Conversations with Coleman

Latest Episodes:

Woke Racism with John McWhorter [S2 Ep.40] Dec 03, 2021

Show notes

My guest today needs no introduction. Joining me in today's episode is John McWhorter.

John has a new book called "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America". This is an excellent book and I highly recommend you to read it.

In this episode, we talk about what "wokeness" is, as John defines it, and whether the woke can be persuaded. We also talk about the progress America has made on race, the extent to which actual racism is still a problem, Robin DiAngelo and White Fragility. Finally, we go on to talk about what a real programme of uplift would look like for Black America.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

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Race and the Media with Nicquel Terry Ellis [S2 Ep.39] Nov 27, 2021

Show notes

My guest today is Nicquel Terry Ellis. Nicquel is the senior writer for CNN's Race and Equality team. Before that, she was a national correspondent for USA Today covering race inequality and activism. She has also spent six years working in local news with the Detroit News and the Asbury Park Press.

I often receive the criticism that I only talk to people like John McWhorter, Sam Harris and Glenn Lowry, who agree with me about the problem of wokeness and the moral panic around racism and white supremacy. However, the people making that charge only see the tip of the iceberg. They don't see the dozens of requests and emails I send to prominent people on the other side of this issue to come on my show, all of which get rejected. Ibram Kendi is the only such attempt that I've made public. Nicquel is really the first mainstream media person, in a long time, that disagrees with me on the race issue but is willing to talk about it. So I'm grateful to her for that. Unfortunately, I did not have that much time with Nicquel but in the future, I hope to go deeper into all of these subjects with people who disagree with me.

In this episode, Nicquel and I talk about the biases of the mainstream media, on the topic of race. We talk about racial disparities and the use of force by the police. We also talk about George Floyd, Tony Timpa and Ma'Khia Bryant. Towards the end of the podcast, we go on to discuss whether Black America as a whole is making progress or sliding backwards, and much more. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

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The War on Parents with Bonnie Snyder [S2 Ep.38] Nov 21, 2021

Show notes

My guest today is Bonnie Snyder. Bonnie is an educator with over 20 years of experience in a variety of roles including teacher, counselor, administrator, and professor in both public and private schools. She's a graduate of Harvard University with a Master's Degree in Counseling from Virginia Tech and a Doctorate in Higher education from Penn State. She is also the High school Outreach Fellow at FIRE: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Bonnie's latest book which is the topic of today's conversation is "Undoctrinate: How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools―and What We Can Do About It". This conversation is very much a follow-up to my podcast with Christopher Rufo and Kmele Foster. This will also probably be the last guest that I'll address this topic within the near future, for fear of boring you all to death. In this episode, we talk about political indoctrination in K-12 classrooms and the power struggle between parents and teachers, critical race theory and the state laws attempting to ban it, and the political leanings of America's teaching population. We also talk about free speech and forced speech, the consequences of self-censorship, and much more.

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The Many Faces of Rationality with Steven Pinker [S2 Ep.37] Nov 12, 2021

Show notes

My guest today needs no introduction, so I won't give him one.

Today's guest is Steven Pinker, and he has a new book called "Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters."

We talk about what rationality is, we talk about rationality's PR problem, whether rationality has increased or decreased over time and how to apply reason to everyday life choices. We also discuss the behavioral economics revolution and cognitive biases, what it means to be intellectually humble, why people love conspiracy theories and when is it okay to be irrational. We go on to talk about the role "reason" has played in the enormous progress humanity has made since the dawn of civilization, and much more.

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Pandemics and Politics with Nicholas Christakis [S2 Ep.36] Nov 05, 2021

Show notes

My guest today is Nicholas Christakis. Nicholas is a physician, a sociologist, and a professor at Yale University. He'll be known to some of you as the professor who kept his composure in front of a mob of students screaming about Halloween costumes back in 2015 or he may be known to you as the author of many books, including "Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social networks and How they shape our lives", "Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society" and "Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live", which will be the focal point of our conversation today.

Nicholas and I talk about how the polarized media has harmed our ability to deal with COVID. We talk about the end goal of herd immunity. We talk about whether the incredible speed of the rollout of the vaccine is suspicious. We talk about the ethics of requiring or strongly pressuring people to get the vaccine. We talked about the ethics of encouraging booster shots when many around the world have yet to get their first vaccination. We also discuss Ivermectin and much more.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

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A Life Without Problems with Ryan Holiday [S2 Ep.35] Oct 29, 2021

Show notes

My guest today is Ryan Holiday. Ryan is the best-selling author of many books, including "Trust Me, I'm Lying", "The Obstacle is the Way", "Ego is the Enemy", "The Daily Stoic" which is also the name of his podcast, and his latest book: "Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave". Ryan is also the former Head of Marketing at American Apparel.

In this episode, we talk about Ryan's strange career path from marketing to becoming the modern face of stoicism. We talk about stoicism, what it is and how to apply it to your life. We talk about mindfulness meditation, how to deal with traumatic experiences, and how to pursue goals while also letting go of the results. We talk about narcissism. We also talk about far-left campus-style politics and its adversarial relationship with the principles of stoicism. We talk about social media and the battle for our attention and much more.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

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Parasites of the Mind with Andy Norman [S2 Ep.34] Oct 22, 2021

Show notes

My guest today is Andy Norman. Andy is a philosopher and the director of the humanism initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the founder of CIRCE, the Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative. In this episode, we discuss his new book "Mental immunity: Infectious ideas, Mind parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."

We talk about how bad ideas operate like parasites. We talk about the notion of a mental immune system. We talk about the virtues and dangers of being open-minded. We discussed Richard Dawkins's notion of selfish genes and his coinage of the word "Meme". We talked about conspiracy theories, we talked about whether you should seek out disagreements with your friends and family or whether you should simply keep the peace. We talk about policies like stop and frisk and how to weigh lives saved against more abstract moral gains. We talk about what makes good ideas, "good" and bad ideas, "bad". We talk about the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment. We talk about cultures of cheating and cultures of honesty in different sports, and much more.

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From the bottom up with Kmele Foster [S2 Ep.33] Oct 15, 2021

Show notes

My guest today is Kmele Foster. Kmele will be known to many of you as the co-host of The Fifth Column Podcast which is one of my favorite podcasts.

He's also the co-founder of a media company called Freethink, and a former co-host of The Independents on Fox Business Network.

This episode was sort of a post mortem on two other recent episodes, the one with Christopher Ruffo, and the one with David Hogg. Kmele was one of the co-authors of a New York Times op-ed, critical of the anti CRT laws that Ruffo had a hand in writing. And it seemed to me that that piece had misrepresented the content of those laws. So we spend the majority of the conversation talking about anti CRT laws in general, that op-ed in particular, and the wider conversation about indoctrination in K–12 education.

Towards the end of the podcast, we make a hard pivot and discuss gun control, because Kmele is a proud gun owner. Many of you didn't like the podcast with David Hogg because he's not a gun violence expert. And that's true, of course. But I just want to make it clear that this podcast is not reserved for experts. If you have 1.1 million Twitter followers due to your activism on some topic, that's reason enough for me to have a conversation with you.

Kmele is also not a gun expert by any means. So if you're upset by that, you can consider this your trigger warning.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

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The Tale of a Radical with Jesse Morton [S2 Ep.32] Oct 08, 2021

Show notes

My guest today is Jesse Morton. Jesse has an incredibly interesting life story. He was born in America, converted to Islam as a young adult, became radicalized, and devoted his life to doing everything he could to help Al-Qaeda from America, including creating the very first English language jihadist propaganda magazine, which later famous magazines like Inspire and Dubuque would be modeled after.

So after a long journey away from Islamism, he now runs an organization called Parallel Networks, which works on deradicalizing people who are involved in extremist political and religious movements of all kinds. I enjoyed this one a lot, and I hope you do too.

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Economics 102 with Prof Abhijit Banerjee [S2 Ep.31] Oct 01, 2021

Show notes

My guest today is Professor Abhijit Banerjee. Professor Banerjee is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, an econ professor at MIT, and a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Banerjee and I discussed the difference between empirical work and theoretical work in economics. We talk about Banerjee's Nobel Prize-winning research on alleviating global poverty. We talk about whether immigrants drive down wages for native workers, the role of financial incentives and driving human behavior.

We speak about welfare, the effect of globalism on American industries like manufacturing, and the social consequences of having whole industries die out, and much more.

#ConversationswithColeman #CwC #ColemanHughes #AbhijitBanerjee #nobelprize #Economics101 #Economics102 #poverty #globalism

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