I spoke about leaving white nationalism on a rationalist podcast
I recently appeared on The Bailey—a podcast associated with the rationalist-adjacent Motte forum—to be interviewed by Yassine Meskhout and TracingWoodgrains.
You may recognize the latter as the fellow who brought me back as a public figure by creating a viral Twitter thread about my departure from white nationalism.
Shortly after this happened I reached out in the Substack DMs and we began a correspondence that ultimately resulted in this heated but highly provocative conversation. If you don’t find it enlightening, you’ll certainly find it entertaining.
Listen below:
Related to the whole discussion about university admissions, I think that it isn’t completely clear what the universities are trying to achieve anymore. Much like all the other institutions, they seemingly have too many contradictory goals and the one that wins the competition is to service the “client”, be it the students or other places they get funding from.
If you want an interesting and challenging environment on campus, selecting for IQ along with high openness makes the perfect sense. Otherwise, majority of the lower level school systems prioritize for conscientiousness and that’s how you get the kind of students that are constantly doing the assigned repetitive and grueling tasks instead of innovating or rebelling in any way. But I will also point out that openness is the only personality trait that correlates with IQ. If you select people purely on the basis of IQ, exams like the SAT aren’t very good at this at all, you would end up with many highly open, quirky and charismatic people, and not all boring nerdy ones.
This is the episode in which Yassine Meskhout spends two hours trying to (and kind of failing to) understand the value of propaganda and symbolism, instead of just focusing on autistically building coalitions with a rational messaging. Tracing, at least, seems to understand that there is a skill of 'pushing people's buttons' in interesting and unpredictable ways – and that this skill has primacy over the machinery that produces proper governance (e.g, policy and data).
Jeb Bush who sounds like Benito Mussolini is a powerful image. That is kind of what you want. A serious, systematic thinker behind closed doors; but a complete wacko animal on the campaign trail. Or some way of drawing the two up together in a coherent, fluid, sexy persona.
Yassine maybe doesn't understand (?) – the thing that draws you in is the wacko dress-up marketing (this is what builds trust); only then, is it even worth it to consider the schematics and administration that delivers results. This is similar to dating: you only get your day in court if you can make a flashy, hot show *and then also later* back that up with depth, intelligence, sensitivity, etc.