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TracingWoodgrains is someone I’ve gotten to know over X and through his Substack. He’s currently a law student and works as a producer for the hilarious Blocked and Reported podcast, which I recommend everyone subscribe to.

I’ve found “Trace,” as everyone calls him, to be one of the most interesting new thinkers to emerge over the last several years. He spent six years in the Air Force where he worked as a Chinese linguist, and grew up Mormon, before leaving the church and discovering he was gay as an adult.

We begin by talking about Trace’s politics. He calls himself a “Lee Kuan Yew Centrist,” and we discuss what that means. Then we move on to his personal background, including what it was like growing up in a religious community and how his friends and family reacted to him coming out as gay and marrying a man. This leads to a conversation about Mormon politics more generally, including how members of the church tend to be pro-establishment and the ways in which that is out of step with conservatism in the Trump era.

We also discuss the issue of low human capital on the right, a topic he recently wrote about. I ask whether there may be ways around this mattering, by conservatives getting better at ideological filtering and seeking to use political power to “de-institutionalize” society.

I asked Trace which political coalition he sees as closer to representing his worldview and more potentially fixable. He and I share many positions in common, and also a kind of political aesthetic, so I was taken a bit back by his answer, and this leads us to go into why our backgrounds might make us approach the question differently.

One of the things we agree on here is a need to see more spirited defenses of classical liberal ideas. In this context, we talk about the surrogacy issue, which we’ve both taken strong positions on.

Near the end, I ask how he came up with the name “TracingWoodgrains,” and whether he’s actually a furry and if the whole thing is really a sublimated desire for bestiality.

All of this is to say that this was a deep and wide-ranging conversation. I’ve done few podcasts that have ended up being this interesting in terms of both intellectual content and personal narrative. Enjoy.