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- [00:01]
Steve Sailer
If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why, hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Everybody's trying to stay employed these days and not get canceled, so God bless them.
- [01:08]
Michael Malice
Good afternoon. Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. We have with us a very special guest. You may know his name, Steve Saylor. He is one of the most provocative figures on the right. He's been at this for decades. I have here in my hand, which I have read his book Noticing, which is a compilation of his writings from 1973 to 2023. Good Lord. If you're not familiar with his work, he's been on Tucker Carlson as well. Your influence has been profound and kind of maybe a little strapped on the rug because you're kind of a bit radioactive and I'm not supposed to be talking here and all this other stuff. I just also want to shout out Passage Publishing. So I'm a big book collector and a lot of times I'll have authors or aspiring authors ask me, hey, should you go with an independent publisher? And I always say no, because you get none of the benefits of the big house and only, only the downsides. The only exception is when you have a company like Passage and their website is Passage Press, where it's curated. So it's just like with music labels, you have that indie label like Sub Pop or Labrador, where they're very specific and you know everything there is going to be quality. Passage is a publisher like that. So they do a very, they do Curtis Jarvin's books as well. They put a lot of care into their product. So for those of us book nerds, it looks really great in the shelf. So shout out to them and congrats for you for, for working with them. Now. Now, Steve, I have so much to talk to you about with this book. One of the things I want to, the first thing is one of your catchphrases that you're known for. And this, where the title comes from, is about political correctness and noticing. Can you tell us what that catchphrase is?
- [02:48]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, probably 25 years ago I started saying political correctness because that was long before Woke. That was what was around since about 1990, that political correctness is a war on noticing. That, you know, we live in a world of complicated, interesting patterns, of subtle chains of cause and effect, of statistical patterns everywhere. And you're not supposed to notice some. Half the time you, you get inculcated in learning what you're not supposed to notice, what you're supposed to act ignorant about. But why it takes half the fun out of life.
- [03:38]
Michael Malice
Yeah. What's interesting is a lot of people who are like these free speech warriors, you know, are like, oh, we need free speech. We need free speech. One of the points I've made, I made this with Gavin McGengus when I was in the show over a decade ago, is every culture has taboos. There are going to be certain things that you're not supposed to acknowledge. Now the trickiness is how pervasive are these things that you're not supposed to acknowledge or talk about. I remember when I was in North Korea, which is obviously not a very free speechy environment, but it is free speech in a certain sense that if you don't talk about the government or politics, and it's pretty much free otherwise when you're talking to the guides. But that, that's a big, big line. But you know, coming, you know, coming from being born in the Soviet Union, being raised in Russian household, you're like, okay, like, don't touch that wire. But everything else is kind of on the table, which is kind of different in America because there are, it's, it's, you know, woke or political correctness as the previous incarnation. There are things you don't realize are wrong until someone decides to weaponize it.
- [04:46]
Steve Sailer
Yeah. As we saw an enormous amount of over the last dozen years during the great awokening. Not so great awoken to my point of view, but yeah, everything got weaponized all of a sudden. And just mild observations that I've been making for years, like, wow, have you noticed, like, there haven't been any white starting court cornerbacks in the NFL since Jason Seahorn in 2003 and suddenly became like, oh, crime thinker, you know, let's, let's keep this guy under observation. So, yeah.
- [05:32]
Michael Malice
But I think in some ways, with the absence of a totalitarian state, this is a more effective, probably necessary way of controlling a population. Because if everyone's always on their guard all the time on any issue, you really have people, you've got that kind of worm in their head.
- [05:52]
Steve Sailer
Yeah. It's not Orwell's 1984, where secret policemen are Paid to spy on you instead. We developed over that period sort of this junior volunteer auxiliary thought police who were just really gung ho about tracking down anything, you know. So like I, I went from 2000, 2013 to 2023 without ever being allowed to make a speech in public. You know, I had various ones lined up at a conference or that conference, and then they get canceled on the grounds that, you know, the hotel had heard from their local antifa that there could be big trouble there. And was the hotel want to get in trouble for, you know, just. It was, it was a, it was a pretty dark time in the, in the American Republic. And we'll see if that's over now. You know, all of a sudden the. We've gone through this giant vibe shift and so forth, but, you know, we'll see what the future brings. I don't know, are you, are you
- [07:08]
Michael Malice
optimistic, pessimistic about the future of America at this point in time?
- [07:14]
Steve Sailer
I'm, I'm reasonably optimistic that, that the craziness of the last dozen years is kind of over. The craziness that peaked from 2020 into 2023 or so with the racial reckoning, which, you know, just was a period of unbelievable socially approved racism of racial hatred directed toward white people. And it was just completely respectable to go into the New York Times or the Washington Post and just spe view fear and loathing of whites, especially if it was white men, straight white men, cishet white men, so forth, if you could narrow it down. But eventually the struggle to be at the top of the pyramid of privilege in the great awokening got it kind of settled down too much so that by 2024 it was basically black women and trans at the top. And everybody else started feeling like, hey, what's in it for me? Right? You know, so you saw the, you saw the Latino men bail out, you saw black men that weren't that enthusiastic, you know, just all, all sorts of groups. If you look at the 2024 results, you get everybody who was like, was like, kind of on the margins of American society, but wasn't on the pyramid of privilege and wokeness. You got like Portuguese Americans, French Canadian Americans, Persian Jews, followers of the Maharishi in this cult town in Iowa, the tri racial isolate, Melungeon in the backcountry of North Carolina, all like, okay, I'm, I'm off the woke train and I'm voting for Trump. We'll see what happens after this. The future is unwritten.
- [09:33]
Michael Malice
One of the things, the mechanisms that is used, I Think so. I talk about this often disingenuously in politics is this kind of, you know, using this very weak mortar to try to combine populations into one overweening group to cobble together majority. I, you know, have. My high school in New York City was half Asian. I went to Stuyvesant. But even that term, Asian itself is just, you know, does not hold ice. I mean, yes, geographically, these people might be proximate, but the Chinese experience and the Chinese American experience versus the Korean experience or the Japanese, you know, try to tell a Korean person, oh, you and the Japanese are basically the same. I mean, were they even bothered to respond? Now they want to combine Filipino and Indian to that mix. It's just a complete, you know, absurdity. And I think at a certain point, even if that works temporarily, once you get down to brass tacks, someone's going to be calling the shots. So it's going to be either the Chinese people or whoever it is. But like you said, you know, when the woke wins, in this case, it was the black women, the trans people. What are the black men and Latin men going to do? It's like, wait, why am I here? I was supposed to be taking part of these winnings, and I'm not.
- [10:47]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, I mean, if you go way back to the 1970s, South Asians, there weren't very many in the country, and they were listed officially on the 1970 census as Caucasians as part of this giant white group that also extended to North Africa and so forth. And then South Asian immigrant businessmen realized they weren't getting any of the benefits Oriental immigrant businessmen were getting on government contracts, racial preferences, or the low interest Small Business Administration loans and so forth. So they demanded, all right, we want, we don't want to be white anymore. That does not pay in modern America. So then the Carter administration came up with the idea of, like, oh, okay, you can all be Asian. But ever since, all the West Asians and the North Africans have been complaining that they're stuck in the white category. And who wants to be white in 21st century America? So finally, the Biden administration announced we're going to have a Middle Eastern and North African category. But. And presumably they'll get the affirmative action benefits if affirmative action goes on, who knows? But nobody exactly seems to know who's in it. Armenians maybe, Maybe not. Israelis? Yes. How about American Jews? Nobody seems to have asked that, which seems like the big question.
- [12:20]
Michael Malice
Yeah, well, you know, I, I interviewed Jared Taylor for my book. Then you write and, and, and he's very famously Said, well, they look white to me. Yeah,
- [12:32]
Steve Sailer
I mean my view is on racial categories. Like 25 years ago I sat down and really studied what the government was doing and I was just gonna like pour scorn on how illogical they were. And then after a month of researching it, I went, eh, you know, these categories, they're probably good enough for government work and they're not that bad. But yeah, we could, you know, we could subdivide them more in the future. But that's, I was just writing about that because one of the ways that human scientists who study human ancestry, that is race, get in trouble is that the conventional wisdom is that the science has proven that there's no such thing as race. So the splitters among human scientists who of course have to deal with the fact that there are racial groups that they can track and have different cultural and physical patterns to them, they go, oh, okay, we're totally against having a big category like Asians. What we should do is split everybody out into small little groups like tiny sub races like Japanese and Hmong. And that's, that's not racist at all. You know, everybody's trying to stay employed these days and not get canceled. So, you know, God bless them.
- [14:13]
Michael Malice
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- [14:43]
Steve Sailer
If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know, having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [15:14]
Michael Malice
Let's get back to the show. One of the things that you kind of are generating most controversy about is talking about race and iq. Now in the bell curve, which for those of us dinosaurs are old enough to remember, when it came out, it was by Charles Murray and who's this Co author. I'm blanking the guy.
- [15:31]
Steve Sailer
Richard Herrnstein of Harvard.
- [15:33]
Michael Malice
Yeah, of Harvard. Right, exactly. This isn't some blogger who just spent 20 minutes on Google. And there's a very brief. I think it's only like three pages. Something very brief in the book discussing race and iq. And they make pains to say, I think sincerely, that this should not be used in any way to kind of, you know, codify bigotry into the law or treat any individual in a discriminatory manner or something like that. And it was a huge brouhaha and there was a lot of discussion at the time. Much of it was Cathy Newman type. Oh, so what you're saying is slavery was good? Oh, so what you're saying, it's just excruciating. But this is something that you discuss a lot and I mean, it must be physically painful for you at this point to hear some of the caricatures of your position.
- [16:22]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, I mean, I, I just follow the science. I mean, I've been a fan of the social sciences since the early 1970s. High school debate topic when I was 13 was how should the. How should public schools be funded? And then that got into all sorts of early 70s kind of revolutionary social science data that was overturning kind of the liberal orthodoxy. When they actually looked at the data from the Coleman Report of 1966 onward, it kind of turned out that how much was spent on schools didn't really matter in terms of test scores compared to what the students brought with them from home. You know, their upbringings, their parents, social standing, their genes, probably. And it's hard to move the needle. And that has been repeated ever since. It doesn't mean we can't do a better job of educating. But the idea that, like, okay, we can close the gap between blacks and whites or a bigger gap between blacks and Asians, but nobody wants to talk about that one, that's hard to do. I mean, rather than narrow, you know, what's used to be a 15 point IQ gap in real life, and it's probably shrunk to maybe 13 points. So there has been some narrowing going on over the last two generations, but that we can reduce it to zero, which has been this huge demand stand in public policy for my entire life, seems much more implausible than we could just like push everybody up a little bit by doing a better job of education for everybody as opposed to, okay, we need to push up the blacks and Hispanics and hold down the Asians and the whites. That's not going to work. There's no way to do that. You can. You can improve schooling for everybody. You can't do it in a racially biased, anti white fashion. Get anywhere. We've been trying that lately. And the NAEP federal test scores have been plummeting, partly due to Covid shutdowns, partly just due to the shoddy lower standards of the racial reckoning era.
- [18:52]
Michael Malice
One of the things that drove me crazy is, again, as I said, I meant to Stuyvesant. And for those who don't know, Stuyvesant is a public school in Manhattan. And the only thing that matters is to get to Stuyvesant is you take a test, right? So the top tier of the test takers, get into Stuyvesant. Second tier, get into Bronx Science. Third tier, get into Brooklyn Tech. Racial, ethnic, gender, colorblind. They have no idea who takes the tests. It's just you and your number two pencil, and that's Gantron. And it was causing results that people didn't like. And I remember Governor de Blasio, former Governor, sorry, Mayor de Blasio, former mayor of New York City, was saying, oh, there's too many Asian kids because they're all getting tutors. And let me assure you, as someone who was there, these are first and second generation of Asians. These are bougie white kids with tutors. They were working at their parents stores or dry cleaners. Whatever they were doing to scratch by after school, they did not have tutors in that. He's kind of. They just worked really, really hard. And you know, it's very historically known in China, you take that test, the bureaucracy, that's your path toward future success in your family. And that they brought that over with them and I think it's frankly commendable. So it was very, very gross to me to hear, you know, all these like, this is the American dream. You come over, you bust your ass, right? Your mom and dad have to do a shitty job, and then, okay, you have a government free education and now you could go and flourish. But it's not about flourishing. It's this bizarre obsession with racial equality, which I don't understand who that serves.
- [20:28]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, I mean, Stuyvesant test only admissions have been protected basically because it worked. And there's like an elderly generation now.
- [20:42]
Michael Malice
I got to wish something else. I just, I just want to point out they would brag that there's like 60 languages spoken in Stuyvesant. So if you're for diversity, we were that. We were the UN Whenever people came from other countries the loudspeaker came in. Do we have some, someone here who speaks like Cambodian? And that kid was in the principal's office. So it really again was this leftist theoretical ideal melting pot. Sorry to interrupt you, but it just
- [21:07]
Steve Sailer
really, it's been protected by an alumni association that's basically old rich Jewish guys who worked in their parents shop and scored high on the test and went to Wall street and made a fortune and just like it's supposed to do. And they're like, no, let's keep it the way it worked for me and let's keep it the way it works for the new generation. I mean, there's also an exaggerated effect because there's so much affirmative action at the private schools in New York that say you're a really smart black kid and you get admitted both to Stuyvesant and they'll give you a free ride to Dalton where you'll go to school with celebrities, kids, celebrity kids and get invited to their second homes in Aspen for spring break. Go to Dalton. You know, it's an, it's not as intense or hard and you know, you're kicked into the upper class of the United States. So that exaggerates. You know why there's like seven black kids at Stuyvesant each year and 1300 Asian kids in each class or something. You know, there's several dozen Stuyvesant worthy black kids in New York City who are going to ethical culture school or whatever.
- [22:30]
Michael Malice
Yeah. It makes, makes much more sense for them to go to Dalton because that's basically going to pre Ivy Leagues.
- [22:35]
Steve Sailer
Yeah.
- [22:35]
Michael Malice
So you're being inculcated into the highest elites of American culture. Whereas Stuyvesant, although it's educationally very admired, it doesn't all present itself as like we're this kind of, you know, pre elite. You know, if you just take the class of Dalton and Time Machine and move them forward 20 years, you basically have the ruling cast in some ways. So one of the other things that I have to ask, and I'm only being slightly tongue in cheek because you are so fixated with numbers and statistics in this book and there's a certain topic that you're really fixated on. Are you at all on the spectrum
- [23:19]
Steve Sailer
autistic Asperger? Yes. No, I don't think so.
- [23:23]
Michael Malice
The reason I asked is you talk
- [23:25]
Steve Sailer
more numbers researcher in the 20th century. The reason I asked sports statistics is
- [23:34]
Michael Malice
you talk more about golf. What's the term?
- [23:39]
Steve Sailer
Golf architecture.
- [23:42]
Michael Malice
Yeah, you talk well about golf courses in this that you do by race Almost. There's like four chapters where you start ruminating like, I don't like anyone who's this fixated on such a specific issue. I have to ask if this is an Aspie thing.
- [23:56]
Steve Sailer
No, it's, it's, it's an actual field of aesthetic inquiry. You know, there are, there are websites and discussion boards devoted to, okay, they're renovating the 13th green at Marion and they're converting it to a beer Ritz. And, you know, 85 guys jump in and have strong opinions about what, you know, Tom Doak or Crenshaw and Coor would have done with that, you know, compared to Hugh Wilson's intentions in 1912. And it goes on and on and there's coffee table books and websites galore. It's, you know, it's.5% of the golfers in America are really interested in golf course architecture as sort of, as a, as an art form. And. Yeah, so it's, it seems odd because it doesn't appeal to anybody who doesn't play golf.
- [24:59]
Michael Malice
Right.
- [24:59]
Steve Sailer
And it doesn't really appeal to 95% of golfers, but 5% think it's as natural as, you know, talking about Monet versus Manet at the, you know, at the museum. So, you know, that's, that, that's something I've long been interested in. Unfortunately. I, you know, when in high school I was like, I should be a golf course architect, but I never had the three dimensional mentality. I can't imagine. I can imagine things in two dimensions, fine. But the third dimension, which is what you need to design fascinating greens, is just beyond my mental capabilities.
- [25:42]
Michael Malice
Let's talk a bit about iq. And because there's a lot of, I think, muddying of the waters on the topic in the subject, in the media and in our culture. And these are going to be very basic questions for you to answer. But one of them is how can IQ tests be legitimate? There's different types of intelligence and no test can measure them all.
- [26:02]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, no, that's, that's very true. I mean, let's take a quasi IQ test, the SAT or also the ACT for getting into college. The SAT has a math section and it reports a verbal score. The actual does the same and add science. The SAT tried adding a third writing score and then people got kind of bored with that. The colleges went, that's not helping us that much. Why waste the time and money on that? The, the military, when you go to enlist in the United States Armed Services, they give you a 10 part test called the ASVAB and some of the, some of the parts are super precise, like how much do you know about repairing trucks? And they're very interested in that because if, if you already know that, they can just skip you ahead a year in training and get you to work. But the big thing is there's an inner core of it of four SAT type tests called the afqt. And you got to score, by law, you have to score at the 10th or higher percentile to be enlisted at all. And most times when they're not absolutely desperate, you have to be at the 30th percentile. And when the economy is bad and there's not a lot of fighting going on overseas, the Air Force and the Navy usually demand the 50th percentile. So basically a three digit IQ. So the, the four four AFQ T tests sort of serve as an IQ test of general trainability. The military has had the Rand Institute check this over a million times over the last, going back to 1917. They've been working on this. And yeah, it'll, it pays off very much. You need people who are generally trainable that these four IQ like tests do a good job of measuring and then you're very interested in what else they can do already like repair trucks.
- [28:34]
Michael Malice
I had an argument on Twitter and I would love to see you be the adjudicant of this dispute. I had asked because I think when people hear 100 IQ they obviously have very different ideas of what that actually means. And I think it's quite, it's much lower than people think to have a 100 IQ. And the question I had is, do you think that someone with a 100 IQ could become a medical doctor in America? And I said no. My friend said yes, they could. I go, I'm thinking 100 IQ you're maxing out like managing McDonald's, which is a perfectly legitimate job. But do you think they could actually have what it takes to go all the way through to become a medical doctor?
- [29:18]
Steve Sailer
All right, they're perfectly average American. Probably. It would be tough. But you know, if they're, if they're super hard working and they're really good at memorizing and they've got a few other advantages. Yeah, they probably could really.
- [29:39]
Michael Malice
I'm underestimating one hundreds then.
- [29:42]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, you know, the average person is pretty good at his job. People, you know, if you put people to work for several 5, 10 years and train them intensely, you know, they can get pretty far. But you know, you, you probably, if you have a 100 IQ doctor you probably need to go, like, yeah, I need to manage this guy because he's going to be fine at renewing my prescriptions. And if I bring him, you know, if I bring him a. Here are my symptoms and here is what I think it is, I could probably talk him into writing me the prescription that I want. But, you know, he's not. Dr. House, MD. You're not going to bring him some exotic symptoms and he's going to go, ah, yes, yes, we saw that case in 1877. That's not going to happen. So, you know, there, there is a lot to be said for managing your doctors. I can remember, I can remember having this horrible cough many years ago, and my doctor would go, I don't know what it is. And then my wife heard that whooping cough is going around. And so, so I went to the doctor and said, I think it's whooping cough. And he goes, no, whooping cough's extinct. I go, are you thinking of the whooping crane? And because here, here's an article in the L. A Times saying we've got this whooping cough epidemic and we should take these antibiotics. It's like, all right, sure, you can have the antibiotics if you think it'll help and cured it the next day. So, wow. There's a lot to be said for managing your doctors, but it's also, it's also harder for people under 100 IQ.
- [31:45]
Michael Malice
I also do want to point out,
- [31:46]
Steve Sailer
because I have a smart doctor, we
- [31:49]
Michael Malice
do want to not have fake news in the show. The whooping crate is not extinct. No. They were on the brink and now they're up to 911 birds. So let's think, because that's great.
- [32:04]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, I'm, I'm a sight reader, so rather than a phonics reader. So I usually just look at the first few letters in, in words and phrases and make a guess. So, yeah, whooping cough, whooping crane, all that stuff kind of blends together in my mind.
- [32:25]
Michael Malice
Foreign. Let's get back to the show. Let's. Here's the other question people have is, is there. How do you know? Or how do we know that there is a genetic component to intelligence? Isn't that just pseudoscience?
- [32:40]
Steve Sailer
We don't know for sure. But, you know, what did, what did Damon Runyon like to quote? You know, the. The race isn't always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. But that's a way to bet, right? You know, it's possible that somebody someday will come up and go, you know, wow, he figured it all out. And there was actually this environmental nurture factor that no one had ever measured before me, and I've measured it. And, and it proves that all you have to do is give this one micronutrient to pregnant women and they'll all have the same IQ babies or something. So it's not genetic. So could happen. You know, the, the people who figure that, yeah, genetics plays a substantial role in iq, they've been working their way down through a series of, of tests over the last hundred plus years to try to, to try to see if it, if, if the theory that genes matter in IQ can be falsified. It's, it's hard to prove it, but, you know, as Carl Popper, the philosopher, said that in science you can falsify things. So like around 2019, there were two studies done of these magnificent new databases where the government gives huge amounts of money to recruit 10,000 young people and then just do all sorts of crazy stuff on them, like do DNA analysis, brain scans, give them IQ tests and so forth. And so both of them have been subjected to analysis of a question that people have been wondering about since the 1920s. Margaret Mead took and was involved in the discussion back then and she pointed out that trying to see if racial admixture and IQ correlate by looking at people and going, hey, looks pretty black, not so black, pure white. We don't know about that guy. Let's see if their IQs, you know, correlate. It was just, it was too weak by the, by the methodologies of the time that we needed a real way to measure genealogy. And now in the 21st century, yeah, we do, we have all these great DNA scans and you can find out, you know, the decimal point, what your percentage of different ancestries are. So they did that, so they did that for these two different databases, the Philadelphia Neurodevelopment and the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development abcd. The latter is like a half billion dollar study that the government has been funding. It's, it's absolutely magnificent. And then they looked at their DNA and said, okay, here's, you know, this person is 95% black, 5% white. This, this person is 70% black, 30% white. Their parents call both of them African American and so forth. All right, how big is the IQ gap? All right, between like 5% and 30% white. Among African American, it was about three points. The person who was 30% white averaged about two and a half, three points higher. That's really pretty small. And it's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to notice in real life. It's why we have arguments over it and people have different opinions on it. On the other hand, the way the racial distribution of traditional African Americans and traditional white Americans works is most African Americans are in the range of 2% white to 35% white or something like that. There aren't a lot who are 75% white. There are some who self identify as African American and nothing else. But generally the way the, the one drop rule has worked over the last 15 generations in North America leads you to have two different groups. A white group that's most people who self identify as white are 98%, 99% white if they're Ellis island immigrants, are probably 100% white. And, and an African American self identifying
- [37:57]
Michael Malice
group
- [38:00]
Steve Sailer
where most of the people, most of their ancestors were also self identifying African Americans. So if you lay out all the numbers. Yeah. It turns out that racial admixture is measured genetically accounts for a majority of the variation in IQ among these people. Now is that proof that IQ causes the racial gap? No, because anti hereditarians can come up with complex rationalizations for why that won't work. But it is, it is true that the hereditarian theory has twice dodged major bullets that people have been talking about doing for the last hundred years. Over the last, since 2019, it survived attempts to falsify it. So, you know, that's probably, you know, that's probably the way to bet, as Damon Runyon would say.
- [39:15]
Michael Malice
You were, I think, the first person to predict what you coined World War T. And this idea that there would be this big push for transgenderism in America. And I think because most people have very short memories and we all have limited memories, to be fair, I want to take us back to the 90s, which wasn't that long ago in terms of cultural history. And I remember Jason Chu, a shout out to Jason, who I went to high school with. He was gay, he came out, which was a very big deal back then, to come out as gay. And you know, for the last century before that, there's the argument what is, you know, because so evolutionary disadvantageous. What is causes homosexuality? What is it as you talk about in your book, you know, there's the idea of homosexual behavior versus homosexual identity, which is a far more recent thing. And there was this idea that it's a third gender or people who are confused about their gender. And I remember Jason being like, I'm not confused. I'm a guy who Likes guys. And this was a big fight for gay people that I'm not. Any way, you know, even though I'm a sissy and I, you know, throw glitter, I'm still a guy who likes guys. There's no ambiguity. And trans people, which are such a fringe, tiny minority at the time, were not. I mean, they were kind of, you know, they didn't want to be exclusionary. So it's like, okay, if you're kind of being marginalized, you know, come join us. You know, so on and so forth. Like, these are our cousins in a sense. But there was very much this distinction, and they were far lower, you know, much more marginalized. A guy who's walking around, you know, trying to be a female than a gay man, you know, even when gay men were kind of on the margins. And now, I mean, it's. This has been like the most. I. I've never. I don't think you've seen anything like this either. How quickly, especially a small population has become the central issue. Can you walk us through how you saw this coming and what you think caused it?
- [41:14]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, I mean, to go back around 2010, I noticed the New York Times is running a bunch of articles on types of birth defects called intersex conditions. Where the baby's born, the doctor looks and goes, okay, very, very rare. It's. It's a sad, unfortunate birth defect. And, you know, you know, I'm very sympathetic to people like that.
- [41:50]
Michael Malice
I think we all are.
- [41:51]
Steve Sailer
Yeah. So, but then in May 2013, and this was right at the point where it was pretty apparent that gay marriage was going to go through, that gay marriage had lost, like, 30 consecutive referendums. But finally, in November 2012, it won a referendum in one state. And then it was like, okay, you know, the Supreme Court or somebody in the establishment's just going to push it through. So gay marriage is sure thing by the spring of 2013. So then what's next? Are they going to declare victory, all these organizations and go, okay, well, we've got what we demanded. We are now out of business. That didn't happen with the March of dimes. You know, NGOs don't work like that.
- [42:43]
Michael Malice
That's the exact example I use in my book. Then you write, it's just like, for people who don't know, I'm so pleased they use that example. The March of Dimes was founded to fight polio. This is one. You know, FDR is on the dime. He suffered very famous in polio. And this was a nightmarish thing. A lot of people won. Yeah, they won. You know, when I tell people credible
- [43:03]
Steve Sailer
things for America, I mean, you know, I mean, I've seen discussions of baseball attendance, and it's like, oh, yeah, in the 50s, attendance was low because nobody dared let their kids. Kids go to a baseball game because they might get polio. And when I tell people the vaccines come along and, you know, a few years later, everybody's forgotten polio. Yeah, it's great.
- [43:27]
Michael Malice
Hold on a second. So when I. When I tell people Mitch McConnell has polio, they think I'm joking, but it's. It's the truth. So the point is, polio gets cured. God bless him. One of the great accomplishments of Western medicine. It's just if people don't realize how bad it was, just look back. It was a complete nightmare for so many families. But to your point, and what I said, my book, it's like, it's not like this huge organization that had accomplished this massive victory over children's health. We're like, all right, we did it, guys. Let's unpack. No, they just changed it to fighting other diseases. And you can't blame them. They've got a workflow. People have jobs. Why would you disband something that's working so well? So to your point, same thing, like, okay, we got gay marriage. Well, we're not all going to quit.
- [44:11]
Steve Sailer
I'd been asking for a while, you know, what's next after gay marriage? And everybody was going like, oh, they're going to push to legitimize pedophilia. Really? I don't think so. I mean, the trends don't seem like that. I mean, you know, in the 50s, you had a great novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, write a book called lolita that sold 15 million copies. And today, nobody's going to ever make another movie version of it or something. People are like, yuck, so what's this going to be? And so in May of 2013, I read this huge article in the New York Times, and it's all about an MMA fighter called Fannin Fox. And the point of the article is that Fannin Fox, who used to be a man, is horribly being discriminated against because Fannin Fox isn't being allowed to beat up women for money, Right? And reading, going, that's like the worst candidate possible. You know, they move beyond the intersex, baby, and now they've got the mma, the X man who wants to crush women under his. Under his chariot wheels in the. In the MMA ring. But people, everybody else, oh, wow, Just. That's discrimination. Yes. And then it just kept building and building for the next two years. And then you had the Bruce Jenner whoop dee doo in the middle, middle of 2015, which was exactly the same time that it was discovered that a white woman named Rachel Dolezal had been pretending to be black. And that became the worst crime of all time. Whereas Bruce announcing, oh, yeah, when, you know, when I was the world's greatest athlete, I was in 1976, I was actually a girl on the inside. Everybody goes, oh, yeah, of course. That makes all the sense in the world. I mean, something that I'd like to point out is that a whole lot of the most famous X Men, the ones who were famous before they announced they'd always been a girl, are kind of examples of toxic masculinity run amok. I mean, I can recall in 2013 reading the Washington Post about somebody. I'm not going to mention the name because I knew this person in personal life a long time ago as the highest paid female CEO in the country. And I'm looking at the picture of this ugly woman. Wait a minute, I know that guy. I went to MBA school with him. He was on my marketing strategy team for nine weeks in 1981. He was the most arrogant man at the MBA school. Now, he had good reason to be arrogant. He was really bright. He was a lot smarter than I was, but it was hard to get along with. On the other hand, he was kind of this kind of Asperger Heinlein hero. He was like. He'd always tell me how he was going to make his fortune in outer space. This was in 1981. I'm going like, but isn't outer space kind of the government's realm and so forth? He goes, no, no, no. You just watch. So about 20 years later, I'm like, you know, sending him a 25 check every month for satellite radio. You know, then, then he, then he invented a cure for one of the. For some rare disease that was, that was plaguing one of the several children he fathered. And then he announced he was. He was a woman. So you get these kind. A lot of these guys are kind of these science fiction hero types. And they're not the nicest guys in the world. They've got other traits for some reason. They tend to have very high IQs. Nobody, nobody knows for sure. But you know, what they've got is typically a sex fetish that a researcher named Ray Blanchard named autogynephilia. That I'm not going to go into. But it's a male only thing that happens around puberty. And our society has done a terrible job of explaining to moody, unhappy adolescent girls, you know, all these Bruce Jenner types that you see on the Kardashians and so forth, and you think, oh, I can wake up someday and just realize I'm really the opposite gender. I've always been a boy on the inside. No, that doesn't apply to the female sex at all. It's a male sex fetish that, you know, some small percentage of men suffer from and they just, they're just embarrassed to tell you about it. And they're really into their fetish and it's totally irrelevant to you. You're just feeling moody because you're going through puberty and you're insecure. And that happens to all girls. And girls don't suddenly turn into boys. No, just forget it. But our society, because we have to protect. He's often rather powerful and just intense guys who have decided that their fetish mandates that everybody call them by female pronouns. That, you know, that we can't educate young girls about what's really going on. And that's just been a national disaster and a tragedy in terms of all the young girls who've messed up their lives.
- [50:29]
Michael Malice
Let's get back to the show. So, Steve, you and I are both old enough to remember that when we went to high school. Maybe you're a little bit older than me, but I think it probably happened with you as well. It was extremely common for women to have eating disorders. Like I would say a huge majority, at least in New York. I can't speak for other parts of the country of young teenage girls have a phase where they had anorexic or bulimia. It's not literally about eating. It's about control. It's about unwanted male attention. It's about a certain cluster of things and they grow out of it. And it's an awful thing, but it was very, very common. But now that same cluster of things, instead of being, okay, I have an eating disorder. It's like I'm uncomfortable. My body, I'm uncomfortable. How I feel I'm going to. How people treated me differently, especially older men. I'm 14, 15, you know, adults are kind of looking at me and saying comments. You can understand how confusing and disturbing that is. Someone who's innocent and young, who just, you know, maybe they develop early, something like that. It's, it's, it's a mild, mildly traumatic, I would say, depending on who it is. If someone's like an older father figure or someone you looked up to as a kid and now they're hitting on you. It's, it's, it's, it's going to screw with your head. But now all those young girls instead of having that phase of eating disorders are now going to be, oh, I hate my body. If you feel like you hate your body, this what you're going to do. They're going to get on the testosterone, they're going to get double mastectomies. Those are things unlike eating disorders, for the most part which are not reversible, which are things which have profound and long term consequences. And they're not told this, they're not told, hey, hey, hey, maybe dressing like a guy for a month, see if you like it more, put on a baseball, you know what I mean? Like, let's ease you into it rather than straight into like biological violent changes. I mean, surely you would agree that'd be preferable.
- [52:12]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, I mean the world has had tom boy boys forever. And you know the, the classic book from the 19th century, Little Women.
- [52:24]
Michael Malice
Yeah, that's right.
- [52:25]
Steve Sailer
Authors, Tomboy Joe. And you know, today it'd be like, oh, you need a double mastectomy.
- [52:32]
Michael Malice
Right?
- [52:32]
Steve Sailer
It's like, no, actually you're a tomboy. Maybe you'll, that's just a phase. Or maybe you'll, you know, grow up and be a lesbian again. Things we'll, we'll see what happens. Let's, let's not do anything stupid right now, you know, so, yeah, like anorexia, I guess There's a famous story of how a, an American trained doctor moved to Hong Kong and then went on the media and announced, I'm here to treat anorexia. And then everybody was, what is anorexia? And then he'd explain it and there'd never been any anorexia in Hong Kong. But sure enough, you know, the more times he went on TV to explain it, the more anorexics were showing up at his office. Yeah, yeah.
- [53:26]
Michael Malice
I'm curious, something you said. My understanding was when it comes to trans women who are men who decide to transition to become socially female, that there are two populations, there are the AGPs, as you discuss them, which are men who have, and you're not allowed to talk with us ever, ever, ever, ever. Men who have a fetish of having intercourse with their female parts, which they obviously would not really have. But there's also people with gender dysphoria who really are uncomfortable in their own skin and do perceive this as females. And from my understanding, the distinction is the first group date women and the second group date males. And that's how you could figure out which one is which. And it's the fetish ones who are the ones who are insisting on the locker room and all this stuff, because they get off on being transgressive and forcing you to engage with their toxic masculinity.
- [54:18]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, I mean. I mean, like, I knew a little boy who was extremely effeminate growing up. I can recall on. On Christmas once, he was playing with all these. With the. The girls and. And all the girl toys they'd gotten. And they said one of the girls goes, hey, you're a boy. Why do you like girl toys? And he goes, oh, I just. I've always liked girl toys. That's just the way I am. And it's like, good for you. God bless you. And, yeah, you'll probably, you know, they. They track this question in the 1970s, and they went like, oh, you know, it's basically 80% of effeminate boys grow up to be a male homosexual. Some of them grow out of the gender dysphoria. Others, you know, want to dress as a woman and so forth. It's, you know, it's not a big issue for society in general. The AGPs tend to be the guys who, like, you know, the professor of economics who played quarterback at Harvard and so forth. These are all real examples of, you know, people who've given me a lot of trouble over the years for kind of explaining, like, what's really going on with them. You know, the computer science chip professor at Caltech or, you know, who's played big roles in the military industrial complex, stuff like that. And then they decide, you know, okay, I run. I mean, here's an example of somebody who didn't pull the switch. Ted Kaczynski, the UN. Okay, it was. He's. He came down in his 20s with this AGP fetish.
- [56:12]
Michael Malice
Bad.
- [56:12]
Steve Sailer
He wanted to have sex change.
- [56:15]
Michael Malice
Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on.
- [56:16]
Steve Sailer
Slow down. Look it up in the Washington Post.
- [56:19]
Michael Malice
Wait, wait, Ted, Ted. Steve Sailors blowing my mind. The Unabomber is trans?
- [56:25]
Steve Sailer
No, but he thought very hard about it. When he was a grad student in his mid-20s, he went to the doctor to ask for a sex change operation because he had all these fantasies.
- [56:39]
Michael Malice
Yeah.
- [56:39]
Steve Sailer
Sex fantasies about being a woman. And it was kind of taking over his life, and he thought he'd get relief if he actually became a woman or fulfillment.
- [56:49]
Michael Malice
Sure.
- [56:51]
Steve Sailer
And. But when he got the Doctor he decided, no, I'm not going to do this. What I'm going to do instead is kill people. And, you know, maybe it would have been better off if he'd had himself castrated. Yeah.
- [57:05]
Michael Malice
Like, is a woman really going to be capable of putting together a bomb? Think so.
- [57:09]
Steve Sailer
Well, you know, if you have Uncle Ted's, you know, extremely masculine math genius mind, you know, the youngest, you know, 10, full time math professor, various colleges.
- [57:24]
Michael Malice
Did you know that he got caught because of his autism? Did you know this?
- [57:27]
Steve Sailer
No.
- [57:29]
Michael Malice
Oh, you don't know this. So Ted, Ted Kaczynski's autism is, is what got him caught. Because autistic people tend to not, not all, not universally just calm down everyone. They're bad with idiom, they're bad with slang. They take things literally. Right. And he would hate the expression you could eat your cake and have it too. Right. Because it's in reverse order. So his he, someone, you, he, he would always say, you could have your cake and eat it too. That makes more sense. And the Unabomber used on a letter and his brother's like, wait a minute, my brother had this weird fixation on this phrase and that started the chain of events.
- [58:13]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, yeah. So the, the, the X man, male to female, late onset transgenderism seems to have something to do with autism. It's why, that's why it's, it seems to appeal to science fiction fans. I mean, Robert Heinlein, you know, started to write transgender sci fi stories in the late 50s. I don't know if, I don't know if he was interested in himself or as kind of a fan service. He spent a lot of time studying his readership. So, yeah, it seems to be tied into autism. Now the issue, I mean, with autism, we've expanded the definition so much. I don't know, I used to use the term nerd all the time. And one thing I want to point out is I don't recall a real classic full blown nerd and ever meeting one until I was a sophomore in high school, right? And then this guy showed up and he was brilliant. He went to Caltech for a semester and flunked out because he was incredibly ornery and all right? So he'd do things like on history papers, he refused to use base 10 for dates, he'd use base 8. So he'd go, the Declaration of Independence was signed July 4, 2326, and just drove brother John Dobrow Gowski crazy. But, you know, so that was like the first true full blown nerd. I'D ever met. And that was in 1973. So, yeah, I don't know. You know. Yeah. Like, is nerdism getting bigger? Is it tied to transgenderism? Yeah, probably. It's hard to say, though, because the definitions keep expanding, and now it's real fuzzy.
- [60:12]
Michael Malice
There's a movie made about my mentor, Harvey Pekar, called, you know, his comic book series called America's Splendor. There's a movie. There's a character in it, Toby Radloff, who's a real person who's played by Judah Friedlander. Stand up. Coming. Judah Friedlander. And when Judah comes out the first time in the movie, he's as Toby, you're sitting there and you're like, okay, this is just a grotesque caricature. You're being mean. Then Toby comes out like, oh, Judah toned it down, right? And the whole thing, Toby's like, I'm a genuine nerd. That was his shtick in the 80s. He was on MTV. He'd have a button. Genuine nerd. Years later, of course, he's on the spectrum. Very heavily on the spectrum. It's understood. And, well, there's a story Harvey told me which was so funny, I don't know if I could do the Harvey voice where Toby came out to people as gay, Right? And Harvey's like, you know, I can't do the voice. He goes, this guy's a Martian. And we were so glad he didn't want to have sex with trees that were like, oh, you're just gay. What a relief. Yeah. Folks, head over to malice.locals.com where Steve took questions from supporting listeners. For folks who want to pick up Steve's book. It's called Noticing you get at Passage, Press. Steve, how else can people support your work and learn more about your.
- [61:20]
Steve Sailer
Well, okay, there's an audio version coming out maybe this week. Should be available.
- [61:28]
Michael Malice
Did you record it?
- [61:29]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, yeah. I'm not the best narrator, but. But I know what the jokes are in my.
- [61:35]
Michael Malice
Yeah, yeah.
- [61:36]
Steve Sailer
It won't take too long to explain to a professional. So, yeah, I think it seemed to sound pretty good. So that'll be out, I guess it'll be on audible and the usual sites. I don't really know anything about audiobooks. Same price as the paperback. 30 bucks. Also, I have a sub stack, and it's doing pretty well. I've had it for the last 10 months. SteveSaylor.net.com was already gone, so it's Steve Saylor. Saylor is spelled S A I L E R. So Steve Saylor one word, period. Net. And, you know, you can, you can get some stuff for free and you can subscribe for, to get. To get all the real good stuff. So I'd encourage you to check it out. I try to post about a half dozen times a week on it, so it's quite active.
- [62:36]
Michael Malice
Steve, we're running out of time. What has been your favorite part of this interview?
- [62:42]
Steve Sailer
Well, it's been a lot of fun. No, I mean great questions and,
- [62:48]
Michael Malice
you know.
- [62:49]
Steve Sailer
Yeah, probably. Yeah. The Ted Kaczynski, you know, cake and Eat it two stories. Great.
- [62:57]
Michael Malice
You are welcome.