and Hispanic kids is they don't not have adequate parenting It's it's a completely different parenting style when Leaving aside the question of whether there's two parents at home at all. Yeah, also the But you talk about the out-of-wedlock births and that causing a major issue towards violence and yeah No, that's the breakdown of the of the family is the biggest social catastrophe we face today But the other thing that does not match up demographically with the hate over parenting thesis is that the brothers of these white female students on campus who are going around Yowling about being in a patriarchy and rape culture Their brothers are not by and large demanding safe spaces, but they have the same helicopter parents So this is really an ideological found that that tells certain chosen anointed victim groups to think of themselves as victims and The others who do not fall within that category are by definition oppressors unless they can work themselves out of the oppressor care category by becoming a quote ally, which is a ridiculously Sort of melodramatic term allies or something you need in war and indeed that's the reigning conceit on College campuses, which is to be a female or a so-called student of color, which does not include Asians Is to be at war at literally at risk of your life from circumambient racism and sexism but as far as the resilience argument and I mean I agree with that that that Adults have a responsibility to teach students Perspective and well, I don't think there's any ground for calling anything on a college campus an adversity So these microaggressions being asked say well so like what are you? Which is a frequent microaggression that gets put up on these little student videos about how oppressed they are This is in a context of say a freshman mixer and somebody is saying like well What is like your ethnic heritage that is now seen as a microaggression in a world where we're told that the most important thing About somebody is his ethnic racial identity. So this question is perfectly legit within that discourse being told that that is a microaggression is not a way to Use your time Productively, you know an adult should tell people the difference between a real problem and a fake problem Being asked what is what are you is a fake problem a real problem is being shot at Having malaria with no cure having tuberculosis with no cure not having clean water not having clean food Childbirth leading Inevitably to 50% mortality of women of mothers and children. Those are problems Not microaggressions It's a very strongly put and I would agree with you that those are real problems that society faces and Are used to face I use that used to face. Yeah, and we and we broke our way through the those problems by banding together and and and being entrepreneurs and being following principles of Capitalism and raising the baseline baseline of living for people and I really appreciated the way that you Made a difference between what is what is written in the coddling in the sense that there is this is more of an ideology like you said I Think that is actually quite quite accurate. It's it's very it's very It's it's Concerning to see Massive groups of people that are just shutting down Conversations that oppose their viewpoints on college campuses including conversations Species that you've Given that we need a deeper Desire for discourse just as simple as Heather, why don't we go through a thought experiment? We can even go through a thought experiment right now that I think might Might help potentially so you know, I like to run simulations in my mind and a Simulation that we could potentially run is that What if society evolved where the the the role of a of white and black was swapped So as though the black was the one that ended up capturing white and enslaving white by the tens of millions in the 1800s, let's just say that as an example and then And then there was a Transgenerational period of trauma that occurred from that process that we would also feel then a bit of of of trauma as well a bit of just of Like wow that was really painful and seeing you know a majority of you know 44 of the presidents being black let's say and only one being white and and so it said And so when we go through this simulation of a of an experiment of what that would be like I start to feel better what it may feel like to be black today But also I realize that I Need to move forward and I need to have goals moving forward Away from just bathing myself in the trauma of the past and wanting to move forward What do you think about that thought experiment? Well sure that's a valid thought experiment I think again the question is what is the most efficacious way now To close the racial gap and what more can let's return to reality Whites do to close it is it is is what we're seeing today predominantly With the academic skills gap, which is huge the average black 12th grader Reads at the level of the average white 8th grader There still is a poverty gap, but that is overwhelmingly explained by black 71 percent It would out of wedlock birth rate That that's the greatest factor in determining child poverty today is whether you have a single parent or two married parents So what is the best way to close that achievement gap and There's no question that this country Lived in grotesque Violation of its founding ideals for 200 years 200 plus years blind to the hypocrisy It's it's unthinkable today. I mean, how could this not have been so obvious that We had created a racial caste system, which was completely at odds with Declaration of Independence and what we purported to stand for so that is all true and one can understand the lingering anger and resentment that it creates but I would argue that today Barriers have fallen in every mainstream institution I do not know a single mainstream institution that is not trying to hire and promote as many blacks as possible Whether it's corporations banks law firms the media Hollywood Foundations universities Publishing houses you name it. It is an obsession. It is an obsession and We have had Pensatory policies for a long time. We've had welfare redistribution of wealth at this point. I would say that the biggest divide between liberals and conservatives in their worldview is that a liberal will see structural forces as the predominant explanation for any type of inequality a Conservative is more likely to see individual behavioral choices So I'll put out another thought experiment to you Let's have blacks act like Asians for 10 years in everything relevant to achieving worldly success So rather than a 71 percent out of wedlock birth rate They have a 16 percent out of wedlock birth rate Asians the vast majority of kids are growing up in two-parent families rather than a anti white Anti-acting white culture that demeans academic effort as acting white and Stigmatizes students black students black peers who are seen as caring too much about doing homework How about if blacks emulate Asians fanatical attention to academic success How about parents emulate Asian parents? Overwhelming interest in whether their students there's children are studying whether they're acing their exams their refusal to accept Anything short of an a something that was also and still is characteristic of many Jewish parents which explains why Until Asians leapt out ahead Jews were the most academically successful group now Asians are whooping everybody's ass And how about if blacks also emulate Asians in their negligible crime rates? Right now the homicide rate for blacks is eight times higher than whites and Hispanics combined Asians don't even show up on those crime rates How about blacks emulate Asians in school attendance absence of truancy Waiting until you're married to have children Graduating from college if after ten years of acting like Asians in all things relevant to Economic success we still saw Economic disparities I Would then be very willing to entertain racism as the explanation But when the behavioral disparities are so great Right now in California say the black truancy rate is five times the net the state average Talk to student teachers in inner-city schools who will tell you about the difficulty of maintaining discipline a difficulty of getting students to just take their textbooks home to study When those behavioral disparities remain as large as they are I'm not willing to say structural Explanations are the most important thing. So there's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania That was a really good simulation Okay, that was a really good simulation because you really think about it for a period of time It's what would you want to change in the behavior patterns in order to maximize the potential of the children of that? Demographic and that was a really good simulation if if we had a Massive experiment where we could see what would happen for ten years with black people adapting these traits of Asians that you that you indicated I bet there would be a big roaring success that would come from that and So that was really powerful Heather I'm happy you ran that simulation and that's that's that's why this shows called Simulation is because we like to do these thought experiments of how societies can evolve and how they can become Better by taking on these potential changes in behavior and seeing where that can go in the future Well, there's one thing specifically that you said there's a difference in seeing things that I thought was interesting it was that When we when we see a hierarchy that has evolved That you made it you made an interesting point that it can be that at sometimes that liberals may see it as the structural violences that are in place that are causing oppression and tyranny and conservatives can see it as in some ways as individual behaviors of People causing them to either go up in the hierarchy or down in the hierarchy and this hierarchy is based on socioeconomics Let's say but there's also hierarchies based on like spiritual actualization or all all different other types of potential waste of sort Humans, but I thought that was a cool point because it's kind of we kind of have to find the nuanced ground in between those in the sense that it's totally on the behavior of individuals to figure them their way up In in the world, but also it's about figuring out what are the last Violences in the structures that are left that make it difficult for people to rise up and help Eradicate those but there seems to be too big of a megaphone Identifying that for something that's so little and your behavior is actually worth way more your mind The way your mind thinks is way more important than your melanin or gonads right well, that's true and You know it it's difficult thing to say to somebody Overcome adversity it just seems like well, what right do you have to say that but but it is the case that those extraordinary civil rights pioneers Uh struggled against adversity and succeeded it's not think we don't want to wish that on anybody But it is a much better Mindset as you say to think of oneself as having the power to overcome obstacles rather than to See every obstacle real or imagined as something that must set you back and and block any further progress So there's been pioneers in many fields. There's always a first person I can't stand this idea that you can only succeed if you have a role model that matches your gonads or melanin You know, how did Marie Curie learn to you know conquer the secrets of of radiation? She was the first female scientist in that field what mattered to her was the joy of discovery And I don't need some female To tell me if I wanted to do chemistry that that I can only do it if there's females that have gone before me That creates a vicious cycle where if there's Nobody in a field then there will never be anybody in that field because the assumption is you can only follow Somebody else before you that's ridiculous. So see it be it helps But it's not a necessity for discovery. It's that curiosity that inherent curiosity Yeah, ideas are not limited to by race and gender It should just be that the joy of discovery again I I just I suppose it helps but I I reject it completely. I've got a pretty hard-line position on it but Yes, there are violences out there. I would say very real violences if you Grow up in a neighborhood that is plagued by street violence That is a traumatic experience now This is something I've also written about which is crime and policing and the solution for that is first Redent the family because it is it is the breakdown. It is in a culture where boys are not being socialized by their fathers And Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw this in 1965 That is a culture that is going to head towards anarchy but absent that the second best solution is sound respectful constitutional policing and That's what people that live in those neighborhoods overwhelmingly want in my experience I have spent lots of time in inner city police community meetings and what I hear from those good Law-abiding bourgeois people is we want more cops. We want you to get the dealers off the streets So there are very real violences that are unequally distributed that are hindrances of getting to school and And so society should obviously try to eradicate them but there has been no dearth of big government projects to try and redistribute wealth and and and welfare that have not done a whole lot to close the Racial divide I Think really what is needed now and and again it there's been no absence of trying we're in New York City right now We have a massive government-supported social service sector That has a social worker for every ill under the Sun What's really needed I would say now is a rebirth of personal responsibility. I Am happy that you're ending with that because it is so crucial to embody that feeling of wanting to achieve success the personal responsibility of taking a burden on your shoulders of wanting to become your own best potential and Teaching that to the children of the next generation's not that we need a That not that we need so many Assistance programs to help us but but rather that we got to take a personal responsibility up and at the same time Personal responsibility up and make it easier for the baseline to be raised up as well to remove the violences in place Heather I want to see Let's let's before we get to the final questions on the way out this This foundation of truth is what we've collectively learned as a society over thousands of years of evolution we've now propped up science as a main foundation of truth and I want to know what your thoughts are on holding that integrity of that foundation and also how how that relates to what we can best do moving forward with having at having civil discourses in universities and corporations about how to best bring on somebody that is Neurally diverse that their mind is diverse and not by you know gonads and melanin, but by their thoughts Well, I would this junk diversity completely as a Affirmative goal, I know diversity mind diversity. Yeah, I just think you look for the best possible person I I now I've not worked in a corporation so it may be that the criteria for Admission for success for what you're looking for are in fact very fuzzy But where they're not where You know pretty much who's a good programmer or who's good at doing spreadsheets or regression analysis I think that's you look for that. It's it's not that complicated and trying to seek Individuals by definition are different. There's no two people who are the same To me every time somebody starts talking about diversity, it's code for something else You know interestingly the first diversity officer that Apple hired Got herself fired by saying at a conference in Bogota, Colombia that you could have 24 white males in a room and they would be diverse because Individuals are diverse. This was so heretical Within the diversity ideology that says that the only diversity that counts is race and gender and that we should typecast Everybody that she was fired for saying that and she of course groveled and apologized and said Well, I just want to make sure that nobody thinks that what I said is representative of Apple's views Nor are they of mine. This is pathetic. She was right the first time around you get 24 human beings together and Whatever their color and race, they're gonna be different that same principle can be applied to to 24 Asian women or to 24 black men or whatever. Yeah, they're different. They're I'm not gonna stare at something. I know liberal whites and conservative blacks I know conservative whites and liberal blacks. I'm not gonna jump to any conclusions about somebody based on their skin color his on his skin color it I just it's It's it's an incredibly narrowing way of viewing things so You know, I would say excuse me that it hurts our foundation of truth when we start identity politicsing everything right absolutely and and As far as their ability to find Truth about human nature going forward, you know, we have now in in science social sciences big replicability crisis That is in part Due to the fact something that Jonathan hate has written about and again, I respect him and he's done very powerfully the overwhelming Ideological monolith in the social sciences that is He's concerned that it produces only one way of seeing the world now. I don't want Quotas for hiring conservatives and academics. I think that would be a disaster I think any quota system is inevitably stigmatizing of the alleged beneficiaries, but but nevertheless The prioritization of race and gender Going forward is going to lead Generally, it too is sort of a surrogate and hand-in-hand with political bias and I think we should just junk all of that And the sort of last point before we get to these final questions. I think this is a really important point I wonder, you know, we're talking about the diversity delusion in the United States Which is so interesting because when you extend this conversation to like what is this like in China? Right is are they even they think we're crazy I talked with Asian physicists at Harvard when I was there doing a debate on affirmative action and giving a talk and They just the the the Asian scientists and students who are here They cannot believe what we're wasting our time up on China is ruthlessly meritocratic that the Asian countries all are ruthlessly Meritocratic yeah a meritocracy, right? Yeah, based on how strongly you perform in the field and not your race and gender Right, right. Yeah, and and I want you to continue telling us about that story And I just I'm just thinking about again running like what is it do they do they actually? Go around and saying in India that well We need to find white people to attend the Indian Institute of Technology and in China We need to find a white we need to find black people to attend our Universities no they couldn't care less. They are you know Whoever's the best and to certain extent of course nationalistic, but um, yeah You know the best thing that Trump would could do to level the playing field with China is to airlift a few cargo planes of gender Feminists from American universities and dump them on Beijing University in its research labs Because as long as they remain Uninfected by this identity poison. They will pull out ahead They care only about one thing. Are you the best person to? Unlock the the secrets of the human genome, you know and and they're Going ahead in a perhaps unethical way with their genetic splicing and whatnot And so they have some problems with the integrity possibly of the research, but they are still Seeking the smartest genetic engineers they can get I'm happy you're talking about it again Just that you got to be at the cutting edge of knowledge the cutting edge of science cutting edge of technology and Not caring so much about race and gender, but rather how well do you know the genome? How well do you know how to program artificial intelligence? How well do you know how to? Program blockchain protocols. How well do you know these things? Because this is how well do you know how the brain works because those are the people that no matter what the race and gender is They're at the cutting edge of knowledge, and we're not going oh, they're black or they're white or they're purple It doesn't matter doesn't matter at the cutting edge of knowledge And we need to push the boundaries of the cutting edge of knowledge and help children get to those cutting edges of knowledge Regardless of their race and gender just help them get to those edges wherever they care about going I'm glad we ran that experiment of what it's like in other places in the world That what is it like for their diversity? Conversations in other places in the world. Why are we so obsessed with a diversity? Conversation here where there's so much more based on meritocracy everywhere else Okay, Heather Before we get to those last questions are is there another Pressing point that you think we should cover in the conversation No, I guess I would just say that Universities should be places where students encounter beauty and greatness Where the faculty Teach them why they should be down on their knees in gratitude before works of sublime insight and imagination that take Us out of our petty narrow selves Into worlds that we would otherwise never experience whether it's life on a 19th century Russian feudal estate or into the imaginary groves of pastoral poetry or Experiencing the Langer of a Chopin Nocturne. These are all things that enrich us and again Take us out of the present Education should be about the transmission of an of an inheritance from one generation to the next and all too often now it's about the transmission of Ungrounded unjustified anger resentment and self-pity How can we pass along the best collective learning principles to the next generation over and over again? So that's how to prosper most effectively Well, we do it by throwing aside anger resentment grievance and Opening ourselves to beauty Yeah, because it's a miracle that we're here on earth It's a miracle that we have all this ubiquity around us. So, yeah Okay, the couple questions on the way out. We like to ask our guests. What would you say is a core driving principle of yours? Well Meritocracy and a belief in the humanistic tradition a sorrow and a rage that that humanistic learning is being destroyed Feeling that It's on us to keep these great books alive if we stop reading them they die so Just a sense of urgency about keeping the inheritance of civilization vital and available to everybody who should Has the privilege to to absorb it and also I guess it contempt for idiocy I don't like I I just You know explanations of reality that are clearly counterfactual I have no patience for and What would you? If you could rebuild Civilization from scratch, how would you design it? Well, I you know, I'm I'm not a deep hierarchy and Friedrich Hayek, but I I'm I know enough about him that I would say that one doesn't design such things they evolve organically and So I'm I'm sort of agnostic about that but it seems right to me So I think that any individual is going to have a hard time Constructing a civilization, you know, it's it's it's derived by trial and error empirically I guess what I would do would be to try and Stop the wrong turn that I think Started to happen partly as a result of the enormous success of capitalism in the 1950s where you had Adolescents for the first time ever in human history being themselves Autonomous consumers and thus the target of corporations because they now had buying power because America was so fantastically wealthy that Teenagers were liberated Through the car and through having huge pocket change and so we got the growth of youth culture Which is stupid culture by and large a reversal of traditional hierarchies where adults are viewed as the source of instruction and discipline and you had children broken free and and being given more Say and things and that's Children or children, you know adolescents have adolescent tastes. They don't know very much, but that part of that capitalism capitalist success gave us the 1960s counterculture and It's Trashing of so much of Western civilization. So I would maybe sort of Reconfigure things a little bit there how you would do so I don't know, but I would fight back harder against the pretensions of The counterculture and the hippies and the whole revolution out I would not obviously fight the civil rights revolution that struggle that was absolutely needed but I think that the What's called the hermeneutics of suspicion the assumption that any kind of Existing structure is simply a mask for oppression and and unfairness I disagree with that view and I would I would try and undo that totally it's been a a Hierarchy of competence is a really good way to look at things and that's right. Yep. Yep Okay, how about do you think this is a simulation? Reality do I think it's a simulation of something else No, I think it's all we've got I think that We are living in a real physical environment and We die And Everything is mortal the transience is is the nature of of our reality including probably the universe so I But I I do think that you stub your toe on a rock and that rock is real And the last question is what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? music You know from massive grand piano. Yeah, I think Mozart's operas the st. Matthew passion by Bach Chopin Brahms I Schubert, I mean one is drowning in beauty and tell us about why those musical pieces Are the most beautiful thing for you? well, they They contain a pathos They lift one up into a sense of grandeur and nobility They contain sorrow eroticism desire exuberance and They are able to express things that feelings and States of being that no other Medium of expression can love it. I love it, and I really love listening to those composers Really in pieces of work Heather this has been such a pleasure. Thank you. I'll tell you're talking to you. Thank you for coming on to the show And get my frozen hand Thank you everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it check out the links below to Heather's work Also, the diversity delusion is also in the links below go and check it out Really do some thought experiments in our minds about that foundation of scientific truth And how I want to keep building the world on that and what people around the world are thinking about How we're handling diversity and do they even have diversity there etc? So really we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Let us know what your thoughts are also go and Go and build the future everyone manifest your own destiny into the world build create and We'll see you soon. Thanks everyone for tuning in keep supporting Simulation so you can continue doing cool things like coming on-site to a great place like New York and talking awesome people like Heather And thank you everyone. We'll see you soon. Bye