TRIGGERnometry - August 22, 2022


Coleman Hughes： ＂BLM Moment Led to Racist Policies＂

Topics
pandemic aid policies entertainment and culture conversation woke art
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Coleman Hughes Jim Crow Martin Luther King Harvey Weinstein Ibram X. Kendi Biden George Floyd Trump Kendrick Lamar Matthew Iglesias Michael Jackson Tucker Carlson Lee Bollinger Donald Glover Steven Pinker Man Bruce Malcolm X Ted Bundy Elon Musk Gen Zs and 5 more
Sam Harris： Trump, Religion, Wokeness Arrested for a Meme - Harry Miller

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 16 minutes

Words per minute

144.76

Word count

11,086

Sentence count

721

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

24

sentences flagged

Hate speech

22

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Coleman Hughes is a writer, musician, podcaster, and activist. He has been a voice in the anti-racist movement known as Black Lives Matter, and he is returning to the show in person for the first time since the show's last episode in 2020.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The I Have a Dream speech gives me goosebumps to this day,
00:00:03.000 and I take that ethic very seriously,
00:00:07.000 and when I see it violated, it makes me angry,
00:00:10.000 and it makes me sad.
00:00:12.000 In the midst of a revolution, it's like there's a frenzy.
00:00:17.000 When the fog clears,
00:00:20.000 you can see all the things that were done that were wrong,
00:00:24.000 that were deeply wrong.
00:00:27.000 There was $4 billion of aid for farmers with debt, 0.90
00:00:32.000 only if you were non-white.
00:00:34.000 If you're a white restaurant owner or a white struggling farmer 0.69
00:00:37.000 that loses their farm in the context of a recession,
00:00:42.000 you are never going to forgive
00:00:44.000 that you were not treated on the basis of need,
00:00:47.000 but you were treated on the basis of race.
00:00:49.000 Just like black people in America have not forgotten
00:00:53.000 redlining, Jim Crow.
00:00:55.000 Where is this going?
00:00:57.000 Well, I don't know.
00:00:58.000 That depends a lot on the actions and the bravery
00:01:02.000 of millions of individuals,
00:01:05.000 many of whom will be watching this video.
00:01:08.000 Hello, and welcome to a very special episode
00:01:22.000 of Trigonometry on the Road from the USA.
00:01:26.000 I'm Francis Foster.
00:01:27.000 I'm Constantine Kishin.
00:01:28.000 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations
00:01:32.000 with fascinating people.
00:01:34.000 A brilliant guest and returning to the show now in person
00:01:37.000 for the first time.
00:01:38.000 He is the writer and musician and podcaster.
00:01:41.000 Coleman Hughes, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:43.000 Thank you for having me again.
00:01:44.000 Yeah, man.
00:01:45.000 It's great to see you.
00:01:46.000 We actually by accident got a chance to hang out last night.
00:01:49.000 We went to see a show at the Comedy Cellar,
00:01:51.000 had a chance to chat a little bit,
00:01:53.000 which is great because the last time we had you on the show,
00:01:56.000 it was summer of 2020.
00:01:58.000 It was the peak of the BLM racial conversation 0.89
00:02:02.000 that we had at the time.
00:02:03.000 And we got a lot of your ideas and thoughts about the world.
00:02:06.000 But one of the things we're starting to find is people
00:02:09.000 who talk about the stuff that you talk about
00:02:11.000 and that we talk about it and who are willing, like you,
00:02:14.000 to actually be public about it and to speak out about it
00:02:18.000 and risk things.
00:02:19.000 Usually there's like a reason or a set of reasons why they do this.
00:02:23.000 It doesn't just happen by accident.
00:02:25.000 So I guess the question is like, what's your backstory?
00:02:28.000 Why are you sitting in this chair right now?
00:02:31.000 That's a good question.
00:02:32.000 I don't know how much I can answer it from the inside.
00:02:38.000 Sometimes people can sort of see you more accurately
00:02:43.000 from the outside than you can see yourself.
00:02:44.000 But insofar as I understand myself, I think I was raised in a context
00:02:52.000 where I really did not care about race one way or the other.
00:02:57.000 I was raised in a very diverse upbringing.
00:03:01.000 And the consensus growing up was the Martin Luther King ideal.
00:03:11.000 And I lived that as a child very much.
00:03:14.000 I had friends of every race and I didn't think about race.
00:03:19.000 And suddenly 2012, 2013, 2014 came around and people started telling me,
00:03:29.000 you're a victim.
00:03:31.000 And race really does separate you from your friends that are white or Asian.
00:03:40.000 This is an important feature of your identity.
00:03:43.000 There are certain things you can understand as a black person that your white friends can't.
00:03:48.000 And I knew this to be instinctively wrong.
00:03:51.000 I had lived enough, I think, to know that race really is only as deep as you want to make it.
00:04:02.000 Or as deep as you choose to make it.
00:04:04.000 And that it's wrong to make it matter.
00:04:10.000 And so BLM hit, and at the time I was a musician, mostly in jazz,
00:04:22.000 and I had friends of every race in that community.
00:04:25.000 And we really all connected on a deep level over loving the same music,
00:04:29.000 which was further evidence, although I might not have said it this way at the time,
00:04:34.000 was further evidence that the human family is not deeply separated into races.
00:04:42.000 You can connect with someone of a different race so deeply that you build a life with them
00:04:49.000 and marry them and have kids with them.
00:04:51.000 You can have the most intimate relationships of your life with people of a different race.
00:04:57.000 And that happens every day's routine.
00:04:59.000 So this new ideology, when I went to Columbia, I was inundated with this new ideology,
00:05:08.000 which in the segment of society that had the least racism that I'd ever seen,
00:05:17.000 Columbia University, Ivy League schools, as progressive as it possibly gets.
00:05:22.000 So progressive that there are posters on the walls of hallways that say Womaxin instead of women.
00:05:30.000 That's how, in Latinx, so progressive that there's a new language.
00:05:37.000 Ten steps left of the Democratic Party. That's how anti-racist it was. 0.85
00:05:41.000 Precisely in that space, I was hearing activist students say,
00:05:45.000 I experience racism every day on this campus, right?
00:05:48.000 I was hearing them speak about the level of racism in this environment
00:05:55.000 in a way that I would hear like my grandparents speak about growing up under Jim Crow.
00:06:02.000 And that cried out to me as like something is amiss here.
00:06:06.000 Something is wrong.
00:06:08.000 And I became very curious about what that was.
00:06:12.000 Colman, just to stop you there.
00:06:13.000 When they said that they were talking about their experiences of racism on the campus,
00:06:18.000 on the Columbia campus, what examples did they give?
00:06:25.000 So I'm not, I can't really recall.
00:06:31.000 Some of them would be what would have been called microaggressions a few years ago.
00:06:37.000 More often they wouldn't give examples at all.
00:06:40.000 And this is where lived experience can matter because if you're an outsider reading a black Columbia student say,
00:06:50.000 I experience racism every day, you may not know what to think of that.
00:06:53.000 You might say, well, that's interesting. She experiences racism every day. 0.97
00:06:57.000 As a black student at Columbia that was, you know, staying at till 2am on campus all the time,
00:07:05.000 giving security guards plenty of opportunities to be racist against me,
00:07:10.000 and experienced like near zero racism, like really close to zero.
00:07:16.000 Maybe once, one anomalous experience in four years, right?
00:07:22.000 Everything else was just totally, totally non-racist.
00:07:26.000 I knew that it was a lie, that these kids were putting it on,
00:07:30.000 and that they were highly incentivized to do so by the subculture because victimhood became currency,
00:07:40.000 became social currency, and as social beings we are extremely attuned to how to elevate ourselves in status, right?
00:07:49.000 It's like, it's most of what we're built to do is to, so if you live in a subculture where you are cool and high status,
00:08:01.000 precisely in so far as you can persuade people that you're a victim of oppression, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.,
00:08:09.000 people respond to those social incentives, and I could see that that's what was going on.
00:08:16.000 So you see this, which is cool. I think a lot of people see it.
00:08:19.000 But there's another piece to my first question to you, which is,
00:08:23.000 why are you someone who feels strongly enough about it to actually put themselves on the line over it?
00:08:29.000 That's a good question. I think, I really took it seriously when I was taught Martin Luther King's words as a kid.
00:08:40.000 The I have a dream speech gives me goosebumps to this day, and I take that ethic very seriously,
00:08:48.000 and when I see it violated, it makes me angry, and it makes me sad.
00:08:52.000 And when I see that people are hesitant and fearful to speak up in defense of it,
00:09:04.000 it makes me feel that I ought to fill that role.
00:09:09.000 Colman, you've used the word violated, which is a very strong word,
00:09:13.000 and obviously you're a super smart guy. You've used that word for a reason.
00:09:18.000 What do you mean by the word violated?
00:09:21.000 Did I say violated?
00:09:22.000 Yeah.
00:09:23.000 Violated the MLK ethic.
00:09:25.000 Yeah.
00:09:27.000 Well, the ethic is that, the principle is that race actually does not matter.
00:09:37.000 And the people who do make race matter are making an error.
00:09:42.000 This is precisely what was the problem with white supremacy, Jim Crow, slavery, 0.60
00:09:49.000 and all of the myriad abuses that black people suffered throughout the history of America,
00:09:56.000 from even before its founding, was that people made race matter when it should not have,
00:10:05.000 and judged people not on the basis of their individual abilities,
00:10:10.000 but on the accident of their birth into a particular race.
00:10:15.000 That is the error. It always has been.
00:10:18.000 And that principle has been violated in the name of paying black people back for history, essentially. 0.55
00:10:29.000 The idea is that we're going to make up for all the horrible white supremacy of the past
00:10:35.000 by flipping the discrimination.
00:10:39.000 As Ibram Kendi says, I imagine your viewers are familiar with Ibram Kendi's book,
00:10:45.000 you know, the remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.
00:10:50.000 Few anti-racists say the quiet part out loud, but Kendi does.
00:10:57.000 And the idea is we are going to discriminate against white people as a group in order to make up for all of what was, 0.77
00:11:06.000 what has been done to black Americans in the past, which requires a violation of the civil rights ethic.
00:11:15.000 The civil rights ethic was not to discriminate against white people, not to reverse the logic of Jim Crow.
00:11:22.000 It was to to to to start anew right from a race neutral perspective.
00:11:29.000 And we can, you know, all of the problems of intergenerational poverty and really dealing with disadvantage and privilege and economic inequality.
00:11:48.000 We can really address those in a race neutral framework and a framework that does not say you're this color.
00:11:55.000 So you're going to get you're going to get this policy and you're this color. 0.50
00:11:58.000 So you're going to get this policy.
00:12:00.000 You know, we have people we know how much money people make.
00:12:04.000 It's possible to do any program that could be race based to do it based on income in class.
00:12:11.000 And it that's a much closer proxy to who is actually disadvantaged.
00:12:18.000 Right.
00:12:19.000 In society to begin with.
00:12:20.000 And it's fairer.
00:12:21.000 And and so that's what I mean when I say that the ideal has been violated.
00:12:28.000 Yeah.
00:12:29.000 And do you think that one of the reasons that this way of doing it, I mean, one of the things we've charted on the show in many different formats with many different people is the shift of the left from working people to certain racial and other minority groups.
00:12:45.000 Do you think one of the reasons is that it's easier to motivate people in this way race runs deeper with people than something like class?
00:12:54.000 It's easier to cultivate a sense of victimhood, for example, within a group based on their tribal sort of ethnicity or whatever than it is on something a bit more abstract like class.
00:13:05.000 I do think that's right. I think one of the mistakes that the Marxists of the past made was thinking that class could be made such a salient and important identity to people of many different races that they would spontaneously unite and really feel one with members of different ethnicities, different languages because they were both poor.
00:13:32.000 And I think it turns out that human tribal psychology is more easily activated, much more easily activated on the basis of ethnicity than it is on the basis of class to the point where you have people that have almost nothing in common, like a poor black person from the hood, right, has actually very little in common, I would argue.
00:13:57.000 I would say he has more in common with a poor white person from the trailer park, from the proverbial trailer park, than he does with a black person like myself that grew up with wealth, right?
00:14:11.300 So, and yet it seems to be easier to get people to connect on the basis of race and ethnicity than on the basis of class.
00:14:20.560 It's amazing, isn't it, how we've seen race relations regress. It's really sad. Can you explain to us some of the things or the policies that have started or have been spoken about that they're going to be implemented in the U.S. in either the past few years or the upcoming few years?
00:14:42.000 Is there an example of this?
00:14:44.680 Oh, sure, yeah. So, we can start with the pandemic era aid policies that have been distributed on race.
00:14:56.420 So there's the American Rescue Plan, which was a $2 trillion bailout at the height of the pandemic in 2021 to help Americans that were struggling, to help businesses.
00:15:06.520 Part of that was $28 billion for restaurants that were going out of business every day.
00:15:14.260 And the program was done in such a way that anyone not white was put to the front of the line automatically in so-called priority groups.
00:15:25.800 If you're white, it took a lot more work to get into that category.
00:15:30.600 There was $4 billion of aid for farmers with debt only if you were non-white. 0.99
00:15:41.340 Zero of that money was available to you if you were a white farmer with debt.
00:15:45.400 And there was zero money in the bill available to you in general, right?
00:15:48.900 So it was just a pot of money only for non-white farmers. 0.67
00:15:52.160 And again, if you're a white restaurant owner or a white struggling farmer that loses their farm in the context of a recession, people are losing their businesses every day.
00:16:07.340 And your business is your life, if that's it.
00:16:10.040 Absolutely.
00:16:10.640 You are never going to forgive that you were not treated on the basis of need, but you were treated on the basis of race.
00:16:18.160 Just like black people in America have not forgotten redlining, Jim Crow, convict leasing, all of these policies that affected black Americans have not been forgotten and in many cases have not been forgiven.
00:16:36.100 And we should not expect that these kinds of things are going to be forgotten or forgiven and certainly not going to be excused on the basis of paying for other people's sins.
00:16:45.940 The thing that I find completely baffling when you were talking about this and when you're talking about it now, I just think the people who come up with these ideas, do they not realize this really pisses people off quite rightly and there will be a backlash?
00:17:02.540 Yeah, it's interesting.
00:17:04.420 I think many people are able to ignore the backlash in two ways.
00:17:15.760 So in one way, they will just actually not look at it, right?
00:17:20.620 Like a lot of, I think, top Democrat party operatives would not actually like these policies if they look them in the face.
00:17:31.460 It's just, they kind of sweep it under the rug.
00:17:33.820 They don't report about it.
00:17:35.180 They don't watch the Tucker Carlson segment about it because why would they watch that?
00:17:39.800 And they soft pedal it.
00:17:42.240 If you bring it up, they say, oh, it wasn't really that.
00:17:45.180 It was something softer.
00:17:47.000 They use the language, the Orwellian euphemisms of priority group and historically disadvantaged group,
00:17:52.800 all of which is intended to soften the truth, which is that you gave people money, limited money, because of the race that they happened to be born into.
00:18:05.200 And you denied it to others on the basis of race, period.
00:18:09.760 And so there's that.
00:18:10.540 But then there's also, the way this will be reported on is the groups that are part of the backlash, well, they are MAGA-backed groups, right?
00:18:19.940 So there's a MAGA-backed lawsuit against the Farmer Bill, right?
00:18:24.840 When you read this in the New York Times, they will make sure to front load for you and therefore prime you as a reader.
00:18:34.020 So, like, I don't like MAGA.
00:18:35.520 I don't like Trump.
00:18:36.300 I voted against him twice.
00:18:37.300 So when I read that it's a MAGA-backed lawsuit, that's priming me to say, oh, well, their anger doesn't count. 0.97
00:18:44.580 Well, a bunch of racists being racist. 0.97
00:18:46.220 They're a bunch of racists being racist, exactly. 0.91
00:18:48.380 Whereas if you were to meet one of these people, a white restaurant owner struggling, who may have had no, you know, you may assume this person had quote-unquote white privilege or whatever, 0.81
00:18:59.700 but you know nothing about this person's background.
00:19:01.500 He might have struggled just as much or more than a black restaurant, any given black restaurant owner.
00:19:07.480 And you meet him and you look in his eyes and you go to his restaurant and you see that this person was reported on as basically a, quote, angry white guy in a way that was intended to let you dismiss his anger as invalid.
00:19:28.260 I mean, you know, and by the way, what was the civil rights movement but a long overdue backlash to Jim Crow laws?
00:19:37.320 That's what it was.
00:19:38.360 So the language of backlash, I think, is it's intended to make you feel that this is, that people are reacting, that they're coming from a place of anger that's invalid.
00:19:52.160 And I think it should, that anger should be seen as a, like a perfectly predictable consequence of people being discriminated against.
00:20:05.400 And the discrimination should stop.
00:20:07.660 Right.
00:20:08.100 Well, this is what I was going to ask you about because I talk about it in my book about one experience that I had in the UK when I was invited to participate in a TV discussion of these similar issues.
00:20:22.160 Um, and afterwards, one of the, it was a panel of several people.
00:20:27.120 And afterwards, one of the presenters during the ad break, uh, looked at me and they went, I'm so glad there weren't any white British people here to be involved in this conversation.
00:20:37.200 Mm-hmm.
00:20:38.840 And I was completely stunned by this.
00:20:42.140 And it was only when I got home later, I was like, why would they say that?
00:20:45.880 Like, they know I don't agree with this.
00:20:48.420 Imagine I recorded that and I put that out or whatever, right?
00:20:51.400 Um, and then it was only when I got home later that I realized this is normal to these people.
00:20:59.380 This way of thinking is normal now.
00:21:03.280 How, do you sometimes wonder how, like when, because when you talk about MLK and that, that speech and the ideal, that's what I grew up with.
00:21:12.300 That's what I, that's where I thought that was the destination.
00:21:15.880 Yes.
00:21:16.020 That's what we're all working towards.
00:21:17.240 Yes.
00:21:17.780 And here we are.
00:21:19.020 Not only have we not made progress towards that, we are actually going back on that.
00:21:25.220 How the hell did we get here?
00:21:27.440 Yeah.
00:21:27.900 I mean, that, that is a deep question.
00:21:30.980 Um, I think there are a few factors.
00:21:33.660 So, let's be clear, the backlash, the, let's say, the, the race obsession goes back a long time.
00:21:44.980 It was there during MLK's time, right?
00:21:47.380 You, you had, you had Malcolm X, you had the Black Power Movement, you had the Black Panthers.
00:21:51.220 You had an intellectual tradition, um, starting, uh, with critical race theory, you know, in the 70s and 80s, and the precursors to critical race theory in the 70s, which came out of, more out of the Black Power tradition, which were saying, even back then, no, race really does matter. 0.54
00:22:10.500 It intrinsically matters because of, you know, white, the country being steeped in white supremacy, being born with white supremacy, being stamped from the beginning with slavery. 0.56
00:22:22.580 It will never not matter.
00:22:24.280 And let's drop this whole naive, I don't see race.
00:22:28.580 That, that, that strain has always been there.
00:22:31.800 It was just, it was fringe.
00:22:33.080 It was small, right?
00:22:34.260 It wasn't, it wasn't necessarily the ruling ideology of every elite university.
00:22:41.800 It wasn't a major factor in the Democratic Party.
00:22:46.320 So, the question is, what changed to allow the idea that race matters, that race should be infused in every policy?
00:22:54.380 What allowed that to really dominate society and dominate cultural institutions?
00:23:05.040 And, you know, that's something I haven't totally figured out the answer to, but some parts of an answer, I think, are, one, I think the decline of Christianity has something to do with it.
00:23:18.320 Because Martin Luther King was a Christian, and he spoke in Christian language, right?
00:23:27.700 He would say, in Christ, there's neither Greek nor Jew, black nor white, bond nor free.
00:23:34.460 And what that meant to an audience of Christians, black, white, and other, was that we're all made in the image of God.
00:23:45.880 God is the transcendent story that unites us, right?
00:23:52.260 Like, how does it matter that you're black and that I am, that, you know, that you're white, if we're both Christian, if we're both made in the image of God?
00:24:01.240 And that was a very powerful thing.
00:24:04.000 That was a very powerful, compelling argument, actually, that persuaded a lot of people.
00:24:09.220 Obviously, Christianity is on the decline, and I'm not a Christian.
00:24:14.160 I wasn't raised with it at all.
00:24:15.720 But it's much more difficult to get people behind a narrative of common humanity when you don't have a religious backing.
00:24:25.060 When you're just saying, oh, you know, we're all one.
00:24:28.720 And we're—that doesn't tend to be as compelling if there's not a religious element to it.
00:24:35.720 It's a more difficult sell, and then I think people revert into tribes.
00:24:41.940 And so I think it has something to do with the decline of Christianity.
00:24:48.200 I think it has something to do with the rise of social media and how fast ideas can spread, how fast videos can spread, and so forth.
00:24:56.760 Do you think one of the things that is so powerful about these ideas and this ideology is it just taps into trauma?
00:25:07.820 You know what I mean?
00:25:08.860 Because, like, everybody's had bad things happen to them.
00:25:13.100 You know, everybody, you know, particularly if you're in an ethnic minority background or you're working class,
00:25:18.880 you can name specific instances where you might have been discriminated against or people were racist to you.
00:25:24.820 Or maybe, if we're going to be generous, people use clumsy language towards you.
00:25:30.180 And once you start tapping into people's emotions, they stop thinking logically and they start reacting emotionally.
00:25:37.400 And that's never a good thing when you react emotionally in a situation.
00:25:42.260 And it encourages that.
00:25:43.880 Right, right.
00:25:44.800 No, it does—I saw a lot of this when I was at Columbia of a kind of social incentive to remember and magnify any real experiences of discrimination you've had.
00:26:06.600 So I even saw this when I was in high school.
00:26:09.680 We once did a racial affinity group.
00:26:12.400 This was just the beginning of the woke revolution, really, maybe 2012, where we—all the black students at my high school, we got for, you know, an hour, a couple hours we got together, you know, directed by the school and, you know, talked about black stuff or whatever.
00:26:31.580 But basically what it became was a competition to find the worst thing that had ever been said to you or done to you.
00:26:40.420 And it was interesting to me because it felt like the wrong way to actually deal with discrimination, right?
00:26:56.420 It felt like—it felt very much like an echo chamber.
00:27:03.700 And obviously the argument for that kind of thing is, oh, so we want a safe space to, like, talk about the time that, you know, somebody grabbed my Afro, right?
00:27:15.560 Like, that's the kind of thing that would happen, that a white kid would do, that wouldn't have happened if you were at a more diverse school where people—or an Afro wasn't a weird thing to have, right? 0.98
00:27:24.380 It's like, okay, so we need to be—we need to talk about that and being around, only around other black people is a, you know, a safe space where you could do that. 0.99
00:27:34.720 That's sort of the argument for it, and there's something to that.
00:27:36.780 But because what it very quickly becomes is just how, like, how much can we just crank the dial on our own sense of grievance and, like, nurse it, nurse the grievance so that it becomes bigger in our minds.
00:27:59.240 And that's what happens when you're in an echo chamber.
00:28:04.120 We see that with political echo chambers on the right and the left.
00:28:09.660 And that's what it is to be in an echo chamber.
00:28:12.640 Like, whatever it started with, it gets louder.
00:28:15.980 And then we send ourselves back into the world with this sense of grievance that has become bigger because we've nurtured it.
00:28:25.600 And I don't think that that's actually the right way to deal with trauma or—it's a very tempting way to deal with it, but it's actually not the mature or healthy way to deal with it.
00:28:39.560 And one of the things that strikes me about this comment is, like, we've been in New York for a few days now, just walking around or sitting down, having lunch outside, watching people go by.
00:28:48.760 Like, it must take an extraordinary amount of, like, effort to divide people on racial lines in the city because it's like everybody is, you know, like, you see people of every race dating people of every other race.
00:29:03.460 And it's like—it's like—it's incredibly mixed.
00:29:08.700 And you can see that to the people that are walking down the street, their races are really unimportant.
00:29:14.140 You can just see that by the way they—by who they're with and how they behave.
00:29:17.920 Do you know what I mean?
00:29:18.800 Like, you're not seeing people hang out with only people of their race at all.
00:29:22.640 And yet, here we are where the elite discourse—and maybe this is where the problem is—the sort of conversations that people have about this issue are incredibly divided in a city that doesn't look at—how does that work?
00:29:36.820 Like, well, yeah, I think there's a very big difference between the way elites think and talk about this and the way the rest of people think and talk about this.
00:29:49.880 Which is not to say—I mean, there's a lot of actual bigotry and tribalism out there.
00:29:55.900 Sure.
00:29:56.140 You know, I don't want my daughter marrying a such-and-such, you know, there's a lot of that out there among non-elites. 1.00
00:30:04.100 But—
00:30:04.660 Of all races, by the way.
00:30:05.880 Of all races, that's right.
00:30:07.420 It's often talked about as if—this is, you know, one of my—one of my gripes is—if you were to ask me on the basis of lived experience where I've encountered the most racism,
00:30:23.160 like what groups I've encountered the most personal racism directed at me from, it's actually not white Americans.
00:30:29.740 It would more be, like, immigrant groups from, like, other countries.
00:30:33.460 Yeah.
00:30:33.700 In terms of, like, who I've heard say the most racist stuff out loud.
00:30:37.140 Well, as an immigrant from an Eastern European country, that does not surprise me.
00:30:41.640 Right.
00:30:42.040 And it's not—yeah, it's not even white immigrants, you know.
00:30:45.360 Yeah.
00:30:45.560 So, again, neither here nor there.
00:30:48.100 The point is racism is a sin committed by all groups of people.
00:30:53.220 And yet it's talked about as if white people invented and are the only ones that perpetuate it, which I think is a very—a very—that's the kind of idea you can only really believe if you've—if you're, like, overeducated and haven't really lived in very many places in the world.
00:31:15.780 You know, it's like your only experience of life is, like, your Ivy League degree.
00:31:18.980 If you actually live in the world, you're going to encounter bigotry from—you're going to realize it's a human foible.
00:31:26.740 It's a human sin.
00:31:27.820 Yeah.
00:31:28.100 Yeah.
00:31:29.200 But, you know, all the examples that you've given, I found it very interesting, have all—a lot of it has come from your university.
00:31:38.100 You went to Columbia.
00:31:38.680 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:31:39.400 Well, it was a big influence on me.
00:31:40.800 You know, I think it was—it was kind of a culture shock in a way.
00:31:47.080 I mean, in one sense, I was exactly the kind of kid that would go to Columbia.
00:31:51.400 So, it wasn't—my whole life was tracking to go to an Ivy League school.
00:31:56.640 So, it was totally to be expected.
00:31:58.540 And it was only a 30-minute drive from where I grew up.
00:32:01.280 But it was a culture shock in the sense that I don't think I had ever been around that much concentrated elite privilege at once.
00:32:18.980 What about this room?
00:32:19.880 And, again, I think maybe the fact that I was a musician was part of it because—and I really saw myself as a musician first.
00:32:33.580 Because music is somewhat meritocratic, right?
00:32:38.780 It's like if you're incredible at the saxophone, you're going to get into Juilliard or whatever.
00:32:44.400 Like, you just—and it's not total meritocracy, but it's like quite close.
00:32:51.480 More like sports in that sense.
00:32:53.440 People come from all walks of life and end up—you end up in the same room as people from all different classes, all different races.
00:33:01.940 And you're bonding over this thing.
00:33:03.880 And that's—that's a kind of environment where race loses its importance or it's—yeah, where race loses its importance.
00:33:19.940 Stand-up is exactly like that.
00:33:20.940 Stand-up is like that, too.
00:33:21.960 It's like that bond of both being on stage overcomes anything else.
00:33:25.260 That's right.
00:33:26.120 That's right.
00:33:26.620 And so to go from that as the defining, like, you know, ecosystem of my social life to Colombia where it was like all of a sudden there's like all these incredibly guilty white people that like are terrified of like saying the wrong thing around me.
00:33:47.760 And I'm—I'm very aware of the social power that I have in any given situation.
00:33:54.180 Like, at any time I can pull the race card and it's going to be viewed as valid by enough people that I can do that.
00:34:01.640 And that's—that's a—that's a very, very tempting power to—to—to wield.
00:34:07.220 And then I could see other black students doing that a lot.
00:34:11.480 You know, like, when you're back into a corner, you play the race card and—and then—and then there was this phenomenon of, like, quietly coming out to other students as not woke, right?
00:34:24.220 It was like there would be the first moment where you quietly, like, tell someone, like, I'm kind of, like, not down with the whole—this whole, like, thing.
00:34:31.540 Like, and then they would admit to you, like, me too.
00:34:34.520 And it would be this moment of essentially coming out.
00:34:39.920 And that is something I had not experienced ever.
00:34:44.800 And it was—it was—I became, of necessity, extremely curious about it because I was like, what the hell is going on?
00:34:55.640 So it was, in a way, it was a kind of a culture shock.
00:35:00.580 And I talk about it so much because the genesis of me writing about this issue—it's like, I used to—when I was a Columbia student, I used to write, you know, like, thousands of words in a Google Doc to nobody but myself.
00:35:16.880 Just trying to figure out why kids were speaking like it—like we were living in Jim Crow in the—precisely in the most privileged, most non-racist place I'd ever been.
00:35:34.280 So, Colman, let me ask you this.
00:35:40.560 We had—when we first had you on in the summer of 2020, that was a peak, at least in this period of time, of the divisiveness, the tensions, the—all of that.
00:35:55.780 Where do you think we are now?
00:35:57.060 Well, we're definitely—we have descended from the peak.
00:36:02.140 2020, as you say, it was the peak of racial bullying, frankly, of horrible ideas like defund the police actually getting some traction,
00:36:16.540 of people being fired for the slightest offenses and for non-offenses at all.
00:36:30.500 People losing friendships over disagreeing about race.
00:36:34.120 And, yeah, I mean, we all remember it.
00:36:41.560 I think it was—in the midst of a revolution, it's like there's a frenzy.
00:36:49.560 There's a frenzy where people actually can't think straight.
00:36:52.640 And then when the fog clears, you can see all the things that were done that were wrong, that were deeply wrong.
00:37:01.040 And it all looks much—it looks worse in retrospect.
00:37:07.220 But at the time, it just—it seemed to be what was called for at the moment.
00:37:10.960 And there were so many people fired and treated unfairly for saying really the most minimal criticisms of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example.
00:37:21.580 And where are we now?
00:37:26.720 I think we're certainly in a better place than we were then, but that's not saying much, right?
00:37:32.000 To me—and you can see this in the actual data on Google search terms for things like white privilege or any other term associated with woke.
00:37:44.160 You'll see the trend line is, like, no mentions until 2014 spikes.
00:37:51.700 And then 2020, it goes way up.
00:37:54.400 And then it kind of has come down since then.
00:37:57.280 But we're still not where we were even before the Great Awakening.
00:38:02.200 So, yeah, I mean, I think it's gotten better in the past two years, but from a peak that was absolutely crazy.
00:38:14.100 I mean, you know, every business in New York City was boarded up, you know, boarded up several times for months.
00:38:23.700 And you had major media figures and politicians saying that that's okay or it's called for.
00:38:37.720 So, from that peak of irrationality, yeah, we've gotten a bit better, but—
00:38:45.080 Do you know what I find frustrating about the whole thing?
00:38:47.160 You just spoke about Colombia.
00:38:49.180 I know people who went to Colombia.
00:38:50.800 I know the grades that you needed to get into Colombia.
00:38:53.100 I know what it takes to get into an Ivy League education.
00:38:57.100 These are the, academically, the brightest and best.
00:39:00.720 And yet they just ingest this whole stuff without questioning, without interrogating it, without thinking for themselves.
00:39:08.780 How does that work?
00:39:09.980 You're meant to be the smartest.
00:39:12.320 Surely, doesn't that mean that you've got the best mind in order to challenge these ideas and find out the flaws in the argument and the logic?
00:39:19.800 Unfortunately, I think that intelligence is not that correlated with your ability to get to the truth about something.
00:39:32.080 Which is to say, tribalism is much more powerful than intelligence, right?
00:39:39.980 Like, they've done studies where they show this.
00:39:44.580 It's like, you show a person with a very high IQ, but who is part of, say, a liberal echo chamber,
00:39:51.880 and you give them some facts about guns, and they will just come to the conclusion, the scripted left conclusion.
00:40:00.440 The right-wing guy will come to the scripted right-wing conclusion.
00:40:04.780 You know, whatever level of IQ.
00:40:06.260 Often, like, the higher IQ you are, the more you're just able to find reasons why your party line is the right one.
00:40:13.700 And, again, like, you will find, there's a million studies where they will have Biden and Trump say the same sentence,
00:40:23.720 and Democrats will disagree with it when Trump said it, but agree with it when Biden says it.
00:40:29.360 And Republicans will do the same thing. 0.59
00:40:32.820 And they will do that no matter how smart they are.
00:40:35.220 You could get a 1600 on the SAT, and it doesn't actually make you less likely to have partisan bias.
00:40:43.760 So, I think the sad truth is, intelligence is not that much of a bulwark against partisan bias.
00:40:54.940 Well, that would seem to be the reality of what we're going through.
00:40:58.860 So, look, we've got, we're going backwards in terms of MLK's dream, as you say.
00:41:07.400 Our elite institutions are pumping out students who have bought into it despite their intelligence, as you say.
00:41:14.720 Where is this going?
00:41:18.060 Well, I don't know.
00:41:19.180 That depends a lot on the actions and the bravery of millions of individuals,
00:41:25.440 many of whom will be watching this video.
00:41:31.420 I mean, which is to say, it depends on every single person's ability to stand up for values and reason
00:41:46.680 and speaking up when it's difficult.
00:41:50.020 You know, there will come a time where something is happening in your workplace
00:41:59.800 or in your friend group or in your marriage
00:42:03.040 where you know something is going on that's wrong ethically and that violates your values,
00:42:11.240 but if you speak up about it, you could potentially pay a price, a big social price.
00:42:15.000 And, you know, there will come a crossroads and hopefully you will find that listening to podcasts
00:42:26.880 like Triggernometry or my own Conversations with Coleman
00:42:29.280 or, you know, can give you the language to articulate your points,
00:42:34.760 the point you want to make to the relevant people in a way that communicates your good faith
00:42:39.700 but gets the point across.
00:42:41.260 And the more people do that, the more people speak up,
00:42:46.520 I think the more, the better this situation gets.
00:42:51.960 So where we're going is going to depend on a lot of people's ability to be brave
00:42:59.180 in the face of difficult situations.
00:43:03.140 And what do we do with institutions like Columbia?
00:43:06.260 Very prestigious, you know, it's a seat of learning, etc., etc.
00:43:12.060 But it's pumping out these students who are just regurgitating this narrative.
00:43:16.720 What do we do with this place?
00:43:18.800 Well, we should support the professors and students there
00:43:21.300 that are committed to free speech and viewpoint diversity, and there are many.
00:43:24.520 The phenomenon we're fighting here is not that, you know,
00:43:33.520 it's not that 50% of students hate free speech and diversity.
00:43:38.700 It's that 5% of students hate it, and 95% are terrified of them.
00:43:43.840 And so is the institution.
00:43:46.800 Yes.
00:43:48.680 Petrified.
00:43:49.380 Right.
00:43:51.060 To the point where, you know, you have the president of Columbia University,
00:43:55.620 a free speech scholar, Lee Bollinger, First Amendment scholar, one of the foremost.
00:43:59.780 And in his commencement speech this past year, he basically said,
00:44:08.640 I know I'm a free speech scholar, but I'm actually going to talk about
00:44:12.520 how there's a bit too much free speech.
00:44:15.540 Misinformation is horrible, and we really should be censoring a lot of stuff.
00:44:20.940 So, yeah, and listen, you know, if he had said the opposite,
00:44:29.100 if he had gone up there and give a full-throated defense of free speech,
00:44:32.500 he would have been making his own life a living hell for the foreseeable future,
00:44:37.020 you know?
00:44:37.660 So there's a...
00:44:39.180 But I'll push back on that.
00:44:40.300 Isn't that his job, to make his life a living hell?
00:44:43.120 Isn't that the role that he needs to play?
00:44:46.900 It's a role he ought to play, yes.
00:44:48.600 It's a role he ought to play.
00:44:50.940 So your question, what do we do?
00:44:53.040 We support organizations like Heterodox Academy,
00:44:56.920 which are doing good work to support viewpoint diversity
00:45:01.960 at institutions of higher learning.
00:45:07.580 And maybe support the more experimental universities that are coming around.
00:45:15.020 I don't know too much about them, but I think University of Austin.
00:45:18.140 Yeah.
00:45:18.360 There's a couple that you may know about that are trying to innovate in the space of college colleges.
00:45:27.380 You know, it's very difficult to innovate, right?
00:45:31.920 It's like we're kind of just stuck with the incumbents in the college space.
00:45:37.720 So I support the experiments and support the people fighting for viewpoint diversity and free speech.
00:45:43.300 Colman, let's talk about culture a little bit because we were talking before we started about how we had the opportunity to meet one of our big supporters.
00:45:51.100 And one of the points he made, he was sort of explained to us why he decided to support our show over other very, very good people who do good work in this area.
00:46:00.980 And one of the things he said is culture is really important, entertainment is very important because in addition to doing these interviews, we also do like live streams where we joke about the issues of the day and it's humorous and it's offensive and all of that.
00:46:15.180 Right. And he was sort of making the point that the work of creating a healthier conversation around all of these subjects depends also on the entertainment side of things.
00:46:26.820 And you are obviously a musician. How do those two things link up? How do you see the role of entertainment and culture in this conversation?
00:46:34.820 Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, so, so I'm a trombonist and a rapper and I've been releasing music videos.
00:46:42.960 I've released three music videos this year. The first one was called Blasphemy.
00:46:46.360 Blasphemy. And in that song, I kind of dealt with some themes of free speech and speaking your mind and self-censorship.
00:46:59.220 And it's interesting because I think the entertainment world is in a bit of a pickle because it's in, frankly, the same situation that elite institutions in general are,
00:47:14.420 which is that, you know, 5% of people have a kind of a veto on any, any new Netflix show, any new movie, any, which is to say what the market actually wants is pretty much what the market has always wanted.
00:47:35.780 The market doesn't really want preachy, woke music or movies or anything.
00:47:47.300 And that's proven over and over again by what sells.
00:47:50.880 Even when the market wants, even when you have rappers that really do come from like a racial justice perspective, like a Kendrick Lamar,
00:48:00.480 his latest album, you know, the whole thing is he is rejecting being this sort of socially conscious voice, right?
00:48:13.900 He's like, I'm going to tell you about all the fucked up things about me and I'm not going to be your hero. 0.67
00:48:19.120 Like, I'm flawed. I'm, you know, like, I'm an asshole. I'm not your, like, I'm not your, I'm not the intersectional hero you're looking for is kind of what his new album is. 1.00
00:48:34.300 And there's obviously Kanye still doing extremely well saying he's what he's saying.
00:48:40.300 Um, and, and so I think what I, what I have to imagine is going on in a lot of like writer's rooms for shows is you have good writers that want to ignore woke and just make a good TV show, whatever that means.
00:48:59.720 Like, like you would have if the year was like 2011.
00:49:03.900 And if the jokes are going to be offensive, they're going to be offensive, but they're going to be funny.
00:49:08.000 And then you have a small minority of people in, in those rooms that is saying, oh, well, you can't say that.
00:49:16.600 That's, that's racist. That's sexist.
00:49:19.600 Um, we need, uh, we need more actors of color in this scene or we need whatever, even if it doesn't fit the story.
00:49:29.560 And basically what, what you have to do is sort of decide between whether you just want to make a good show for its own sake or you want to cave to a small minority of people that have a lot of cultural power right now and make your show less funny, make it less engaging, make it less relatable.
00:49:51.280 And, and, and I, but I think for what it's worth, I think a lot of people are doing that effectively, like even a show like Euphoria, for example, which, um, some people might say is like a woke show.
00:50:04.920 I don't think it is. It's just, it happens to have a trans main, main character.
00:50:09.500 Like they, they say the word retarded on that show unapologetically. They like, there's one scene where Rue is like talking about how, talking sort of praise, in a praiseworthy way about Christians and like even saying something nice about, anyway, the overall tenor of the show is, violates a lot of tenets of wokeness.
00:50:39.500 And I actually think that's why it's so popular among Gen Zs because at the end of the day, people never want preachy art, whether that is preachy Christian right-wing art, moralist art, or preachy far-left woke art.
00:50:53.980 People want art that taps into deep themes of human nature, and that goes as much for, for Gen Z as it does, um, for millennials and, and, and boomers and stuff, you know.
00:51:10.140 So, I think, uh, the, the, the, the good thing about the profit motive is that you can't really be successful if you're ideological.
00:51:21.620 You're, you know, as an entertainer, your, your ideology has to be to entertain at all costs, pretty much, like to make a good show.
00:51:28.600 You know, you know, Atlanta's another great example.
00:51:32.000 Um, Donald Glover received a lot of backlash from, from the woke over his reparations-themed episode where he actually showed in this kind of black mirror-esque way what reparations might look like if it, if you actually had black people tracing their ancestors back to, like, specific, like, like, what would that actually look like?
00:51:55.120 And when you see it, you can't help but think, oh, my God, this is a nightmare.
00:52:00.540 This is like, and, and so, you know, an episode of Atlanta showed that and got a lot of backlash, but again, Atlanta's an extremely successful show.
00:52:11.660 And it's not anti-woke either, necessarily.
00:52:13.860 It's just orthogonal to woke.
00:52:15.900 It, like, ignores, he, he's trying to make really interesting shows, and because of that, he can't really be married to any ideology.
00:52:25.680 Because here's the thing, is that great art shows the complexity of life.
00:52:30.860 Right.
00:52:31.420 It shows the nuances.
00:52:32.800 It shows how, actually, this simplistic way of looking at the world, it's, it's, it doesn't reflect life.
00:52:39.860 That's why it doesn't work.
00:52:41.360 I remember watching Who Do You Think You Are, which is a British program where they take a celebrity and they look back over their, you know, over their ancestry, their ancestry.
00:52:51.100 And they, they had on this mixed race woman, former athlete, and they look back, and it turns out that one of her great, great grandfathers, who was black in the Caribbean, owned slaves at one point.
00:53:02.400 And she was devastated and really upset.
00:53:05.420 And to me, that seemed really incongruous, because it, that's got nothing to do with you.
00:53:10.460 You know, this idea that we have to look back, and somehow, by looking back hundreds of years, we're going to be able to solve the problems of now.
00:53:19.020 Now, it, it just seems bizarre to me.
00:53:22.920 You know, it, it doesn't, it just doesn't seem to fit.
00:53:26.180 And I guess the problem is, is, do you think we're ever going to get to a place where we're going to stop talking about art being woke or not?
00:53:36.260 Do you know what I mean?
00:53:37.360 We didn't have these conversations 10 or 15 years ago.
00:53:40.080 We just judged the art, whether it was cinema or, or film, or film or theater, whatever it may be.
00:53:45.780 By whether the person who made it was a pedophile.
00:53:47.740 Yeah, exactly.
00:53:49.020 But on its own merits.
00:53:51.640 Yeah, well, we're entering an age of, well, we're, we're witnessing the birth of a new major ideology, quasi religion.
00:54:04.260 And you think birth, you think we're just getting started.
00:54:08.740 I don't know.
00:54:09.820 I don't know.
00:54:12.180 It seems to have some staying power.
00:54:14.160 And in the 1950s, you know, we very much did judge art by whether it was Christian or not.
00:54:23.540 You know, that was a huge deal in, in, in America, at least.
00:54:26.320 And it was a huge deal for entertainers because they had very clear ways in which they could violate the, the mandate that all art must be Christian and must not offend the Christian base.
00:54:46.520 And comics, and comics rebelled against that and got punished for it socially in the 60s.
00:54:53.480 Nanny Bruce.
00:54:54.440 Uh-huh.
00:54:54.760 And, but I think, you know, in the maybe 80s and 90s and 2000s, the power of Christianity waned in the culture, especially in the, in blue America.
00:55:08.880 And there was some political correctness stuff in the 90s, but it wasn't, it didn't really have staying power.
00:55:20.340 It, it was confined to certain elite spaces.
00:55:25.060 And in the 2000s, yeah, I mean, I don't remember having too many conversations.
00:55:30.580 Or, you know, even in, like, 2010, I don't remember having too many conversations.
00:55:34.960 Like, was this movie woke or was it anti-woke?
00:55:37.960 Like, was this, was this episode transgressive of, like, oh, like, is this take canceled?
00:55:46.780 It's like, people will say that.
00:55:47.860 Oh, like, I have a canceled take.
00:55:50.340 Which is like, oh, like, whatever.
00:55:53.760 Which is like, oh, Top Gun was really good.
00:55:55.440 Like, is that canceled?
00:55:56.320 So, yeah, I think we're going back into an era where there is a, an ideology that is very important, kind of the way Christianity was important in the 50s.
00:56:14.860 And every individual filmmaker, musician, songwriter, TV writer, artist will have to make a decision of whether they want to and are willing to violate certain doctrines to make good art.
00:56:34.780 And some of them are going to answer that, nope.
00:56:37.100 Like, I, I got a family, I'm not going to do anything that rocks the boat.
00:56:43.600 Others are going to rock the boat in all the right ways.
00:56:47.520 And I think they'll be rewarded for it by, by the masses.
00:56:54.760 Coleman, on another note, do you think we can ever truly separate art from the artists?
00:56:59.940 We've seen, you know, a raft of, you know, celebrities, great artists, you know, behave appallingly and abominably.
00:57:08.680 And people were saying, you know, we should get rid of them.
00:57:11.400 We should, they should be taken off Spotify.
00:57:13.440 We shouldn't be listening to their music.
00:57:15.440 Well, I mean, where do you stand on this?
00:57:16.580 Because it's not as, you know, there are nuances to this argument, aren't there?
00:57:21.880 Um, I don't know.
00:57:24.540 I, I think I'm kind of a live and let live guy.
00:57:28.080 So if you can't separate the art from the artist, then don't listen to that artist.
00:57:33.660 Yeah.
00:57:34.440 Yeah.
00:57:34.720 But I, I can guarantee you, I listened to Michael Jackson all the time.
00:57:38.160 And I, I never think of what he probably did to children.
00:57:45.620 And I, like, I never condone it more in my head.
00:57:48.420 It doesn't even occur to me, which is to say, I can separate the art from the bad parts of the artist in that case. 0.99
00:57:56.620 And if I couldn't, then I would just stop listening to it and get on with my fucking life. 0.95
00:58:01.360 And I wouldn't demand that other people be just like me. 0.99
00:58:05.680 That's an insane and narcissistic way of going through the world.
00:58:10.700 Another thing that's interesting to me, and we were talking about it with a comedy club promoter here in New York last night,
00:58:17.820 is someone like Louis CK.
00:58:20.920 And I'm, and I sort of asked him, like, what was your take on that?
00:58:23.780 Why did you let him keep playing your comedy club?
00:58:26.360 And he was like, well, if I had a bartender who got accused of something with no conviction in court or anything like that,
00:58:33.500 I wouldn't fire them.
00:58:34.540 A union would never allow you to fire someone just because they've been accused of something.
00:58:39.120 But on the other hand, I also think, do you think that in a situation where people, you know, are getting away with things,
00:58:47.880 we're trying to feel our way towards having a bit, like, for example, there were parts of Me Too.
00:58:54.020 You go Harvey Weinstein, absolute sleazebag.
00:58:56.340 I'm glad that happened.
00:58:57.440 Do you know what I mean?
00:58:59.540 Like, it's not, so, I guess what I'm saying is, do you think that there is some good to all of this, too?
00:59:05.960 Like, we're making progress on some things while maybe going too far in the process, or do you think this is all bad?
00:59:12.340 No, the Me Too movement was definitely partly good.
00:59:14.580 Because it was, well, it was shocking to many people that a guy like Harvey Weinstein could get away with what he was doing for that long in the modern era.
00:59:25.680 I think a lot of people thought that that was a thing of the distant past rather than the present.
00:59:31.020 And it took that much cultural power to give people the courage to come out and, like, fight this guy who had so much power.
00:59:43.640 And there were some others like that.
00:59:46.300 And then, inevitably, as it always does, it went way too far pretty quickly.
00:59:52.600 And the opportunists came in.
00:59:55.360 And the dishonest people came in to cash in on the trend and get their 15 seconds of fame.
01:00:04.380 And, like I said, as it always does in times of revolutionary frenzy, people suspend all the important principles of due process and reason and hearing both sides.
01:00:16.900 And it all looks much worse in retrospect than it does at the time, right?
01:00:22.400 Like, I'm trying to think of a particular, oh, Louis is a perfect example, right?
01:00:30.640 Like, you know, he's accused of something that happened, you know, many years ago, before he was famous.
01:00:45.400 And no one wants to hear his side of it, right?
01:00:48.420 Like, no one is interested in hearing his side of it.
01:00:50.580 And from his side, it's really what he was accused of doing was actually not that bad on his telling.
01:01:05.040 And on their telling, there was something sketchy about what he did, right?
01:01:10.220 And this is the kind of thing we normally settle in a court of law if a crime is being alleged.
01:01:15.980 And people go to prison on false charges.
01:01:19.800 People appeal.
01:01:20.700 There's a whole—we have a whole legal system set up precisely because situations like this are so complicated and so easy to run into mistakes.
01:01:30.080 But in the frenziness of the moment, people are like—it's like how grasshoppers become locusts.
01:01:37.220 And seem like totally different animals, right?
01:01:41.340 When there's a revolutionary frenzy going on, humans stop behaving like humans.
01:01:45.340 We start behaving like locusts, and we just swarm and bypass all of our better judgments.
01:01:55.120 And in retrospect, you can look back and see, how is it that people were so horrible to him?
01:02:02.600 Um, but again, it's just—it's how we behave in times of frenzy.
01:02:12.260 The reason Me Too always made me feel uncomfortable right from the start—
01:02:16.600 Is the allegations.
01:02:18.020 Yeah, exactly.
01:02:19.020 I was worried that I was going to go down.
01:02:22.320 But thankfully, I've got great lawyers, Coleman.
01:02:24.560 Here we are.
01:02:25.180 Coleman's looking at you going, it looks like you might actually have some allegations against him.
01:02:35.080 I get that sweaty white man energy.
01:02:36.840 Okay, now, uh, but no, like, it's just that the moment you have a group of people who feel that they can get justice,
01:02:49.120 and there's no checks, there's no balances, there's no ability really for the person accused of this to come back and to be listened to,
01:02:57.840 And all of a sudden, you're not getting justice, what this looked like.
01:03:03.400 And that's not to say that there were people who, you know, like, Weinstein, obviously awful, awful, awful.
01:03:09.820 But it looked like fury and revenge.
01:03:13.240 And when that happens, revenge and justice, they're two very different things.
01:03:17.160 Yes.
01:03:17.860 Yeah, they are.
01:03:19.620 And, um, the problem is that it becomes a bug light for dishonest people.
01:03:26.320 If you send out a signal to the whole world, you say,
01:03:30.780 Okay, normally we do the due process, we do due diligence on your claims,
01:03:34.560 but right now, starting now, we're going to suspend all of that.
01:03:40.320 There's a lot of people out there that are going to say,
01:03:42.500 Ah, this is my chance.
01:03:44.260 This is my chance.
01:03:45.360 And they're going to make something up, they're going to exaggerate the truth of a situation, 0.97
01:03:48.720 And you're basically sending out a bat signal for shitty people that want to ruin someone's life. 0.56
01:03:56.440 And that is the inevitable problem you run into when you have even legitimate and good movements, like Me Too. 0.86
01:04:07.040 If you tell people, people respond to incentives, and this is what, you know, revolutionaries never think about.
01:04:13.100 They never think about or consider that when you suspend the rule of due process, you're going to attract, inevitably you're going to attract bad people that see their chance.
01:04:27.780 And they never account for that human nature always includes those bad motives.
01:04:34.600 Those bad people will always be there to make false accusations and to seize their opportunity to climb in social status as a result of valuing victimhood.
01:04:46.700 And so it's very important in those moments to fight for the rules of due process and all the principles that have made, you know, Western democracies fairly decent places to live relative to the alternatives.
01:05:11.640 Well, see, the thing is that, philosophically speaking, the progressive ideology doesn't believe in the existence of bad people.
01:05:19.920 There are no bad people in the progressive mindset.
01:05:22.800 There are people who've been failed by the system.
01:05:24.620 That's why they're behaving the way that they are.
01:05:26.940 But they're not bad.
01:05:28.320 Human beings are not prone to bad behavior.
01:05:30.900 Well, what about straight white men?
01:05:33.360 Well, they are imbued with whiteness, which has been taught to them, hasn't it? 1.00
01:05:38.140 Mm-hmm.
01:05:38.840 Right?
01:05:39.520 So, of course, they think they're bad people, but it's because of the way they've been brought up.
01:05:44.920 And what we need to do is undo the whiteness, right? 1.00
01:05:47.520 That's the argument.
01:05:48.880 Mm-hmm.
01:05:49.220 So I think that's where a lot of the progressive mindset goes awry.
01:05:53.700 It's based on the idea that human beings are infinitely perfectible.
01:05:57.480 Mm-hmm.
01:05:57.600 And the only reason human beings aren't perfect is we haven't done enough social engineering to get them to that point.
01:06:03.520 That's right.
01:06:04.820 That's right.
01:06:05.420 Steven Pinker's book about this was incredible and still the best treatment of the subject that I know of called The Blank Slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
01:06:15.260 This is the belief, always popular among revolutionaries of all eras, that we are basically born with no nature, born inherently good, and only made bad by society.
01:06:31.420 Only made selfish by society, whereas my view of human beings is that we are evolved by evolution to all have some degree of self-interest.
01:06:45.620 And we can never be made, we can never be made perfect.
01:06:54.600 We can never even be made close to perfect, that there will always be a subset of humans that want to be aggressive and violent for its own sake.
01:07:02.520 You know, this is like one of the things that, like, you look into, like, Ted Bundy types, and you always want to find something in the background that explains who they became.
01:07:13.620 And the truth is, sometimes you find it, but sometimes you don't. 0.99
01:07:17.080 Sometimes people just are fucked up. 0.99
01:07:19.180 And beyond that, almost everyone is imbued with a kind of baseline self-interest as animals. 0.99
01:07:31.860 You know, just like dogs have a nature, humans have a nature.
01:07:34.580 And it's tempting to believe that because humans, our brains are malleable and culture matters quite a lot, all of which is true, that we have completely, we've completely cast aside any kind of inherent nature.
01:07:55.360 The truth is, yes, human beings more than any other animal, we're capable of learning a way of being from our culture.
01:08:04.340 We learn a language from our culture.
01:08:06.000 We learn, you know, everything from the hand signals we use when we talk to, like, what kind of style of dress we think is cool.
01:08:13.560 All of that is malleable and can be learned and can change over time.
01:08:20.380 But at the end of the day, there is still a core to us that is given to us by our nature.
01:08:28.920 And that nature includes self-interest.
01:08:30.700 And it precludes the possibility of systems like communism working on a large scale, right?
01:08:38.700 People are always going to prefer their children to other people's children, their biological children for the most part, their biological family, and are going to privilege that over the rest of the world.
01:08:49.560 And that's inherent.
01:08:50.560 It's not going to change ever.
01:08:51.900 So if you try to make all of society like one family, you end up getting a disaster, right?
01:08:58.880 If your theory of criminal behavior is that all of it is caused by social circumstances and poverty, and you think you can get rid of the police and address crime with, like, social programs,
01:09:12.860 you're going to run into the fact that actually some people commit crime because it's fun and because they can.
01:09:20.140 And this is one of the things that really grinded my gears about the 2020 riots, which is like, okay, why are the riots happening?
01:09:32.660 People will say, okay, yeah, people are, you know, George Floyd, racial injustice, you know, et cetera.
01:09:39.340 Like, okay, well, how come all the rioters are young men?
01:09:46.240 Hmm, that's interesting.
01:09:47.140 Are only young men the ones that are affected by racial injustice?
01:09:52.720 Well, no.
01:09:53.920 How come older women aren't rioting and are, in fact, begging the police to intervene? 1.00
01:09:59.260 That's interesting.
01:10:01.040 Well, maybe they're doing it because rioting is fun, and you've given them a temporary pass to do it. 0.93
01:10:07.240 Like, I think sometimes people have to become, like, more in touch with their inner teenager and remember how fun it was to just do, like, mischievous shit for no reason when you were, like, 16, right? 0.98
01:10:23.860 Like, that is, to me, the Occam's razor explanation is, like, a lot of people would be, if there were no consequences, if you couldn't possibly go to prison by doing it, how many people would just do that type of shit just because? 0.98
01:10:40.240 Because it's fun. 0.99
01:10:41.500 I'd do it.
01:10:42.140 Yeah.
01:10:42.380 It'd be a lot of fun.
01:10:43.420 Go smash something up.
01:10:44.720 I mean, young men have been doing this for centuries.
01:10:47.120 For centuries.
01:10:48.680 And so I think the, as some philosophers would say, the explanandum, which is, like, the thing to be explained, is reversed, right?
01:11:00.480 People think you have to explain why people are, like, you know, crashing police car windows with a bat.
01:11:10.320 And to me, I think, basically, you have to explain why they aren't doing it more often.
01:11:14.460 They're doing it because it's fun.
01:11:17.020 Yeah.
01:11:17.920 And more importantly, in that particular case, is you give them a pass.
01:11:21.480 Is you give them a pass, yeah.
01:11:22.440 There's a socially acceptable pass, which is that a lot of people will, for the moment, we're going to say, it's noble.
01:11:29.000 Violence is noble. 1.00
01:11:29.800 It's justified by what was done to George Floyd.
01:11:32.740 And, again, you're sending out the bat signal to all the people in the world that want to have fun anyway.
01:11:37.800 Oh, all right.
01:11:38.720 We've got a couple months where we can do whatever we want.
01:11:41.120 Let's take this pass, you know.
01:11:43.220 Loot a store because it's fun. 0.87
01:11:45.320 Loot a store of some, like, poor, like, Indian immigrant in Harlem that has nothing to do with this situation and just destroy his life because it's fun. 1.00
01:11:55.780 Coleman, it's been great speaking with you, again, about this stuff. 0.98
01:12:01.320 I don't know where the fuck this is going, but wherever it is, I feel like your voice is going to be one of the important voices in shaping that conversation. 0.93
01:12:10.160 Oh, thank you. 0.96
01:12:11.100 Thank you.
01:12:11.460 I appreciate that.
01:12:11.660 So we're glad you've taken the time to do that on here with us.
01:12:15.080 We really appreciate it.
01:12:16.020 It's been a real pleasure to meet you.
01:12:17.500 Likewise.
01:12:18.120 In person.
01:12:18.600 The last question, as you know, that we always ask before we ask a couple of questions for our locals that only they will get to see is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
01:12:31.880 Hmm.
01:12:32.920 That's a good question.
01:12:38.200 So I have been a little bit thinking about this question of birth rate.
01:12:44.280 Global birth rates declining in all developed nations.
01:12:48.600 And Elon Musk has been talking about this recently.
01:12:51.260 So I do think we have been talking about it.
01:12:53.120 But prior to him and also someone like Matthew Iglesias in his book, One Billion Americans, talks about this.
01:13:00.560 It seems to be close to a law of, I don't know what you would call it, developmental economics or what have you, that as societies become wealthier and more educated, people stop having enough children to replace their numbers naturally.
01:13:21.180 And you see it in pretty much everywhere on earth.
01:13:27.300 And the only places you don't see it are either societies that haven't become wealthy yet or the highly religious, the ultra-orthodox Jews, the Amish and Mennonites. 0.93
01:13:46.220 You know, the Amish in America have more than doubled their numbers in since the 90s, which is incredible, right?
01:13:53.920 While the rest of America has receded below replacement level.
01:14:01.660 That's what happens when you don't use condoms, mate.
01:14:03.680 That's what happens when you don't have entertainment, mate.
01:14:05.840 That's a good point.
01:14:06.600 What else are you going to do?
01:14:08.760 Yeah.
01:14:09.480 But it's interesting to think about the long-term future of humanity, right?
01:14:14.980 Like if everyone, what we want to happen is that poor countries stop being poor.
01:14:21.480 Like poor countries, we want that to happen. 1.00
01:14:23.680 So let's say that happens and everywhere on earth now is below replacement level, except for the ultra-religious minorities that are doubling their numbers every 10 years. 1.00
01:14:37.180 What a great recipe for a future world.
01:14:39.620 It's interesting to think about what world that creates.
01:14:42.220 Yeah.
01:14:43.560 I'm sure there won't be any division, mate.
01:14:45.220 No, it'll be fine.
01:14:46.160 Maybe it's not a big problem.
01:14:47.280 Maybe it's such a slow-moving emergency that the equilibrium will shift and, you know, it's kind of not something to worry about.
01:14:54.980 But maybe, I don't know, maybe it changes the fundamental fabric of society.
01:15:03.480 If you have like 40% of America is Amish in like the year 3000 or something, if America still exists. 0.99
01:15:11.140 Anyway, but that, I mean, I don't know.
01:15:12.560 That's something that I think more people should be thinking about.
01:15:18.240 Coleman, it's been an absolute pleasure as always.
01:15:20.880 If people want to find you online, if people want to discover your work, where's the best way to do that?
01:15:25.680 Listen to my podcast, Conversations with Coleman.
01:15:29.340 Check out my music, Cold Man, spelled C-O-L-D-X-M-A-N.
01:15:33.900 The X is silent.
01:15:34.820 I have three music videos out.
01:15:36.280 The latest one is with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
01:15:38.520 I got to do a cameo.
01:15:40.160 So you can listen to my music wherever you listen to music.
01:15:42.240 Watch my videos on YouTube.
01:15:44.340 And follow me on Twitter, at ColdXMan.
01:15:47.820 Coleman Hughes, thanks so much for coming on.
01:15:49.480 And thank you guys for watching and listening.
01:15:51.900 We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or all show.
01:15:56.160 And of course, make sure you check out the bonus questions with Coleman on Locals.
01:16:00.220 They're only available as on Locals.
01:16:02.080 So if you want to see them, you've got to sign up for that.
01:16:04.600 But also, if you like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.
01:16:09.620 Thank you so much for tuning in.
01:16:11.600 And see you soon, guys.
01:16:12.640 Coleman, with the benefit of hindsight, would you still vote for Biden?
01:16:17.960 Thank you.
01:16:18.420 We'll see you soon.