* Louise Perry and I discuss the recent viral Compact article by Jacob Savage on the disappearance of millennial white males from elite intellectual and creative occupations

* There is something darkly amusing about how the least racist cohort of young white people to ever exist were the ones required to step aside for the sake of diversity, while the older cohort of white people who were more racist got to keep their jobs

* We explore why Compact has become the home for arguments that suddenly define online discourse (recall that they also published Helen Andrews’ piece about feminization, which Louise and I discussed here)

* How political ambiguity makes certain essays “safe” to share across ideological lines

* The contradiction at the heart of diversity initiatives: they are said to be necessary, yet when they actually work they are denied to be effective

* How Thomas Sowell’s experience shows that perceptions of merit shift once standards are known to differ

* Louise suggests she may, as a professional journalist, have benefited from being female and asks me whether, with a mixed race Asian/Latino background, I have benefited from diversity initiatives. I speculate that my edge wasn’t race—it was veteran status and a personal narrative that fit certain programs

* I tell a story from many years ago when I landed in a Stanford summer program meant for “underrepresented minorities,” and what it felt like to be the odd one out in a room with a very different moral vocabulary, and what nonwhite leftists say when white people aren’t in the room

* Louise and I discuss two possibilities for why Substack skews more male than legacy media outlets: either Substack is a refuge for writers from disfavored groups, and it selects for independence and risk tolerance; podcasts show the same pattern

* Why self-promotion feels “icky” to almost everyone, yet becomes mandatory if you’re building a career without much institutional backing

* Louise makes the blunt point that men are simply better, on average, at pushing past the cringe of self-marketing. This changes outcomes in creator markets

* The unfairness of the “another white guy starting a podcast” meme: Hosting a podcast gets celebrated when it comes with elite branding vs. mocked when it’s an independent project (until it becomes successful, of course)

* We contrasting Hollywood’s decline to academia’s decline

* Why the collapse in media trust is one of the few points everyone now concedes, from left to right

* We explore a simple causal idea: if the press were still widely respected, attacking it would be politically costly—so the willingness to attack it signals the trust was already long gone

* What got selected out of media wasn’t only race or gender—it was heterodoxy, disagreeableness, and eccentricity, which made the whole product more boring, which is why increasing numbers of people prefer to read Substack for opinion journalism

* Connect the “betrayal of meritocracy” thesis to the mood shift among younger cohorts: a fast, visible overhaul produces cynicism, polarization, and a sense that the ladder is rigged

* If institutions stated preferred diversity goals plainly and quantitatively, people could accurately assess their odds of success instead of living in fog and rumor

* How prestige functions as a kind of currency in creative and intellectual jobs, and how competition for prestige can suppress wages while increasing political conformity

* Louise and I return to a core conflict: blank-slate assumptions drive a belief that unequal outcomes must be discrimination, so proportionality becomes the only acceptable moral target

* I add a second force that is less discussed: people often misjudge national demographics, which makes their sense of “fair representation” wildly inaccurate

A reminder that paid subscribers can access these recordings on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

And Merry Christmas! This will be my final post for 2025. I’ll be back to my regular posting schedule in the new year.

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The Unresolved Contradiction of Diversity Initiatives

Rob Henderson's Office Hours (private feed for [email protected])

The Unresolved Contradiction of Diversity Initiatives