Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Nathan Cofnas has had a strange couple of years. He’s been mobbed by both the right and left, pushed out of a research job at the University of Cambridge, and suspended from his current position at Ghent University in Belgium, a suspension that was lifted shortly after this interview. Somewhat unexpectedly, he’s also become one of the more talked-about figures in higher education.
Cofnas is the philosopher who broke the story exposing Jason Arday’s allegedly fabricated biography and plagiarized PhD thesis. The scandal ended Arday’s career at Cambridge and preceded his death weeks later. Cofnas was careful to tell me the story was never really about Arday himself, a man he sees as a small-time opportunist. His real target, he says, is the system that lets a concocted life story sail past Cambridge, the BBC, and nearly everyone else without real scrutiny, and what that says about what happens when institutions lower their skepticism for the sake of a good narrative.
That’s the story that made Cofnas’s name famous, but it’s not why I wanted him on. He’s a self-described race realist, someone who believes race is not just a social construct but is correlated with real, innate differences between groups, including intelligence. Cofnas’s claim is specific: Elites, not the general public, should be more willing to engage with this research, because the alternative to that conversation, in his view, is wokeness. I don’t buy the premise. I don’t think we’re stuck choosing between wokeness and the bell curve, and I think both of those worldviews collapse into the same kind of tribal conflict the moment they actually go mainstream.
We spent most of the conversation in real disagreement. I pushed him on whether an idea like this can be contained to elite conversation once it starts being discussed, and whether human beings are capable of hearing about average group differences without applying them to every individual they meet from different groups. He thinks I’m underestimating people. I think he’s underestimating just how bad we all are at decoupling an average from a rule.
We also got into the deeper question underneath all of it: whether the current, uneasy consensus around color blindness and individual treatment is actually a stable place to stand, or just a temporary truce that’s already breaking down. Cofnas thinks color blindness already failed once, in the sense that it didn’t deliver the equal outcomes people expected, and that failure is what produced the backlash we’re living through now. I think he’s telling the wrong story: that what actually happened wasn’t a slow disillusionment with color blindness—it was social media rewarding the most divisive framing of every issue it touched, race included.
My objection was never about whether Cofnas’s research holds up. It’s about whether any society has ever safely talked about this topic without the conversation turning into something worse.
0:00 Intro
9:50 Who Is Nathan Cofnas and How Did He Expose Jason Arday?
28:21 The Implications of the Jason Arday Scandal
30:18 What Is Race Realism?
32:35 Where Do You Draw the Line Between Groups?
40:17 The Forced Choice Between Wokeness and Hereditarianism
45:45 Is the Cultural Explanation Persuasive Enough?
54:06 The Danger of Mainstreaming Race and IQ
1:00:50 Was Colorblindness a Stable Equilibrium?
1:07:18 Did Colorblindness Fail or Did Social Media Break It?
1:29:27 Should Conservatives and Liberals Be Talking About IQ Gaps Between Political Tribes?
1:34:19 Nathan's Criticism of the University of Austin
Nathan Cofnas has had a strange couple of years. He’s been mobbed by both the right and left, pushed out of a research job at the University of Cambridge, and suspended from his current position at Ghent University in Belgium, a suspension that was lifted shortly after this interview. Somewhat unexpectedly, he’s also become one of the more talked-about figures in higher education.
Cofnas is the philosopher who broke the story exposing Jason Arday’s allegedly fabricated biography and plagiarized PhD thesis. The scandal ended Arday’s career at Cambridge and preceded his death weeks later. Cofnas was careful to tell me the story was never really about Arday himself, a man he sees as a small-time opportunist. His real target, he says, is the system that lets a concocted life story sail past Cambridge, the BBC, and nearly everyone else without real scrutiny, and what that says about what happens when institutions lower their skepticism for the sake of a good narrative.
That’s the story that made Cofnas’s name famous, but it’s not why I wanted him on. He’s a self-described race realist, someone who believes race is not just a social construct but is correlated with real, innate differences between groups, including intelligence. Cofnas’s claim is specific: Elites, not the general public, should be more willing to engage with this research, because the alternative to that conversation, in his view, is wokeness. I don’t buy the premise. I don’t think we’re stuck choosing between wokeness and the bell curve, and I think both of those worldviews collapse into the same kind of tribal conflict the moment they actually go mainstream.
We spent most of the conversation in real disagreement. I pushed him on whether an idea like this can be contained to elite conversation once it starts being discussed, and whether human beings are capable of hearing about average group differences without applying them to every individual they meet from different groups. He thinks I’m underestimating people. I think he’s underestimating just how bad we all are at decoupling an average from a rule.
We also got into the deeper question underneath all of it: whether the current, uneasy consensus around color blindness and individual treatment is actually a stable place to stand, or just a temporary truce that’s already breaking down. Cofnas thinks color blindness already failed once, in the sense that it didn’t deliver the equal outcomes people expected, and that failure is what produced the backlash we’re living through now. I think he’s telling the wrong story: that what actually happened wasn’t a slow disillusionment with color blindness—it was social media rewarding the most divisive framing of every issue it touched, race included.
My objection was never about whether Cofnas’s research holds up. It’s about whether any society has ever safely talked about this topic without the conversation turning into something worse.
0:00 Intro
9:50 Who Is Nathan Cofnas and How Did He Expose Jason Arday?
28:21 The Implications of the Jason Arday Scandal
30:18 What Is Race Realism?
32:35 Where Do You Draw the Line Between Groups?
40:17 The Forced Choice Between Wokeness and Hereditarianism
45:45 Is the Cultural Explanation Persuasive Enough?
54:06 The Danger of Mainstreaming Race and IQ
1:00:50 Was Colorblindness a Stable Equilibrium?
1:07:18 Did Colorblindness Fail or Did Social Media Break It?
1:29:27 Should Conservatives and Liberals Be Talking About IQ Gaps Between Political Tribes?
1:34:19 Nathan's Criticism of the University of Austin
