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Richard Hanania's Newsletter
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Content provided by Richard Hanania. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Richard Hanania or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Foreign policy, American politics, and social science
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22 episodes
Mark all (un)played …
Manage series 3549275
Content provided by Richard Hanania. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Richard Hanania or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Foreign policy, American politics, and social science
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continue reading
22 episodes
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Richard Hanania's Newsletter
David Lynch recently passed away, so Rob and I decided to honor the legendary director by watching two of his movies, Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2008), and discussing them. We liked the first film, and debated various interpretations of it, including the standard one and other possible theories. I’m motivated to have a contrarian take here, perhaps because of the overwhelming beauty I found in the reality we were initially introduced to. While Mulholland Drive gave us much to work with, we both absolutely hated Inland Empire . In my view, it’s fine to have surrealist or absurdist elements, but if it gets to the point that the whole thing is a disjointed mess it’s hard to stay interested or care what happens. A character could have died or turned into a rhinoceros at any point after the first hour and I wouldn’t have been moved or surprised, because nothing actually matters once you figure out what the director is trying to do. You need reality to be bounded in some way if you hope to be entertained by or learn from a work of art. We refer to ChatGPT throughout, which performed quite impressively, generating arguments for novel interpretations for the films and clearing up some of the confusion we had about the plots and sequences of events. At the end we decide we’ll give the series Twin Peaks a chance, so look out for that. By the way, the other day I asked people to subscribe to my new YouTube channel, where I posted the conversation with Brian Chau. As it turns out though, I already have a YouTube channel with nearly a thousand subscribers. I just forgot it existed. So ignore the link I posted yesterday and go here if you want to watch my free videos on YouTube. But I prefer you see them here. If people have other interpretations of the films or thoughts on the conversation here, feel free to leave them in the comments.…
The stock market was sent reeling today as a result of the release by the Chinese company DeepSeek of an open source AI model that comes close to or matches the performance of American models, but was created for a fraction of the cost. While traditional models have cost in the range of $100 million to $1 billion to produce, the latest application from DeepSeek was reportedly created for under $6 million. Wanting to know more, I invited Brian Chau on for a livestream to discuss. Some of the questions we cover: What does it mean for a model to be open source? Why would a business release an open source model? Should you sell all your Nvidia stock? How do we know that DeepSeek really cost under $6 million to build? Can its costs be verified? What might the intentions of the Chinese Communist Party be in letting this happen? Will AI take all the jobs? Has Brian’s p(doom) changed at all? When will us writers be replaceable? Has Brian’s vision of a hands off approach to AI regulation won? Did Big Yud go down with the Kamala ship? As a non-expert, I found it very useful to have an hour in which to pick Brian’s brain. I can’t recommend this conversation enough for those who want to make sense of what has happened in AI over the last few days.…
I just did a livestream with Bryan Caplan on Trump’s executive orders on DEI and my role in making them happen. For context, see my post from yesterday. We discuss the history of EO 11246 and Bryan talks about the pressure his dad got from the government to hire more minorities in the airline industry in the 1980s. One point to emphasize is that even people who think a lot about policy have been completely in the dark about the reach of the affirmative action in government contracting regime, on both the right and left. Bryan asks me to give an estimate of the probability I made the marginal difference in us getting Trump’s new executive order. Bryan leaves about halfway through, and I then provide further thoughts on the topic, along with sharing some ideas on the general “vibe shift” everyone is talking about. While this is a victory over DEI, I worry about the pendulum swing involving a backlash to immigration. To me, the fight against DEI and for more open borders is the same struggle: merit, treating people as individuals rather than members of groups, and economic progress. Yet most who are passionate about DEI are motivated by their place on a racist-antiracist axis, so a vibe shift against woke means more restrictive immigration policies. It is important to push back against this. I close by taking a few questions from the audience, including on how to think about the issue of nationalism versus globalism. Read more…
I just did a stream on the inauguration and Trump’s potential executive orders, some of which might be signed by the time you watch this. I did this stream with screensharing, so you can follow along as I scroll X, the New York Times and the Washington Post , and read about the Biden pardons, what Trump is expected to do on his first day, and more. In the midst of the Twitter scrolling, I also go on tangents about parenting, Barron’s potential, and the Elon “Roman Salute” scandal that just happened. I find this kind of stream fun and might do it more often if people want it. The recording is available audio only as a normal podcast, but you probably won’t get nearly as much out of it if you don’t see the video. I also noticed that you might need to do full screen in order to see things well enough on a computer. I think that it might actually work better on mobile. Sorry, the Substack video feature is still a work in progress. Read more…
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Richard Hanania's Newsletter
Rob Henderson joined me last night on a live stream to discuss the question that has roiled right-wing twitter: should American men work at Panda Express? For background, see Rob’s coverage here. See also friend of the Substack Scott Greer, whose article we reference. Rob is amused by the Greerhead Pledge, which you can learn about from my conversation with Scott. We go into the status-money tradeoff in jobs, the reasonableness of people’s expectations, how much these anonymous rightists reflect attitudes in the rest of society, their similarities with woke, and more. We also discuss whether working at Panda Express will actually limit what kind of partner you can hope to attract. I explain why one of the beauties of immigration is that it allows you to go outside of the status hierarchy of your own society when looking for a wife. I’m big into following your dreams. Listeners shouldn’t get the impression from this conversation that I’m for income-maxing above all else. That’s not what I did, and if you truly have a passion or talent for something, go for it. What I’m objecting to here is the idea that you should tell people who are only slightly above average it is fine for them to look down on normal, everyday jobs. That’s not good either for society or encouraging people to live happy and productive lives. Read more…
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Richard Hanania's Newsletter
Alex Epstein ( X , Substack ) is a philosopher, energy expert, and the author of two New York Times bestselling books: Fossil Future and The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels . Alex and I met a few years ago through our mutual friend Bryan Caplan. A couple of months ago we were talking and he asked me how much Ayn Rand I had read. I mentioned that I’d gone through Atlas Shrugged when I was in my teens or early twenties, and by chance had picked up The Romantic Manifesto not that long before we spoke. One thing led to another, and the last few months I’ve been going through all of her published books. I’ve also read the Anne Heller biography , which the Ayn Rand Institute hates but Bryan and I both found captivating. Alex lives in Los Angeles, so we decided to meet for a podcast to discuss her ideas and work. In this conversation, I fear that I come across as not that big of a Rand fan, though that is only in comparison to Alex. As I say during the discussion, I’m probably at the 90th percentile of Ayn Rand appreciators and he’s at the 99th percentile. To me, her greatest contributions were providing a moral foundation for capitalism and a framework for self-help. I believe if you adopt Ayn Rand’s philosophy, you will both be happier and have generally correct political and moral views. We get into the question of whether Rand is anti-natalist, or even anti-family. I think kids are conspicuous by their absence in her works, and family relations are usually portrayed negatively. Alex provides a different perspective. We also go into Rand’s personal life, what if anything it tells us about her philosophy, and which novels we like more or less. I’m personally partial to We the Living , while Alex likes The Fountainhead the best. There are a few spoilers here regarding Atlas Shrugged , but none for her other fiction books. I’ll be writing more about Rand and her ideas in the coming weeks. For those who want to start reading her work, or perhaps reconnect with it, the Ayn Rand Institute allows students to get one of her books for free. Most if not all of her published essays can be found online. Below are a handful that we mentioned throughout this conversation. “Racism” (1963) “What Is Capitalism?” (1965) “Of Living Death,” (1968) on the Catholic Church’s views on contraception and sex ( text , Rand speech ) “Philosophy: Who Needs It?” (1974) ( text , audio of speech at West Point )…
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Richard Hanania's Newsletter
Did you ever think to yourself, “I love Richard Hanania, I just would like to see what he’s like when having fun with some trannies?” Well, you’re in luck. I recently had a discussion with Brianna Wu and three of her friends. You can watch below. Someone asked, and yes, as you might have guessed, I no longer hate pronouns more than genocide. My dislike of rightoids has grown so intense that anyone they hate automatically becomes more tolerable, and they don’t hate anyone as much as they hate trans. I’ll continue to be honest, and as I tell Brianna and friends, I’m so pro-woman that anything in the shape of one is basically fine with me. But I’m still grossed out by female-to-male transitioners. A biological female with a beard fills me with rage. You can add boobs to a human, but it’s a crime to remove them. So my instinctual ranking of dislikes are now 1) Female-to-male 2) Rightoids 3) Genocide 4) Male-to-female. If we’re going in terms of political danger, however, you have to put rightoids and genocide ahead of all trans. This is my truth, and I will not apologize for it. In other news, there’s now an X bot trained on my work that you might follow and have some fun with. It’ll occasionally engage when people tag it and reply to those it follows. It’s mostly got my ideas correct but is way more dour and serious, and lacks the humor, sarcasm, and creativity that make me who I am. I still maintain my humanity. Still, this is a fun project, and I plan to continue feeding it inputs and trying to improve it over time. As the tech gets better so will the Hanania bot, and I’m intrigued by the vision of one day having an AI that has completely nailed my values and beliefs but is able to digest all the information on the internet. Maybe at that point I can just outsource all my opinions to it and give the bot control of this newsletter. There’s also now a Reddit for fans. I’ve never been a big Reddit guy but have been lurking there for a bit. Seems like a good place for fans to get together and talk about ideas. As a reminder, I have an end-of-year special on paid subscriptions if you use the link below. Sign up for a year now, and you’ll be able to renew indefinitely at 20% off. That’s on top of the savings you get by paying yearly rather than month-by-month. The offer is only good until January 1. Hanania End-of-Year Special: 20% off for Life Below are the links for the month. As a reminder, to get them in real time on X, you have to subscribe to my account there. 1. NYT on the elimination of hereditary peerage, told through the eyes of Godfrey John Bewicke-Copley, the 7th Baron Cromwell. Lord Cromwell himself says he doesn't believe in the hereditary principle, and if the Lords themselves don't believe in it there's not much hope for the system. However, the article makes a compelling case for being conservative here, as it turns out that British governments are now stacking the House of Lords with "lifetime peers" who are just donors, former politicians, and other connected people. The House of Lords is now a sprawling body full of elites who were appointed by governments but can never leave. This seems as bad, if not worse. Burke nods. 2. Article on Confucianism and its effects on fertility patterns. It doesn’t seem to me that the Chinese have ever had either a real eugenics movement or a principled anti-eugenics stand like in Europe and America. Trying to synchronize science and thought on human affairs is more of a Western thing. 3. As insane as you think NEPA regulations are, things are even worse. Government agencies produce thousands of pages of reports before they can do anything, when the content of the reports doesn't matter. They just have to produce the paperwork, and groups that are not interested in learning about the underlying issue or improving government decision making, but simply want to stop projects, sue to get more paperwork. How long can this continue? 4. Stephen Kotkin talks to Tyler about his studies, time with Foucault, Siberia, East Asia, and Stalin. No biography I’ve read has captured a man and his times better than his two volumes on Stalin. See my review here. The books raise deep questions of historical causation and the nature of power. Disappointed to hear that it’ll still be a few years until the third one is published. 5. Just watched the 1942 Italian adaptation of We the Living . The book was my favorite of Rand's novels, and the movie absolutely blew me away. Read more…
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Richard Hanania's Newsletter
A war has broken out on X between Tech Right types and populists over the question of Indian immigration. For context, see this article , or basically scroll through my entire X feed. I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day posting about this, as this topic is where many of my interests overlap. I’m particularly fascinated by the idea of right-wing nationalism as a radical egalitarian movement that masquerades as one that is Nietzschean. As soon as these people want to argue against high-skilled immigration, they start using talking points that are basically carbon copies of those of woke leftists , even borrowing their exact language . Another one of my recurring interests is the natural tension between the Tech Right and right-wing chuddery. I’ve previously discussed JD Vance as a figure who straddles these two worlds. The Tech Right and many classical liberals dislike the left because it is too small-minded, safetyist, and fearful of the future. Populists come from the opposite direction. While they think leftists are too concerned with the feelings and well-being of racial and sexual minorities, they are driven by a leveling instinct when it comes to whites and resentment towards successful outsiders. I discuss the two main arguments right-wing populists make against high-skilled immigration: that newcomers depress native wages, and “we are a nation, not an economy.” The first argument violates basic economic reasoning, while the second makes little sense unless you understand it as a racist dog whistle. Near the end I break down Vivek’s post today about jocks and nerds. See also my response on X. This is an issue that is going to pop up again as the Trump administration begins to govern. Few things are as important for the future of humanity as making sure that the most competent people get to the places where they can be the most innovative and productive. This is a war worth fighting, even if it includes posting through Christmas. Note: I’ve changed the name of this feed from Clown Car to The Hanania Show . The original name was meant to highlight that the show revolved around the 2024 election, but since the topics covered are now much broader, it no longer makes sense. If the audio cuts off, it is because you have the free preview feed and will need to become a paid subscriber to listen to or watch the whole thing. Read more…
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