The Hanania Show

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comYes, we’re going to keep milking this thing for what it’s worth. To follow up on my article on Sydney Sweeney’s breasts and their implications for the culture war, here I do some gender theory. The more I think about it, the more I realize that her not apologizing for coming from a family of MAGAs is probably a bigger sign of cultural change than her boobs themselves.I begin by talking about the ways in which many of the things that divide the two sides of the culture war are implicit in social norms and rules of interpersonal relations. I also discuss the seeming paradox in which leftists are more likely to support pornography and prostitution while being horrified by the male gaze. In many ways, turning sex into a kind of market transaction makes it more predictable and rule bound. Pornos have scripts, while real life romance does not, which makes the former in many ways less disturbing to a movement that seeks to regulate practically all aspects of human existence in the names of safety and eliminating power disparities. If one takes a broad definition of consent, it is much easier to establish in market situations. For these reasons, leftists want the standard workplace to be completely sanitized of sex, while being more comfortable with sex as work itself.I understand many women don’t want their sexuality to always be salient, so I won’t condemn everything about liberal spaces. Something I emphasize in The Origins of Woke is that one reason that the civil rights regime is so evil is that it makes how men and women relate to one another a matter of federal law, instead of letting market forces aggregate preferences. We should respect such differences, and clearly individuals have widely varying views regarding what kinds of private institutions they want to build and be a part of.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comTracingWoodgrains is someone I’ve gotten to know over X and through his Substack. He’s currently a law student and works as a producer for the hilarious Blocked and Reported podcast, which I recommend everyone subscribe to. I’ve found “Trace,” as everyone calls him, to be one of the most interesting new thinkers to emerge over the last several years. He spent six years in the Air Force where he worked as a Chinese linguist, and grew up Mormon, before leaving the church and discovering he was gay as an adult.We begin by talking about Trace’s politics. He calls himself a “Lee Kuan Yew Centrist,” and we discuss what that means. Then we move on to his personal background, including what it was like growing up in a religious community and how his friends and family reacted to him coming out as gay and marrying a man. This leads to a conversation about Mormon politics more generally, including how members of the church tend to be pro-establishment and the ways in which that is out of step with conservatism in the Trump era. We also discuss the issue of low human capital on the right, a topic he recently wrote about. I ask whether there may be ways around this mattering, by conservatives getting better at ideological filtering and seeking to use political power to “de-institutionalize” society. I asked Trace which political coalition he sees as closer to representing his worldview and more potentially fixable. He and I share many positions in common, and also a kind of political aesthetic, so I was taken a bit back by his answer, and this leads us to go into why our backgrounds might make us approach the question differently. One of the things we agree on here is a need to see more spirited defenses of classical liberal ideas. In this context, we talk about the surrogacy issue, which we’ve both taken strong positions on.Near the end, I ask how he came up with the name “TracingWoodgrains,” and whether he’s actually a furry and if the whole thing is really a sublimated desire for bestiality.All of this is to say that this was a deep and wide-ranging conversation. I’ve done few podcasts that have ended up being this interesting in terms of both intellectual content and personal narrative. Enjoy.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comFor a while I’ve been investing in cryptocurrency, without knowing much about what the blockchain is or its underlying mechanics. A week or two ago, I took Roko Mijic’s advice to buy some Dogecoin, and have been rewarded with a 35% return already. After that happened, I thought it was about time I sought out someone to explain to me how this all works, so I invited him on the podcast to discuss.Roko is famous for the idea of Roko’s Basilisk, which took the rationalist community by storm in the early 2010s. If you find the idea of a vengeful and all-powerful AI that will torture you plausible, you may want to skip the first 20 minutes or so of this conversation, as some believe that even learning about the argument increases your odds of punishment. According to Roko, one guy jumped out of a window after realizing its implications. Here’s the Wikipedia page if you’re brave enough. We also go into Roko’s idea that the study of AI alignment should not come at the expense of thinking about the goals we program into these systems, along with the collective action problems that the technology presents. To learn more, you can either follow Roko on X, or join his X community, where he discusses this topic with others.This is one of those conversations I am going to go back and listen to. I’ve read a few books and articles on how the blockchain works, but this discussion demonstrated how nothing can replace talking to someone who is knowledgeable about a topic. I highly recommend this podcast, and hope others find it as enlightening as I did. Listen to us talk here, or watch the video below.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comThis week, I begin by discussing two recent articles by and about women: “How Feminism Ends” by Ginevra Davis, and “Female neediness is real, but it’s not a tragedy” by Ruxandra Teslo. These essays have a common theme in that they both emphasize the difficult hand nature has dealt women. Davis focuses on the physical pain they feel, and has a compelling explanation of the trans phenomenon that I hadn’t considered before. Ruxandra criticizes the so-called Reactionary Feminists, and makes clear that many of the complaints they have about modern societies are exaggerated and need to be understood from a comparative perspective. My view is that being a woman is difficult, there is a lot of competition between the sexes and within each sex, and we need to get beyond the idea that we’re going to find a social system that solves problems that are based in human nature. All we can do is judge societies in a relative sense and consider tradeoffs when deciding what changes we want to make, realizing that many things are determined by our inherent design interacting with the current state of technological development and therefore out of our direct control. Near the end of the discussion, I talk about Mitch McConnell stepping down as the leader of the Senate Republicans and take the opportunity to reflect on his legacy. I think it was either me or Brian Chau who coined the term “effective Republicanism” to refer to his approach. McConnell had the wisdom to understand that we are in effect a judgeocracy, and to pull the levers he needed to pull in order to ensure more conservative policy victories over the long run. He was never going to be appreciated in this populist era in which the Republican base demands buffoonery, but understanding the virtues of McConnell provides insight into how to wield power.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comAnatoly Karlin joins me for the second time on this podcast. In our previous conversation, he talked about his move away from Russian nationalism. This time, we discuss his new article, “Navalny Died a Barin.” I am fascinated by the idea of Putin as a kind of charisma vampire, who destroys anyone who is interesting and full of life, leaving a regime of gray mindless mediocrities willing to do his bidding. I was touched reading about how Navalny once asked the judge and court officials who were persecuting him whether this was what they wanted to be doing with their one God-given life on this earth. According to Anatoly, it doesn’t matter whether you are pro- or anti-Putin. What the regime cares about is that you don’t have your own voice and can be controlled. The enemies of liberal democracy are today boring, cowardly bureaucrats. I don’t know if this is a blue pill or a red pill, but it’s certainly a good reason to oppose modern authoritarian regimes.We discuss the logic of killing Navalny, where any future threats to the regime might come from, what would happen if Trump came back into office, and how Putin is a TV watcher driven by a combination of self-preservation instincts and mind-melting Boomer memes. At the end we touch briefly on Anatoly’s current experience in Próspera, what cryptocurrencies he’s bullish on, and whether he’s tried any gene therapy while there.I find myself disliking Putin more the longer he stays in power. After Prigozhin’s death, I noted that the man may have been a war criminal, but there was a masculine heroism in how he lived and died. If only Putin was a more worthy adversary of Western civilization! Not a guy who is still scared of covid, hides behind bureaucratic procedures to wear down his enemies, and poisons their underpants. The fact that the populist right has embraced the man only reinforces my view of how much they suck.Anatoly predicts that the Russian election next month will basically be a nonevent. The death of Navalny feels like the end of Season 4 of the show or something. Already having taken out Prigozhin and on the offensive in Ukraine, things are looking up for Putin. Assuming he gets past this election without much trouble, we’re just waiting for the next health scare, mass protest movement, economic crisis, shift in the war, or attempted coup. Russians deserve better, and may the memory of Navalny inspire them to work towards their liberation from this lifeless and particularly vicious gerontocracy.

The podcast discusses topics such as a debate on democracy versus monarchy, Tucker's trip to Moscow and criticism of US foreign policy, finding a healthier balance in criticizing America's flaws, and Edward Luttwak's analysis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comBryan Caplan joins me to play a very special game. Building off my “Why the Media Is Honest and Good,” and Bryan’s response, “Mainstream Media Is Worse Than Silence,” we decided to browse some major news sites and analyze the headlines in order to explore our differences. We cover the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal.You can listen to the audio here, but to get the full benefit you should watch the video to follow along as we go through the major news sites and react in real time to what we see. We previously agreed not to read the news today until our conversation, which would allow us to spontaneously react to the articles. I realized here that the question of whether the media is good or not depends on one’s framing. In my original article, I assumed the perspective of someone who wanted to be informed about the world, and was comparing the press to twitter and right-wing alternatives. Bryan is more arguing that it’s better not to pay attention to the news at all, which I think is probably the right choice for most people. He moved me a bit towards his position. Very few of the “problems” that the media focuses on are actually problems in my view, and the ones that do exist are often made worse by coverage. I had a realization that I really couldn’t think of many instances where the media warned people about something and government went and made things better, although that probably reflects my libertarian bias, which Bryan isn’t the best person to check. Perhaps I was too quick to dismiss other potential ways of making important information available to the public, like the torts system. I’ve always assumed in these arguments that the press would be replaced by some other source of information, not that the people would do what’s most healthy and just focus on their own lives. Our MSM is good relative to most institutions that have controlled the marketplace of ideas throughout history, and also, as mentioned, its right-wing antagonists who have built alternatives that are rife with sensationalism and misinformation. We digress into a few other areas, like Prigozhin’s attempted coup, coverage of Bukele and what’s happening in El Salvador (see here and here), how awful conservative media is, and what we know about Balochistan. Enjoy.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRon DeSantis recently came out in favor of a bill that would outlaw lab grown meat in Florida. This provides a reason to talk about something I’ve been thinking about for a while, which is the degree to which cruelty to animals is polarized across party lines, and how Democrats are preferable on this issue. Most people don’t think of this as a kind of culture war topic, but there are consistent differences between the two major parties. If you’re an effective altruist, or even a utilitarian of any sort, animal cruelty is one reason to clearly favor the left. See here for my article on how although I still eat meat, my hope is that technology can one day put an end to factory farming. In addition to the substantive differences between the two sides, I discuss the psychological and ideological motivations behind Republicans trying to stand in the way of animal rights. I identify the increasing hostility to all forms of progress among conservatives, based on the naturalistic fallacy. Before, the right might have been pro-life, but leftists were more opposed to “messing with nature” in non-religious contexts, by being more skeptical of things like GMOs and vaccines. I also go into how conservative parties have often supported government intervention to favor farmers, in contradiction to free market principles. With our recent political realignment, the right has become the tribe of less educated and less trustful individuals. This means that rather than the naturalistic fallacy sort of being split into different domains, conservatives are just more consistently anti-technological progress, regardless of the costs. Opposition to lab grown meat can be seen as one more manifestation of this, along with hostility to vaccines and reproductive technologies. This is potentially a very disturbing development, although if leftists become more pro-progress in response the net impact could be positive. On a different note, my debate with Curtis Yarvin this Friday, hosted by Anna Khachiyan, has sold out its original venue in East LA, so we’ve moved it to Glendale. More tickets are now available here, either $100 for regular seats or $55 for discount tickets. Look forward to seeing everyone there.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comThe abortion issue is dragging down the rest of the conservative movement. While many have pointed this out, there hasn’t been much thinking yet about what, if anything, can be done about it. The goal of this podcast is to look back on how the pro-life movement came to dominate American conservatism and investigate whether that history has any lessons for today.As discussed in Randall Balmer’s Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, Evangelicals did not care about the abortion issue until the late 1970s (see thread). The origins of the Moral Majority can actually be found in resistance to civil rights law, and attempts to set up and protect religious schools that either implicitly or explicitly excluded students based on race. In addition to the book, this monologue relies on a BBC podcast I would highly recommend (audio, abridged text) on the origins of the culture war. It talks about the important role of Francis Schaeffer’s documentary series Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, which was screened across the country in early 1979.In this podcast, I go into Evangelical-Catholic differences and what the history of the anti-abortion movement tells us about political change over time and the potential for conservatism to shift again. Here, the Trump cult can be an advantage, since one man has such a disproportionate influence on political attitudes. He has already shown skepticism about the pro-life agenda; whether he currently has the actual ability to execute a pivot given his current mental state is a different question. Near the end, I talk about the ways in which conservative meanness and their desire to “own the libs” can potentially convince them to change their minds on the abortion issue. The results of the 2024 election will be key here. Parties don’t like to repeatedly lose — especially in a hyper-polarized era like our own— and pro-lifers being at fault for yet another bad year may help move conservatives closer to the rest of the public on reproductive freedom.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comI discuss the Republican primary in New Hampshire last night, widely considered to have been for most practical purposes the end of the campaign. Last week, I talked about Bullying Grandma Syndrome, which explains why Trump has and continues to dominate the Republican Party. Haley’s relatively strong performance with Democrats and Independents last night brings to mind another dynamic, which is how the current Republican Party relates to the wider electorate. Many people aren’t content to get bullied by senile grandmas forever. They end up leaving the party, and this is why we’re seeing an exodus of more educated voters from the GOP. In politics, there’s something called the “median voter theorem.” I think that while there is something to this idea, the best explanation for why moderate candidates tend to win is that they have personalities that are more appealing to wide swaths of the public. Watching Trump and Haley supporters, it seems to me that Republicans really don’t understand the most important contrast between them, which is that one group is composed of people who might be your neighbors or family friends while the other is a collection of the elderly relatives who you have to put up with during holidays but otherwise do everything to avoid. I also discuss why I’m less bullish on Trump’s chances of winning the general election than a few weeks ago, his diminishing mental capacity, and why the combination of the abortion issue and Republicans generally being seen as the party of weirdos means we may be entering an era of Democratic dominance.LinksNBC exit poll on NHTracingWoodgrains on the Republican Party being doomedInterviews with Haley votersTrump being senile, confusing Nikki Haley for Nancy PelosiTrump supporter with bad hip fantasizing about civil war