All right, welcome listeners to episode 122 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sitman, your podcast co-host,

and I'm here as always with my great friend, Sam Mother Bell, who just has returned to New York

City from visiting our intrepid producer Jesse Burnhamen at his home in Montana.

Sojourn to the Mountain West. You're lucky I didn't walk off into the wilderness and make a new life for myself.

And you also got to see where the magic happens. Jesse's... His lair. Yes, his lair.

Surrounded by weird keyboards and synthesizers that he uses to make his music.

I think when he did the first of his albums where he played all the instruments on the record, I called him as being akin to like a deranged one-man band.

Deranged doesn't even begin to describe it.

Yes.

But it was great. Montana was great. Jesse and Catherine and Baby May.

It was great to see them. Next time we got to get them out here so we can have a know-your-enemy summit on your

roof. That's true. Well, speaking of deranged people, this episode is the second in our book series,

an occasional series, where we pick a text written by a conservative intellectual, a figure on the

right that we think is unusually

interesting or important or has something to say to us now. And we chose for a second book,

Charles Murray's 2012 book, Coming Apart, The State of White America, 1960 to 2010. At the start of this

episode, we give you a fair amount of biographical information

about Murray and a fair number of handholds before we actually get to the substance of coming

apart. So, Sam, why don't you just tell listeners what this book is about, why we chose to

devote this time to it before we

get some other matters? Sure. Well, the thesis of this book is pretty easy to summarize.

This is based on five decades of statistical and qualitative research, Charles Murray is going to

...