Episode 89: IQ Fetishism with Quinn Slobodian

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Daiken.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So Adrian, today we have a very special guest.

One of these people who I'm a little shocked agreed to join us.

Quinn Slobodian is here.

Quinn has a new book called High-Ex Bastards that caught my eye, particularly for his one chapter called Neurocasts, which he is here to talk to us about, exploring the neoliberal right-wing's use of IQ and race science to further their economic vision.

Quinn, thank you so much for being with us.

It's my pleasure.

So there's one theory of the Trump era that, you know, Trump is accelerating, but is also sort of the product of a kind of like epistemic collapse.

This notion that the right-wing elites and the sort of populist masses that they are harnessing have this broad-based hostility to authorities of knowledge, right?

Towards professors, towards doctors, towards public health representatives.

And you see this kind of thing like in Clarence Thomas's concurrence in Scrimetty, right?

Which is basically an attack on medical authority.

You see it in more or less anything that RFK does at the Department of Health and Human Services.

And there's this notion that, you know, there is a new right-wing populist distrust of expertise and deferral to like the impulses and preferences of the people, the common man, right?

It's easy to view this trend as a kind of reemergence of superstition and a distrust of empiricism.

And Quinn, in your book, one of the things you argued, I thought really compellingly was that this is kind of a misapprehension of what's going on with thinkers on the right wing regarding both their notions of like the people and also their relationship to epistemic authority.

And one of the things that you say is that we are now experiencing the culmination of this history in which conservative economists turn to nature and to their own sort of distinct sources of science and empirical authority in the wake of the Cold War to make the case for their worldview.

Yeah, absolutely.

No, I'm a big proponent of the idea that there's science on one side and then just, I don't know, ignorant opposition to expertise on the other is a really bad framing.

And for someone like RFK, actually, in particular, right?

I mean, he is the master of like do your own research and part of this worldview that there's actually buried data out there that has been suppressed and needs to be brought to light, and that they are the ones who are actually the most faithful to science.

And they're holding that against the, you know, the woke distortions of the elites who are just bending the truth to reproduce their own power.

So there definitely is this storyline about the appropriation of a language of science by the insurgent far right.

And as I tell in the book, this becomes one of the territories where two groups of people who seem quite different from each other end up hanging out, mobilizing, allying.

And those two groups are people who are mostly interested in questions of ethnic purity and national national purity, we call like an ethno-nationalist right,

and those people who are mostly interested in questions of economic freedom, who you would normally call libertarians or neoliberals.

And so that book is really about why it was that in the wake of the Cold War and in the 1990s, those two groups found shared ground on a revived science of human nature.

that grounded natural hierarchies in something that they thought was like beyond the reach of the social movements and the progressives that had long bedeviled them.

I was so excited by this story you tell because I think you really touch on a few of our like in bed with the right bugaboos, right?

So this is a story that casts a new light for me on sort of, you know, birth rate anxieties that we're going through right now in a lot of popular media.

It made me think differently about the sort of like superiority complexes inherent in a lot of the masculinities of Silicon Valley, what we refer to in our little world as like the creep masculinity.

And then it also made me think really differently, particularly in this one chapter that we're going to be talking about today, about the quasi-mythical status of IQ in the right-wing imagination.

So I particularly wanted you to tell us about how like IQ testing, race science, and this like ethos of positive eugenics and sort of skepticism of

social democratic welfare programs have been feeding into an economic theory of what you call neuro castes, right?

These people who are esteemed to be biologically suited for certain kinds of work and certain kinds of compensation.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, I mean, people would probably be most familiar with the bell curve from 1994 as something that seems to have, in recent history, revived discussion of IQ racism and became a really important touchstone for the far right up to the present and mainstreamed, again, the idea that these IQ tests were somehow meaningful ways of measuring people's worth in the economy and ultimately their worth as citizens.

But the thing that I lay out in the book is an earlier prehistory of the IQ fixation, which doesn't short circuit all the way back to Lewis Terman, although there will be some Stanford racists in between, I promise you, so don't worry.

Nice.

It doesn't go all the way back to the stuff that Malcolm Harris has recently excavated.

And the recent book Predatory Data has also done a nice job on this.

But there's this one book called The Geography of Intellect, which I found really fascinating, written by Stéphane Possigny, who was a Viennese political scientist who ended up as a longtime at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

and someone else named Nathaniel Weil, who is a really fascinating character who was, among other things, part of the Alger Hiss trial, so helped to denounce Alger Hiss, a former communist, who then became a hard right conservative and specifically an IQ fanatic, racialist.

And they wrote this book, The Geography of Intellect, which is really a foreshadowing of the bell curve.

comes out in the early 1960s, has a bell curve somewhere on its cover, and basically says that in this time of decolonization and excitement about foreign aid development,

maybe the upending of the normal imperial world order, that none of that was ever actually going to happen because the distribution of wealth around the world was just downstream from the distribution of cognitive ability.

So, whites were smart, that's why they were rich, that's why their civilizations had succeeded, and brown and black people were not,

and therefore they were mired permanently in the state that they found themselves in circa 1962, and they would stay ever thus.

So, it was a very deliberate kind of counter-revolutionary deployment of IQ science.

It sounds like the book is claiming the impossibility of decolonization in exactly the same way that the bell curve in 94 will try to biologically, quote unquote, prove the impossibility of multiculturalism, right?

Exactly.

So that's not a coincidence, right?

One of the arguments of the book or the observations of the book is that these appeals to supposed hard science arise at times when there's some need to repress or push back into the bottle what they see as forces that threaten existing hierarchies, especially around race and gender.

So that was round one, thwart decolonization with appeals to IQ.

And indeed, then the bell curve in 1994 was the same thing, trying to deal the deathblow to post-1960s, post-great society demands for some kind of equality and outcomes, especially educational outcomes, which of course had been, you know, very large scale, lots of resources, lots of thought, lots of time and effort put in from the 1960s to the 90s to try to make things turn out somewhat more similarly for richer, poorer, black, more black, and more white communities.

And there had been very disappointing outcomes.

So it was very reassuring for a lot of people for the bell curve to come along and say, oh, don't keep trying.

This is the answer.

It's been here all along.

This thing is written into the DNA.

It's written into the genes.

And these miliarist efforts are always doomed to fail.

Aaron Powell, right.

There's something like almost kind of comforting in it for

the frustrated egalitarian, right?

Like it's not that we have collectively failed morally or in terms of our imagination or in terms of our investment.

It is that like this is a

naturally preordained hierarchy that we bear no responsibility for.

Yeah.

And I would say in many ways we're kind of still in that era, right?

That deferral of blame to endowments that are beyond the reach of social policy

sort of feels like the defeatist era of treatment of educational inequality that kind of reigns to this day.

The other thing that strikes me as interesting about IQ is that you're kind of outlining why it was structurally so important for people's worldview.

But it also becomes really, really interesting in their own biographies, right?

I'm thinking here about like how 19th century race science and sort of phrenology and physiognomy were often sort of practiced inside the home and on yourself.

And I'm just thinking like, I feel like there's two kinds of people in the world, the kinds of people who know their IQ and people who have never, ever had any interest in like finding out any of that stuff.

Absolutely.

Like the way it sinks its claws into the individual biography and really becomes sort of the way someone makes sense of their own rise or not rise, their own career or the career they didn't end up having.

Can you talk a a little bit about that?

The way it is this way of thinking about populations at this extremely large level and the scientificity such as it is is all about vast numbers.

But then when someone starts with it, it's like, oh, this is about you.

You need this to be true right now.

Yeah.

No, I mean, that was clearly true for Weill, who was very active in the mensa society.

It won't surprise you to find out.

Wow.

Who was very worried about the falling standards in the mensa society and the existence suddenly of too many women in it, among other things.

And it was very true for Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, too.

So

they were both from more humble backgrounds.

Herrnstein grew up pretty poor from a Hungarian immigrant family in Brooklyn.

And Charles Murray grew up in Ohio.

I believe his father was like a whirlpool repairman or something like that.

And then had both, of course, made their way to Harvard.

through their own hard work and their own efforts and their own IQ.

And it galled them especially.

And they talked a lot about that to see people who had been given a free pass to come in and get the things that they had rightly deserved because of their natural endowments.

And Murray, doing the conservative thing, of course, flipped it around and said, it's not only bad for me to see, you know, a black kid on campus in Harvard Yard in the 1990s, but it's actually especially hard for the black kid because he now knows and is burdened with this fact that others look at him as illegitimate in his presence on the campus.

So we need to restore, you know, erect that sense of individual certainty for everyone, not just for ourselves, although it's transparently just an expression of their own experience for sure.

And discomfort, yeah.

A point now made repeatedly by Clarence Thomas, basically whenever he has the opportunity.

That's right.

Completely.

So I'm interested in this blip of 1963 with the publication of The Geography of Intellect, because like how

euphemistic is that versus how avowed is it in its scientific investment in white supremacy?

Because

one narrative I had

about race science that I think you've done some work to debunk, but I think it's a common one, is that

Darwin's theories were taking up as a means to justify various inequalities, right?

Be it global imperialism or like race and gender hierarchies within Western countries.

And that like in the late 19th and basically the first half of the 20th century, this leads to a big craze for eugenics that creates all kinds of sundry intellectual dishonesty and moral catastrophe in the form of things like, you know, sterilization campaigns.

But then I also thought that the embrace of the Third Reich had sort of put the brakes on that, right?

And that the horrors of the Holocaust,

the affiliation of Reich science with the Nazis had done a lot to sort of push this line of inquiry out of respectability, even among conservative thinkers, right?

This is a telling in which race science has made a more recent comeback, right?

But in your book, you narrate how it was sort of like not even exactly peripheral, but like being cultivated in quieter ways in these think tanks.

Do you want to like tell us a little bit of that like history of how race science survived after the Nazis?

Yeah, so I think for the most part, the story that you had as an assumption is correct, that there was this counterattack by Franz Boas and his students, basically, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Sorneal Thurston.

And the rise of cultural anthropology did put paid to the idea of essential physiological differences mapping onto a hierarchy of traits in some identifiable way.

So from the 1950s, really up to to the 90s, it was really the high point of the idea that, as we were probably all taught in college, like race is a social construct.

It doesn't actually mean anything.

It's invented by the powerful to justify and legitimize their own power.

And the whole point of studying race and racism is to poke holes in it and undermine it and show it to be ideology and mythology.

You know, history made into nature.

However, in the shadows through that whole period, there was a kind of twilight version of race science and physical anthropology that continued to exist, sometimes in pretty shady and disreputable places.

So I give some of the background of that.

Something called the Pioneer Fund in particular funded something called Mankind Quarterly, which did not have a huge subscription base, but had a very devoted one.

And among the people who were very devoted to it were indeed some of the people connected to the main libertarian or free market think tanks of the 1950s and 60s.

So the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a big Mankind Quarterly fan, the Institute for Humane Studies, this is where we get close to the Stanford races of when it was still in Menlo Park before it moved to George Mason University, was a kind of hub for trying to keep alive the idea of physical anthropology and racial difference as a way to counter what they saw as the socialistic civil rights movement.

William Shockley, another denizen of the valley who famously was proposing that he would offer cash prizes or rewards to black men to sterilize themselves was someone who was in touch with the people at the Institute for Humane Studies.

So there was this race science community that continued to exist, sometimes overlapping with occultish, neo-Nazi kind of circles.

But at the same time, there was also more mainstream physical anthropology.

So the kind of people who would study the bones of, you know, early man, so to speak, and Neolithic remains were part more of the genealogy that had been marginalized by Franz Boas and company.

And they have had a major resurgence, obviously, since the 1990s.

And that's one of the things I talk about in the book, too, is the context for why IQ and race science starts to come back into public discussion in the 1990s or become more like Zalonfeig, as Germans say, like ready for the salon, is because of things like the Human Genome Project, which restored the idea of population differences being something one can, you know, put your finger on.

And the idea that there was a gene for this and a gene for that, again, something we probably remember from our childhood or teenage years since discredited.

But the 90s were a real time when, as Rogers Brubaker and other people have talked about, race kind of got taken away from the humanities and given back to the scientists.

And this idea that race was something that was real, and that not only people on the right might be interested in that, the people on the left who are worried about things like the vulnerability of populations to things like sickle cell anemia or other kinds of disorders that are disproportionately represented in certain marginalized groups, then it might be good to actually pay attention to self-identification of race.

So the 90s are a real hinge moment where, you know, by now in the era of like consumer DNA tests and 23andMe, it's completely normal for people just to say like, oh yeah, no, I'm like 2.5% Ashkenazi Jewish.

That's not strange.

35% Mongol Asian.

And my mother's kind of a bit proud about the fact that she has the highest possible Neanderthal DNA that you can have because that's now something that

Stephanos Girlanos, in his new book about the invention of prehistory, has a great section about how the far right in Europe has reclaimed the Neanderthal as a kind of proto-white population.

Maybe you should talk to him about that.

So there's a way that that kind of science continued.

But I think it's also worth mentioning, only because I've been razzed by this a bit.

That's a polite way of putting it, but by some people who've been critical of the book, for saying that I made the IQ idea seem entirely the property of the right.

So educational psychologists, including many on the left, have often deployed intelligence testing not to reinforce the idea that there's a natural hierarchy, but actually to try to carry out the very equalizing policies that the right is often opposed to.

So there's a kind of irony or paradox at the heart of the book in a way, which is that eugenics, which has long been associated with interventionism and like statism of various kinds and often being carried out by people on the left in the early 20th century, actually,

becomes more the property of the libertarian right.

And the question is actually not easy to answer, which is like, how do you do libertarian eugenics?

Right.

Because normally it would mean like the state needs to do something.

But libertarian eugenics, especially in the mind of someone like Charles Murray, comes down to immigration policy.

That's the simple answer.

Is you know, you do last, you let communities take care of themselves and let people get weeded out by social Darwinist trends.

And then you create a new filter for who gets in based on your thumbnail, back of the envelope idea of racial competence and endowments.

Well, it's an interesting thing, too, that like, as you say, there are uses of IQ that kind of measure the individual and, for instance, show variability over time, et cetera, et cetera.

What's really fascinating is that the libertarian IQ fixation is all about groups.

Is it true in general that a lot of this is about this idea that not just that IQ measures something, but also that IQ can be aggregated?

Where I'm always struck by the idea that you then get

claims that a certain country has an average IQ of 80.

And I'm like, Given the description of what that would look like, how they would ever land an airplane seems really difficult.

So like this cannot possibly be correct.

It would really strongly suggest that people don't know how to take the test,

which then pulls down the number, right?

But it's really interesting that they can conceive of themselves as hyper-individual, but people they don't like sort of become lumped together in these massive racial or ethnic groups.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, the group difference idea is what then makes it possible to be used as a form of policy creation, right?

If you can say,

we can choose from the potential immigrant groups based on this and we'll more or less be right, even if we might lose some people on the left-hand side of the tail of the curve, then on average, we will be more right than wrong.

So yeah, that fixation on group differences is definitely, you know, you can't be taken out of its context of affirmative action, opposition, civil rights, backlash.

But I think that the other interesting thing, though, about the fixation with IQ, and this is where the book I think kind of tees up, but doesn't quite take the shot.

about Silicon Valley libertarianism and the way that this has now become such a fixation for the kind of techno-authoritarian right in your guys' part of the country is that the latest interest for Silicon Valley people is actually

genetic interventions, right?

Yeah.

So the idea of gene editing, the idea of prenatal embryo selection for IVF, all really kind of advances in assistive reproductive technologies by which now you can customize, ideally, the child that you're going to have.

And this is something where this is someone named Steve Su, HSU, who has a company called, I think, Genomic Choice or Genomic Sequence, which is right in the milieu with people like Balaji Srinivasian and Effective Altruist and so on.

So there's an interesting kind of two-step where first you say, you know, intelligence is hardwired and it can't be changed, but you only say that to say that but a very small elite of us who have access to cutting-edge technologies, however, can also intervene in those hardwired sort of circuitries.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So for listeners who are not familiar with Shockley, right,

he was a longtime denizen of Silicon Valley.

He came there in the late 50s, famous for Shockley's semiconductor and for kind of accidentally creating Silicon Valley by being terrible to his underlings who then all left and founded first a different company, Fairchild Semiconductors, and then spun out Intel, AMD, and many, many others, but who later then taught at Stanford and was, yeah, a avowed eugenicist, as Malcolm Harris shows in his book, Palo Alto.

Won a Nobel Prize.

Yeah, prior to that, one should say.

The Nobel Prize.

The Nobel Committee did not look at his eugenics, like, cool.

So, like, this stuff has been around for a long, long time.

But I really think my read on today's tech moguls and IQ and eugenics really is that it for them comes out of this original kind of stressor, which is that they were a bunch of white boys who loved computers in a generation full of white boys who loved computers and who gravitated towards any story that would tell them that they were special.

And I think this particular thing, like we're all slaves to our genes, except you, if you give me money, is like absolute catnip for these people because it's saying there are these eternal biological laws which explain why you rose to the top.

You didn't get lucky.

You, in fact, rose to the top on the merits of your DNA or whatever.

But you can also hack it, right?

The same way Peter Thiel thinks he can hack memetic desire.

Yeah, you're so smart, you can actually even fix the immutable.

Yeah, exactly.

It's immutable for everyone else, but it doesn't apply to you.

It's like, if you designed heroin specifically for people with too much money between Atherton and Daly City, like you couldn't do a better job.

Like they're going to fucking love this shit.

Well, one of my favorite little like side factoids is that Curtis Yarvin was the product of this like IQ fixation world.

CDY.

Right.

Yeah.

Center for Talented Youth.

And I still think this is a book that needs to be written, like the history of the gifted child idea from the 90s.

It was so huge.

I don't know if your guys' kids are school age yet, but it's like basically gone now.

Actually, the gifted child idea is.

Absent.

I mean, there's a lot of attention to kids with special needs, which is great.

And somehow the educational philosophy has moved on from the idea that it's a good idea to like, you know, pluck out children in public school and make them feel special.

But I think that produced a childhood experience for a lot of people of the kind you're exactly describing, which has never left them and has left that sense of being specially endowed.

But I wanted to just add one more thing, which is I did very early when I was researching this stuff, I did an event at Harvard with Stuart Schrader, who I had written about Charles Murray's experience as a Peace Corps worker with,

and Adam Van Arsdale, who was actually a biological anthropologist.

So he knew this story from that side.

And a woman who was a quite elderly African-American woman professor at Boston College, whose name is escaping me right now.

But she is an educational psychologist.

And so we were assuming that we would all talk from our own disciplines.

And then she would say, like, yeah, this IQ, what a bad idea.

We need more resources, da-da.

And she was like, oh, no, we use IQ all the time.

She's very much like a progressive.

She's like, yeah, what we do is we racially weight it.

So we do IQ tests and then we also do a second questionnaire, which is intended to measure your degree of racialization.

So to what extent were you made to understand yourself as black in particular was the example that she was using.

And then we adjust because we know that the experience of racialization in the U.S.

is equivalent to a certain loss of IQ.

This is how she said they utilize it in their discipline because of what you can assume are lost access to certain kinds of resources, forms of teaching, blah, blah, blah.

So rather than just undermine or deconstruct IQ, they took it and then tried to deploy it for their own purposes, right?

In the spirit of quantification and educational testing and all that stuff.

So she said, if you want to know who is keeping the myth of IQ alive or the idea of IQ alive, it's not people on the right, it's ETS, it's educational testing services.

Oh, yeah.

Because that spirit of quantification is really what makes people so data hungry.

And that's also what makes them want to know, like, what's the average IQ of like Gabon?

So I can then like correlate that with GDP and have like some bad quantitative results about the relationship between intelligence and economic development.

And one of the things that really shocked me was to find Richard Lin, who's one of these especially hardcore race scientists that I talk about in the book, at some point created this bad compendium of IQ for the world.

And it was on that website, Our World in Data.

So you could access the data set there or look at a color-coded map of the world according to levels of IQ.

And I was like, why in the world is this man's like shoddy understanding of the world being given this status?

But

I'm interested in like part of the story of the rise of iq racism on the economic right seems to be a little bit about like people abandoning the willingness to entertain like other causes right like um you know we talked earlier a little bit about how

iQ sort of has

the

ability to distill this kind of ill-defined

set of phenomena and characteristics of human beings into like one number, number, right, that can be measured and it's and quantified and it's up or it's down.

And then there's also sort of this similarly simplifying tendency in a lot of like the evolution of the thinkers of people like Charles Murray who like begin their careers with like maybe more

broadly encompassing theories of intelligence or of behavior and sort of as they go on become more and more committed to this like group level inheritability of a definite trade.

Yeah, I know his case for sure, right?

I mean, I actually thought that was quite interesting to see how he basically became it, started out as a behaviorist and just thought it was all about incentives and pleasure and pain and people do things because they get away with them and are rewarded and so on.

And he was really specific about that not being racially subdivided or coded in any way and that this is simply universal human nature.

So that was the kind of analogy of humans to animals of, you know, the B.F.

Skinner variety that didn't try to create a kind of a cod ordinal ranking of how people react to this or that.

And that he did well with that theory as well, which was used to argue against welfare programs, especially for single mothers in the 1980s and indeed into Clinton's welfare reform.

as Melinda Cooper writes about so well.

But then when he found the IQ idea, you know, it was really off to the races.

And that's actually still crazy because I don't know if any of you have ever held the bell curve in your hand, but it's like an 800-page book.

Or it's a very long book.

Very strange as a bestseller.

I suppose it was kind of its version of Piketty's like inequality of capital

in the 21st century and that it was, you know, rarely read but often bought.

I guess that's something we all aspire to as trade authors at the end.

But I think it also

tapped into something that we haven't mentioned yet, which is the rise of the focus on the information economy.

And that's actually a parallel with the Geography of Intellect book, too, because the term the knowledge economy was coined in the early 1960s by Fritz Machloop, a Viennese economist who was part of the Montpellerin Society and so on, to say that as economies develop, you move away from manufacturing and industry and new kind of cognitive skills are required, not just working on the assembly line, but handling, I guess, complex problems of paperwork and things like that.

And in the 1990s, there was a big burst of attention to knowledge workers and symbolic analysts, and the idea that this was the future of the American economy was mind work and mediated by screens.

So they were well-timed there, too, not just in the final nail in the coffin of a great society.

Miliarism, not just as a way to kind of excuse the mass incarceration of the decade as being simply, you know, the warehousing of people at the wrong end of the bell curve,

but also to say, you know, we're moving into an era where intelligence, in other words, sort of brain power rather than body power, brawn, will be the average endowment that the employees in the brave new American economy will need to be deploying.

So that is really then then a direct line to, you know, like coding camps in Appalachia and these ideas of

not much has changed in that, in that regard.

And the kind of the move, I can't be racist because I'm saying, I may be white, but I say East Asians are even more superior or something like that.

It's like that comes straight out of the knowledge economy stuff.

Yeah.

And that was very much part of the geopolitical competition of the 90s too, right?

This insecurity about Japan outpacing the United States.

And then 10 years later, 15 15 years later, China.

That was also one of the reasons to orient yourself to IQ.

And from what I hear in China, there's a real fascination with IQ as well and the idea of G as some sort of measurable general intelligence, not just as a kind of self-congratulatory narrative, because in that science, East Asians do indeed regularly come out on top along with Ashkenazi Jews, but also because it's seen as a way to kind of reprogram 21st century economy through allocation of educational funding and things like that.

Aaron Powell, how did the turn towards a knowledge economy and a sense of, okay, we're going to need

differently qualified workers with like different cognitive capacities, and perhaps we can find those workers in different racial groups?

Like how did this thinking about the new economy interact with the explosion of

the fields of genomics and neuroscience in the 80s and 90s?

because it seems like the tools to measure this thing you think you need are emerging very rapidly right alongside the articulation of the need itself.

Yeah, I mean, I think that it wasn't, and we still actually aren't in a place where people thought that they could draw direct conclusions from certain DNA sequences and then certain intellectual endowments or assets.

I mean, the interesting thing is to read someone like Nick Bostrom in his book, Superintelligence from 2014, that was a very, very big deal in Silicon Valley.

In a way, it's what leads to the creation of open AI by Sam Altman and Elon Musk and others,

because it was one of the first ones to raise this fear of the runaway AI.

The famous example of the paperclip Maximizer comes from Nick Bostrom, and that's usually what he's associated with, as well as the simulation theory.

But the other thing he's talking about, actually, for a good half of that book, is new forms of biological intervention that can be used to increase human intelligence.

The book is set up as like, okay, we need to increase human intelligence.

Intelligence is the only factor that really separates us from the animals and so it's the variable we need to home in on.

How much can we do with our like meat computers, like with our bodies?

Okay, and then he spends 75 pages laying out ways of doing biological enhancement, which rely on something that doesn't exist yet, which is like being able to figure out like a gene for smartness or finding a correlation between the kind of people who tend to test high on IQ tests and the kind of DNA that they tend to have.

But then the back end of the book is, okay, humans are useless.

This has all got to go online.

We have to do this with supercomputers and neural nets and so on.

But the interesting thing that he observes kind of in passing in that book is

how quickly certain kinds of assisted reproductive technologies had become available and then had become normal very, very quickly, right?

So the classic example, and this is, I'm writing with my friend Ben Tarnoff, a book about Elon Musk right now, and part of the reason I was reading it was because of this fact, you know, pointed out by Vivian Wilson herself that she had been sex selected as an embryo for implantation.

And that that was, as she thought, pretty horrible because she felt like it treated her like sex, like a commodity that, you know, felt like a, for her father was then like, he didn't get what he asked for because he got a girl and he wanted a boy.

Right.

But it turns out that the ability to do sex selection for embryos was like made available almost the same year that she was born.

And the kind of things like prenatal screening, which had been non-existent 10 years before, are now like almost 100% of people do those things.

So I think that, you know, what you're describing, the kind of rise of genetic and genomic knowledge and how it intersects with the knowledge works, still remains kind of in a speculative space.

Like it's not that

yet that we've heard from, you know, David Sachs as AI and cryptos are that he's also going to be intervening in kind of like

genetic selection for high IQ babies.

But, you know, we're only in year one of the four-year Trump term.

So

no, I mean more as a way of thinking, as a way of thinking about how human traits and behaviors and characteristics were imagined as being biologically embedded, right?

This seems like a zeitgeist towards a kind of biological determinism emerging in the early 1990s, like right ahead of Murray's book, right?

Yeah, well, the interesting thing is that race in the bell curve is frequently described as being genetic or, you know, the whole crux of the argument is that more of our intelligence is genetically determined than is usually accepted.

So it doesn't say it all is.

It still gives a lot of space for nutrition and education and so on, early childhood interventions, but that it's just more than, I think it's 60% or something is the number that they use.

But their idea of race, and then they say, and those are, there are large and stubborn differences between racial groups, but their idea of race is not actually genetic, even though they use the word genetic.

It's totally based on self-identification, on tests, and on censuses.

So there is no population genetics at work, actually, in the bell curve.

It's all just sort of implied.

When you get to the more recent Charles Murray stuff, then he's now leaning on the more recent developments in the field.

The examples that he gives us that we will have something like a genetic credit score or a genetic audit that he believes will be necessary for all job applications, university applications, and selection for those kind of things will no longer be subjective or based on how well you wrote your college entry exam or essay, how many good anecdotes you roll out, but just the sheer numbers of your likelihood to succeed based on this genetic audit.

The other idea that's quite exciting for people like that is the idea of epigenetics and the idea that you can, through these interventions, also then produce inheritable adaptations in the genome.

So to be honest, I'm actually, we've been talking about this as kind of a niche interest amongst, you know, the hyperactive EC class and posters and stuff, but I'm almost waiting for it to become a larger mass phenomenon.

I mean, I do think that the time is ripe for, as we saw with RFK, like this sort of counter science becoming something that really mobilized people.

And so it wouldn't surprise me if they're, especially maybe even amongst parents of the upper middle class who are really keen on having their children succeed in tightening job markets, that this kind of boutique services and a kind of worldview based around intelligence and genetics is something that

I would bet on if I had a betting market for future ideologies, which maybe we do have.

I just don't know about it.

All those former gifted kids from the 90s who are now parents trying to consume the same product that was sold to their parents.

I have to say, it strikes me as so interesting that you were mentioning 23andMe.

That's obviously done a lot to kind of, as you say, reintroduce genetics and genomics.

as a way of thinking about yourself into pretty broad swaths of American discourse.

My understanding of that is it's ultimately just statistical analysis.

They look at your self-identification and then write back what other people with those genes said their heritage was.

The reason I bring that up is because that's ultimately what an LLM is, isn't it?

We look at probabilistic language performance, like, oh, it's talking to me.

It's like, well, no, it's not.

It is producing a very realistic simulation of it.

This is the same thing for genomics.

And it does seem to me really interesting that there is something here about, as you say, an upper-middle-class and up elite kind of naturalizing the kind of probabilistic outcomes that come with an increasingly unequal society, right?

And to kind of slap a genetic label on that.

And I think you're right that like, if you think of it that way, it's impossible to imagine that this stays the preoccupation of a bunch of freaks in Silicon Valley and a bunch of VCs on Twitter.

This is the fear of falling, except, you know, with a double helix.

Yeah.

No, no, but you're right, that it is ultimately just probabilistic.

It's not that you send in that DNA sample and they actually sequence out your DNA.

All they do is sort of say, okay, well, how is this similar to other people's who have also sent in their spit or their snot or whatever.

The interesting thing, though, about 23andMe, actually, is those it's basically gone bankrupt, right?

It turns out that the thing that people assumed would be infinitely lucrative, which is the code of human life and people's the essence of their

being and identity, doesn't doesn't itself produce a marketable object except for other people's curiosity.

And then, when the market has been saturated and everyone either has a family member who they can get that information from or has done it themselves, then it dries up.

It's not actually like a tradable or infinitely like an accumulation model in and of itself, which that gives the lie to a lot of the 90s discourse about genetics, which was like, we're opening up here.

Right, right.

There was a kind kind of belief that it was like a new frontier of endless kind of primitive accumulation, and like the body would now be a place where you could just endlessly kind of churn out new markets and things.

But no, it turns out that you know, it has a kind of beautiful kind of non-commodified quality to it.

Yeah, best thing that happens is that there's a knock on the door, and the FBI is like, you know, there's a serial killer in your family, and we got to find him.

Like, ah, brother.

Yeah.

Also, you're part Armenian.

Not as Neanderthal as your mom always told me.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly.

You're not 117th Neanderthal and also the highway strangler from the 70s as your uncle.

Was there never a podcast of like bad news from 23andMe?

Because it always struck me as like the best idea.

You know, I feel like with 23andMe, the only two options are either like, you know, that is not your real father or yeah, you're, you're mostly Irish.

You know, it's like either like life-alteringly disturbing or like kind of entirely banal, which yeah, I can I can see what you're saying, Quinn, about the kind of low ceiling of the actual information on offer.

But that gets at something,

I mean, I'm sorry I always bring this back to 19th century phrenology and physiognomy.

There's something interesting about that mode of explanation, but it's above all, there's something interesting about it as a mode of questioning.

There's a kind of person and a kind of milieu that really seems to depend on being able to ask questions about itself in this biologistic way and sort of to justify and locate itself in the social fabric by means of these kinds of questions.

So it's really much more about cultural habits, isn't it?

And I think it's as that that I fully agree with you.

It's going to trickle down to very, I think we're going to get two kinds of people, people who...

under no circumstances have any interest in this and people for whom, you know, like having gone to CTY in the 90s like is like the one thing they'll mention.

I went to high school with a kid who went to CTY and he would not shut up about it.

It's my first year.

It was my first year in the United States.

I was like, what the fuck is this thing?

And why won't this guy shut up?

What is CTY?

Your first word in English.

Yeah, Pierre Rosenvillain actually has a really interesting couple of pages in his book, A Society of Equals, about...

phrenology being a specifically American fascination.

He said,

it's not a coincidence that it was America where this became popular.

And his argument is a bit counterintuitive, but interesting, because the whole argument of the book is basically like America was a much more equal society than France or Germany or the UK of the time.

And so to appeal to like the bumps of the head was a way to actually give some structure to what otherwise could seem like almost random, like who gets to succeed and who doesn't.

If you could say like, no, no, no, it's it's grounded in my

head shape, which is a window to the soul, then you could make sense of what could seem like the chaotic ups and downs of actually quite a wide open economic system.

Aaron Powell, yeah.

I mean, it's really noticeable that a lot of Silicon Valley today is shaped by the kids of the professional managerial class whose main experience was massification, right?

That like the middle class was swelling and the idea like I must be different from others and equality and sameness basically as something offensive, something scary, something threatening is clearly part of their very basic psychic structure.

And the idea that

something needs to tell you that within that ambit, there are, for those who know how to look

salient and important differences, this is extremely important and it's culturally important.

Yeah, and even though it's kind of a tired callback at this point, you know, the Michael Young book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, is still so much fun to look back at.

And there's a reason why I kind of lean on it in the beginning and the end of that chapter We're talking about because, among other things, there's a computer called Pamela, which has an IQ of 100 that everyone is measured against, which is just a wonderful detail.

That's great.

But then the way that this system is brought down is a revolution of women on May Day who reject the idea that there should be a kind of scientific version of natural order determined by intelligence that says who's in power and who's not.

And that really,

I can't help but think about Silicon Valley and the sort of the fear of the revolting worker that is at the heart of something like the new Alexander Karp book, the Technological Republic, or Mark Andreason's fear about the woke, you know, Skittles-haired, it was a term I heard recently mentioned, Skittles-haired, like Twitter employees, you know, daring to speak back to their bosses.

I mean, it's really just reenacting like the final scene of the rise of the meritocracy.

So it makes sense why they feel like, no, like reinstate Pamela, you know, keep the workers and the women down and make sure that IQ remains like the yardstick of who is in power.

Quinn Slobodian, thank you so much for joining us.

Really, really grateful for your time that you came to us standing in your closet

and made this happen.

Way warm.

Yeah, no, I know that it's brutal on the East Coast.

I have to go there in a couple weeks, and I'm like kind of not looking forward to it.

We've had a moment of respite, but tomorrow, yeah, the hammer comes back down.

I hope you get a popsicle and a nap, you know?

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