This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comDerek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic (profile, X account), and the host of the Plain English podcast. He joins me to discuss his new book Abundance, co-authored with Ezra Klein. Derek was actually responsible for the first article I ever published in a mainstream media outlet, which was a response to him in The Atlantic in 2012 on the question of whether clutch matters in basketball. He had encouraged me to submit it after I emailed him. I was really proud of the accomplishment at the time, and it got me thinking that I could publish in mainstream outlets, though it would be years until I would do so again. Derek had understandably forgotten about our initial connection, and it was fun to remind him of it here. After a bit of sports talk, we get to the substance of his book. I was already well versed in some of the intellectual currents that flowed into it, including progress studies, state capacity liberalism, and basic free market economics, yet I still learned quite a bit. Thompson and Klein do an excellent job of putting together the data, anecdotes, and anecdata necessary to make a compelling case of where liberalism has gone off the rails.We spend a good bit of time talking about how the authors decide to frame the issues involved. In particular, I wonder why they do not make a full-throated defense of markets, since so much of the abundance agenda involves getting government out of the way. This leads to a discussion of why conservative states do so much better on the housing issue, and whether a pro-abundance agenda can actually make for a popular political program. See Klein’s recent article, “There Is a Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball.” See also my article “Forty Years of Economic Freedom Winning.”I go on to ask Derek something that I’ve always been curious about, which relates to the sociological and demographic characteristics of the people on the left with views contrary to his own. I read outlets like The New York Times and The Atlantic, and I see pro-abundance views, and very little in terms of NIMBYism and favorable coverage of NEPA review. Since elite liberalism, as represented by Klein and Thompson themselves, seems to be oriented in the right direction, why has policy not changed all that much? Near the end, I ask about how much of the abundance/anti-abundance split on the left is reflecting an underlying difference in neuroticism.I’ve written a lot about how pessimistic I am about the trajectory of the right, but the rise of ideas represented by Klein, Thompson, and other thinkers who are pro-progress in the best sense makes me much more optimistic about where the left is going. As we discuss here, I worry about whether there may be difficulty in overcoming vested interest groups, even if Klein and Thompson win in the marketplace of ideas. If liberals are all abundance agenda types in a decade and not much has changed in blue state governance, it seems to me that there perhaps needs to be consideration of whether the left as currently constituted can provide answers in areas like housing and energy. In other words, perhaps those in favor of abundance cannot hope to achieve their goals as long as they find themselves in the same coalition as degrowthers, the highly neurotic, and bureaucratic elites who benefit from complex and open-ended regulations.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comJust did a livestream with Michael Tracey. We talk about the latest news in the Ukraine War. The Ukrainians have accepted a 30-day ceasefire proposed by the Trump administration, and the ball is now in Putin’s court, in Rubio’s words. This seems to us like the minerals deal all over again, where Ukraine hawks are maneuvering in the hopes of getting Trump committed to supporting Ukraine and angry at Putin. We discuss the motivations of the various actors involved and whether anyone has an incentive to stop fighting, or alternatively whether it would make sense for Trump to pull the plug on Ukraine. Our outlook is grim, as it doesn’t seem like we are anywhere near peace. From the outside, it looks as if Putin has every reason to continue the war.Michael tries to convince me to take Trump’s supposedly expansionist aims literally, and argues for a connection between tariffs and promises to make Canada the 51st state. I at first think he’s crazy and ask what evidence he has for that link. Michael delivers by pointing to a recent Truth Social post where Trump makes the association explicit. He moved my perspective on this a bit. On the idea that Trump now sees himself as a kind of messianic figure, I loved this profile of the man and his ear from September by Olivia Nuzzi, which was truly a work of art. Near the end, we take some questions from the audience. Michael explains why he’s “Mearsheimered out,” and we give our overall outlook on the tariffs and what to expect from Trump going forward. We talk about why right-wingers are so pro-Putin these days, and I argue that it actually does mostly come down to gays, fealty to symbols of Western civilization, and a trad aesthetic. I also try to convince Michael to take seriously the idea that Russian propaganda has a major role to play in how the right is perceiving reality. See the thread here for my recent conversation with Tucker and how he has bought into a Russian influence operation regarding Ukraine selling weapons online. See also my article, “Putin as the Patron Saint of Right-Wing Misanthropy.”Note: if you’re listening to this show on your podcast app and it cuts off around 26 minutes in, you’re listening to the free preview. Become a paid subscriber to listen to or watch the whole thing.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comJust did an AMA. I took questions on whether I would ever have another institutional affiliation again, why Substack is so much higher quality than Twitter, Nick Fuentes’ intelligence, what parts of the Trump agenda might be undone by a future Democratic administration, whether I watch Severance, anime, nationalism and immigration restriction, and more. Note that the new time for the weekly show is Wednesdays at 1ET/10PT, rather than 4ET/1PT. Finally, I was on Destiny’s stream on Monday. These always get massive numbers of views, and you can check out our conversation here.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comI did a livestream yesterday after a viral tweet on the Zelensky press conference from hell. I discuss what I saw, scroll Twitter for reactions, and take some questions from the audience. The first hour and a half or so was good, but it dragged out a bit at the end. Yet it’s all here for the superfans.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comI did my first weekly show with Michael Tracey today. Michael begins by discussing his experience at CPAC and his time at a DOGE appreciation party, where I was apparently a topic of contention. The bulk of our conversation is then spent talking about the deal for the US to supposedly take a cut of Ukraine’s resources, to be signed Friday according to Trump. Here is what is reportedly a copy of the current text. We try to read the mixed signals from the Trump administration, and debate what it all means. Near the end, we discuss the big announcement that Jeff Bezos is going to be making sure that the Washington Post editorial page promotes individual liberty and free markets. As announced, this is the first in what is going to be a regular show on Wednesdays at 4ET/1PT. You can join us live for free by downloading the app below or get the whole thing as a paid subscriber later.

I am honored to have New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on the podcast to talk about his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious. I’ve always seen atheism as my first intellectual position. Upon learning that many Christian doctrines declare that non-believers go to hell and are tortured for all eternity, I decided I needed to look into whether their claims were true and came to the conclusion that they most certainly weren’t. Yet I don’t completely dismiss the idea that something beyond the natural world might be out there. Bentham’s Bulldog writes pieces on theism and makes arguments that I’m unsure how to think about but don’t strike me as obvious nonsense. A 2020 survey showed that 19% of philosophers leaned towards theism, so it’s not like the position is akin to anti-vaxx or young earth creationism, where none of the trained experts take the claims involved seriously. The fact that people just as smart as me have thought longer and harder about the subject and arrived at the position that God exists is enough to give me perhaps a bit of doubt about my atheism. Debates around theism strike me as similar to those about AI doom. I can develop strong opinions on topics when there is empirical data we can bring to a question. So I have confident views on the best economic system, the role of heredity in determining cognitive and personality outcomes, what causes some voters to support Donald Trump, and whether humans have seen a major increase in living standards over the course of history. When it comes to speculation, trying to follow chains of reasoning, and arguments derived from analogies and thought experiments – which I think is most of what we have in debates over theism and AI doom – I don’t trust myself or other people to be able to do any of this well. Douthat is someone whose political and cultural writings I’ve always found interesting, so I decided to give his new book a try. Believe focuses mostly on attempting to convince the reader that there is something out there beyond material reality, with only the last chapter making the case for Christianity. I found myself dividing the arguments into a few baskets. The best arguments for theism I think rest on fine-tuning and the mystery of consciousness. I found the supposed evidence for the existence of the supernatural – miracles, demons, the power of prayer, near-death experiences, etc. – less compelling. This was much of the focus of his conversation with Tyler, who also sounded very skeptical. I ask Ross to assign probabilities on the supernatural being real, Christianity being true, and Catholicism being true. I then explain my main moral problem with traditional Christian dogma, which is that some portion of humanity will be sentenced to everlasting torture. We tend to think that any punishment should fit the crime one is guilty of. Few would say that an individual who has committed a dastardly act should be held down and tortured for decades, which leads to the question of why an all-knowing, all-loving God would do something similar on a much longer timescale. We talk a good bit about the role of providence in human affairs, which I found quite fun. The conversation swerves into how Ross thinks about someone like Trump playing a preordained role in history. On the surface, this might seem like a somewhat silly part of our discussion, but it actually raises intriguing questions regarding how the mechanics of God intervening in human affairs would actually work.Near the end, we get to the part of Ross’s book I’m most skeptical of, which is the alleged evidence for supernatural experience. If prayer is real, why not conduct a double-blind randomized study? I also bring up the Randi Prize challenge, which offered $1 million to anyone who could demonstrate supernatural abilities but never had to pay out. I have to confess however that I do find the story told by professional skeptic Michael Shermer about how his wife’s old radio started working on their wedding day to be very weird. I do sort of love the idea that God is like a writer for a prestige TV drama, and history has all these A and B list characters that He shuffles around in order to move the plot along. The Roman Empire is maybe its own season. World War II was the finale of the one that began as the Industrial Revolution was taking off. Now we’re in the middle of Season 8, and AI, which started out as a minor character in the background, is about to become the main protagonist. The series finale is of course Judgment Day. People like Trump and Putin are the main characters, the Starks and the Lannisters, while we lesser mortals are akin to the slaughtered hordes left on the numerous battlefields of the War of the Five Kings. The Hanania subplot is a pretty cool one. Five years ago I was nobody, now I at least have a (very bad) Wikipedia page, and can reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people on a daily basis, leading my fans closer to God or everlasting damnation. I start out as a rightoid, move towards rightist-tinged rationalism, become an influential figure among Elite Human Capital as I disparage the existence of the supernatural. Razib uses the tools of modern science to show I am related to Jesus and his neighbors in ancient Palestine, as the Lord starts speaking to me about how God is actually real, hoping to use (knowing he will use?) my biography and background to bring others into His flock. Ross Douthat convinces me to believe in God, I return to the faith of my ancestors, actually my childhood, and they run a big feature in the New York Times about what happened. All thinking people read it and become convinced God is real, helping us shake free of our cultural decadence and existential anxiety as humanity moves towards a new Golden Age. All thanks to me and this podcast. Oh and you get to live in a state of bliss for all eternity. Very seductive! I can see the appeal of this. But as I tell Ross, short of the Lord or one of his angels appearing directly next to me, I have no way of understanding how one would distinguish Him sending me a sign from my own wishful thinking and intoxication with a very cool narrative that gives me an important role to play in a great cosmic story.I did not become a Christian while talking to Ross, but I enjoyed his book, and perhaps some other souls will be saved among the listeners of this conversation. I think I will take him up on his suggestion to read They Flew and hope to also look into the question of the historical Jesus before long. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comJust did a livestream with the beautiful gorgeous amazing brilliant stunning Claire Lehmann, editor of Quillette. You can follow them on Substack here, and also follow Claire directly to keep up with what she is doing. Follow her on X too while you’re at it.We discuss conservatives’ love affair with Andrew Tate, who the Trump administration is now trying to help get out of Romania. We also talk about the topics of some of my articles, including DOGE, conservatism as an oppositional culture, and whether AI will take the jobs of people like us. I was hurt to learn that Claire hated the AI drawing of my article on why we should all die for Ukraine.In addition to her being beautiful gorgeous amazing brilliant stunning, I continue to appreciate Claire as someone who has kept her head and remained reasonable in a time when tribalism and audience capture have ruined so many others. I enjoyed talking to her about our intellectual ecosystem and the influencer market. I ended the conversation feeling like we were going to be ok.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comI just had a discussion with Razib Khan about some of the exciting recent developments in paleogenetics. In 2018, I read David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here and was absolutely captivated by the idea that we could learn about cultures, population movements, and other aspects of our past through the analysis of prehistoric, ancient, and more recent DNA.The field of paleogenetics is a fast-moving one, so there have been a great many discoveries in the five-plus years since the book was published. Reich was on Dwarkesh’s podcast a few months ago discussing some of them. Until another authoritative book comes out on this topic – which I was excited to learn that Razib might soon write – the best you can do is subscribe to his Unsupervised Learning newsletter, where you can find poetic articles on the intersection between genomics, culture, and history. The immediate motivation for this conversation was his recent piece on how the Indo-European explosion of 5,000 years ago actually led to a decline in civilizational complexity in Europe. After some initial chit-chat on the latest on Ukraine and debating stupid people on X, we discuss that essay, along with various other topics, including* The race of the Ancient Greeks* The fluctuations in Neanderthal admixture in humans throughout prehistory* What the Indo-Europeans looked like* The identity of the Ancient Persians and their relationship to modern Iranians* “Cold winters” theory, and why we see a looks gradient from Northern to Southern Europe* The discrediting of white nationalist ideas* Theories about group IQ differences* What paleogenetics can actually tell us about cultures, the rise and fall of civilizations, and how people lived* The irrefutable non-human DNA evidence suggesting there are unlikely to be lost civilizations yet to be discoveredNear the end, I tell Razib that he’s basically one of those guys who appears on Rogan and talks about lost civilizations and such, except that what he says is actually grounded in science. In a world with twenty more IQ points, he would be a lot better known than Graham Hancock. While the enthusiasm towards ideas about the human past of Rogan and Hancock fans is understandable, they unfortunately don’t have the judgment to distinguish between science and myth.Every time I learn more about paleogenetics, whether through reading or talking to Razib, I come away invigorated. Aside from perhaps some lessons about human nature, there is little practical knowledge to be gained from such work. Still, some of us are noble enough to want the truth about ourselves, and to be able to stand in awe of the process that has led to us knowing so much about how humans, and our humanoid cousins, lived, worked, loved, and died across tens of thousands of years based on nothing more than the artifacts and genetic material they left behind.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comJust did a livestream on the importance of “race posting” in right-wing culture. Things have gone well beyond being anti-woke. Young right-wingers have created a horrifying inverse of woke culture where race and attitudes towards racial issues, along with attitudes towards those who dislike racism, become the center of one’s worldview. I argue that, setting aside the question of whether one should lose a job for tweets, there is something unhealthy about people forming a community based on whether they can “out racism” each other. I bring up what I call “Red Scare Culture,” in which there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who are racist and cool with racism, and those who will put forth any criticism of racism in any context only because they’re concern trolling or trying to gain acceptance from leftists. See here for context. What annoys me perhaps most of all is that race guys become boring. There are people I know who are passionate about politics, but somehow have no strong opinions on economics or foreign policy. It’s simply race, and to a lesser extent being “based” on sex issues too. Just a pathetic existence. Don’t fall into this trap! You’re a bigger slave to woke than the academic who puts the pronouns in his bio and then goes on with his life. Partway through I’m joined by Jeff Giesea, who has experience in many of the same circles. We discuss how class conflict intersects with racial issues in America, and how we’ve ended up in a paradoxical place where race is the center of our political discourse but matters less and less in our personal lives. We can see this most clearly in the multiracial racists on the right who don’t see any contradiction in their world view.Links and further reading based on references in the conversation:On the DOGE engineer who was fired for racist tweets and subsequently brought backMy tweet from today on the topicRecent discussion on Ask a Jew on a wide range of issues including thisMe on Nietzschean ChudderyMe, “How to Not Get Cancelled” Me, “America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization” Me, “Ron Unz Confronts the Far Right”

I did a livestream today with Noah Smith, someone whose writing I have admired for a long time and who I was happy to finally get to meet.We start out by talking about what’s going on with the Trump administration, and all the recent craziness, including the president’s supposed plan for the US to take over Gaza. This blends into discussions about China and Russia, and their memetic relationships with the American left and right respectively. Noah explains why he believes that Putin will not make a deal in the current conflict, and why that means we should keep supporting Ukraine. He also goes into why the current war in Ukraine reminds him of the Russo-Finnish War (1939-1940), and whether Elon Musk is destined to play the role of Franco and eventually take over the Republican Party once Trump is gone. If that’s not enough in the way of historical analogies, Noah presents his theory that Elon Musk sees himself as a Metternich-like figure, perhaps trying to form a global triumvirate with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping against the US foreign policy establishment and the forces of woke.We also talk about American domestic politics, including the GOP as a cult of personality and how quickly the Democrats can reform. In the process, Noah names his ideal Republican presidential candidate and talks about why he is a fan of Texas as a civilization. Near the end, going off his recent article on too many Americans being afraid of the future, I ask Noah what his elevator pitch is for embracing change. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I present a novel theory of “horny posting,” which sees it as a way to defeat both inceldom and racism, the two great evils of the right. Relevant articlesNoah Smith, “Too many Americans still fear the future.”Noah Smith, “The chaos has arrived.”Richard Hanania, “Trump’s executive branch revolution”Betting market I created on Trump’s tariffs This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe