Modern Wisdom - #763 - Coleman Hughes - Bringing An End To Race Politics

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Coleman Hughes is a writer, an author and a podcaster. The state of race relations in America seemed to be improving for decades, then crashed and burned over the last 5 years. What's going on? Why is everyone so obsessed with race again and how can we move beyond race politics? Expect to learn why anti-racism is just neo-racism, the difference between being colourblind and actually being racist, why your social class is more important than your ethnicity, whether MeToo hurt women more than helping them, if there is a realistic case for DEI, whether any race-based policies have ever worked and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 20% discount on all supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code MW10) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Coleman Hughes. He's a writer, an author and a podcaster. The state of race relations in America seemed to be improving for decades, then crashed and burned over the last five years. What's going on? Why is everyone obsessed with race again? And how can we move beyond race politics?

I expect to learn why anti-racism is just neo-racism, the difference between being colourblind and actually being racist, why your social class is more important than your ethnicity, whether Me Too hurt women more than helping them, if there is a realistic case for DEI, whether any race-based policies have ever worked, and much more. Coleman is a legend. I love the way that he communicates. He is incredibly thoughtful and he also happens to be a phenomenal rapper and jazz musician. So just a full stack competent human.

In other news, you might have been hearing me talk about some big projects that we have done recently. Last week, I did the most expensive, most complex shoot that we've ever done with four guests. And you will get to find out about that next week. It's very exciting. This is breaking new ground, I think actually for podcasting overall.

I think this is a world first that's ever been done. And I haven't seen the edits at all. It may look totally kind of crap and not be very fun, but it was something new and very different and pretty exciting. And I hope that you love it and I'll be telling you more next week. So get excited and join me, join me in the anticipation.

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This episode is brought to you by Surfshark VPN. Protect your browsing online and get access to the entire world's Netflix library for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. If you use a public Wi-Fi network like a cafeteria or a library or an airport, regularly that internet admin can see all of the data going back and forth between your computer and the internet. Your internet service provider is selling your data to companies that target you with ads and phishing websites are trying to steal everything from you at all times. All of this is fixed with a VPN and it is available across

unlimited devices so it protects your phone, your iPad, your laptop and even your smart TV and it's got a 30-day money back guarantee so you can buy it and try it for 29 days and if you do not like it they will give you your money back. Head to surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom for an exclusive discount plus that 30 day money back guarantee. That's surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Coleman Hughes. What do you think about the state of race in America now? What's your meteorological weather report? Yeah. So, you know, the reason I wrote this book, uh, is that this idea of color blindness, which means you try to treat people without regard to race.

I see obviously that you're a quote unquote white guy. You see that I'm a quote unquote black guy, but I'm going to treat you like Chris Williamson, knowing everything I know about you as an individual. And I ask you to treat me like Coleman Hughes, knowing everything you know about me. And we don't regard, we don't give weight to each other's races when we treat each other. And my book is advocating not just for that, but also advocating for getting race out of public policy. In America, we have all kinds of policies

that use racial discrimination explicitly. And people have various reasons for this, to fight racism, to combat the legacy of slavery, and so forth. And in my book, I want to argue instead for a colorblind philosophy. Let's get race out of public policy. If we want to correct for disadvantages,

let's do that on the basis of socioeconomics and class. And in my view, this is a much healthier path towards the ideal of a colorblind society. It used to be, you know, common sense on the left and in liberal circles that that's what you wanted to do. In the mid 60s, you had Martin Luther King writing and speaking to this effect. But in the past 50 years, and particularly in the past 10

with the explosion of Black Lives Matter, social justice, wokeness, DEI, critical race theory, whatever you wanna call it, this idea of colorblindness has come under attack as naive at best or as white supremacists at worst. So, so in the book here, I really try to rescue this idea of colorblindness because I think it's the, the wisest way to actually navigate a multiracial, multi-ethnic society in the long run.

Explain to me the difference between being colorblind and not seeing race, because that kind of became a meme. I don't see race became a meme. What is there a difference? I think there's a huge difference because the truth is we all see race, right? When someone says, I don't see race. I understand what they're getting at, but it's actually a lie. It's not true.

I could, you know, everyone watching this can see that you're white and that, that I'm not right. So when people say, I don't see race, they're putting up a very convenient target for the critics of colorblindness to say, look, they're just being naive. They're pretending not to see race. And it allows people to dismiss the deeper philosophy of colorblindness without giving it a fair consideration. So in my book, I advocate that people just stop saying that it gives enemies of colorblindness far too easy a target. What you should say instead is I try to treat people without regard to race. Now that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as quickly, but it's much closer to the truth. It's more accurate. And so,

I think we should all admit that we see race all admit that we are theoretically capable of being racist, racist, all of us are. So this is not a book that's telling you to be naive or to pretend that racism doesn't exist. It's a book that says we should treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and in our public policy. should treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and in our public policy. You mentioned before about this abandonment of the conversation around

class and this focus on the conversation around race. This is something that I've noticed, especially coming from the UK, which is still a super classist society. I have a party trick that I've done a couple of times over the last year since moving to America. If there's me and another British dude or girl in the room, I'll say, don't tell me anything about you, just let's have a conversation for 60 seconds about something that isn't you and your origins.

And I'll try and work out where you're from, what sort of school you went to, what level of education you've got, what your parents did, what, what class you would be considered from and the ability to do that. I don't know if that's a skillset that the Americans have to be able to just X-ray in on someone's class background, but just accent and presentation of British people denotes so much about their background. Right, yeah, that makes sense.

I mean, you can sort of do that in America, but not probably not quite to the same extent. Hmm. So talk to me about this abandonment, the conversation around class and this prioritization of race instead, because, you know, classic left leaning policies were about class, they weren't about race. Yeah. So during the civil rights movement, um, movement, the policy of the civil rights movement,

and you can, anyone can read this in Martin Luther King's book, Why We Can't Wait from the mid sixties. He says, here's the plan. We are going to have a anti poverty program. He called it the bill of rights for the disadvantaged. It's going to benefit the black poor, it's going to benefit the white poor alike on the basis of class, though it will benefit black people disproportionately because black people are disproportionately poor to begin with. But it won't be a race-based policy, it'll be a class-based policy. And we're going to get rid of Jim Crow, get rid of all race-based policies and proceed with a kind of war on poverty and disadvantage that is colorblind in nature. Everyone agreed, I mean, for a brief moment, the elites at least, the people in power agreed

pass the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s, which made it the case that for instance, my grandfather and grandmother could vote and so on and so forth. Sit wherever they wanted on a bus, go to whatever restaurant they wanted, go to whatever school they wanted. And then in the late 60s, there was a series of destructive riots, over 150 riots in American cities around this issue of race and policing. And what happened is everyone who had just agreed to this colorblind principle lost faith in it because they said,

if we just agreed on colorblindness past all this legislation, how come there's all this rioting? Clearly, we must need to do more, we must need to do something else. And the only thing that I can compare this to in the lifetime of most of your listeners, if not all of your listeners, is the summer of 2020 when George Floyd died in Minneapolis, and you had riots all over the country,

in most American cities, and you had riots all over the country in most American cities, and you had politicians and everyday people feeling enormous pressure to put racial identity on the front burner and to do all kinds of things. Every elite institution was in some way trying to promote black people to high levels of authority, to show how much they cared about black people, to require black people to be on the boards

of publicly traded companies, to change the categories that the Grammy Awards operate under, just everything. Everyone felt this enormous pressure to quote unquote center race. Something very similar happened in the late sixties and that's where the impetus for race-based affirmative, affirmative action came from. And the whole suite of race-based policies that have become normal, uh, in American society.

So that's really what happened with the pivot away from colorblindness. It's looking back on 2020. It was almost like a collective apology from people that didn't really know what was going on. We feel like maybe someone's been racist somewhere. Maybe this George Floyd thing is indicative of some huge, big underlying problem. Oh my God. I don't know. That makes me such a piece of shit. I, problem. Oh my God. I don't know.

That makes me such a piece of shit. I, I, I'm not, I don't have my finger on the pulse, empathetically, sympathetically. I, I, I, I'm not a good person. What can we do to not only signal that I'm not one of them, whether them are, but also to make reparations, to fix this problem. I need to, I need to make sure that these poor minorities are okay. And let's bring a bunch of impetuses along a bunch of procedures, a bunch of, a bunch of initiatives that people can do. Yes.

So the, the, one of the reasons people had that sense is because, because the media, the national media in America, does not report when there are police incidents with white Americans. It just doesn't become news. And it's partly because of the media, it's partly because there's less of an audience for it. So for example, there was a guy named Tony Timpa

who died in a way extremely similar to George Floyd with an officer's knee on the top of his back for about 13 minutes. And they're cracking jokes as he's losing consciousness saying, wake up for school, Tony just really terrible behavior for a group of police officers. And he died. Whole thing was caught on video. You can look it up on YouTube. Almost nobody to this day knows or cares about it because it didn't catch fire because he happened to be white.

This was just a two or three or four years before George Floyd. So when you have a media ecosystem where those stories are unseen, now when you see it happening to a black person, everyone assumes that this kind of thing only happens to black people because they are black. And then it becomes an example of racism that ties into the whole legacy of slavery, legacy of racial inequality, and really infuriates people.

And so people in 2020, they lost all reason. They didn't ask whether all the policies they were implementing had anything to do with helping black people, the kinds of black people that are poor and from poor backgrounds like George Floyd. Instead, they promoted black people to the heads of boards of publicly traded companies, as if those are the same kinds of black people that need help like George Floyd. Essentially, they made the black elite even better off than it was before. While at the same time, defunding the police for neighborhoods where black people need them the most. Okay. At the time of the summer of 2020, Gallup polled black Americans with three simple questions. Do you want more police in your neighborhood, the same police presence in your neighborhood or less? 80% answered the same or more. Only 20% wanted less police. And that was the position, a very

minority position within the black community of the Black Lives Matter movement, the defund, the police movement and so forth. Police were defunded in many cities in America and then later refunded in many cases by popular demand within the black community in certain places. The end result was that 2020 represented the single greatest increase in homicide from year to year in America in the past hundred years. That is a shocking fact that most people don't know. And it was a direct result of the reaction to George Floyd's death, the de-policing, the mass retirement of the police, the general sentiment of anti-police. And it hurt nobody more than the black community because those homicides were not equally distributed in nice neighborhoods unless they were

highly concentrated precisely in communities that are disproportionately black and disproportionately poor. I taught Joe Rogan yesterday on his podcast about luxury beliefs from that's been recently repopularized by Rob Henderson and defund the police is patient zero for this. I mentioned that I was walking through Austin and saw a house that has a defund the police, uh, placard in the garden and a private security sticker next to the front door in the window. Yeah.

It, the fact that people like that don't see the irony is really depressing to me. I mean, there are literally people that have their own private security detail, okay, who supported defund the police. There are people in gated neighborhoods who pay a premium just so that strangers can't come near their house, not even in their house, but near their house, who want to want to gut police forces in that are, you know, for poor neighborhoods. This is amazing. And that's what happened in 2020.

And more importantly, that's what can happen, in particular in America on the left, when people only obey their empathy towards a video and suspend the rational thought that should come with that. Okay, this video is horrible. Let's all agree that. What is actually the best way to move forward? Let's not just rage. Let's actually think, uh, look at evidence and not be so hasty with

supporting policies that might backfire for the very people you're trying to help. I think it would have been very difficult during the summer of 2020 to have put out a realistic crime impact statistics. Um, what the actual polls are saying from mostly black neighborhoods, I think anyone that posted that it would have been very quickly lambasted as some white supremacists, race denial, you don't care, you don't understand, you don't know. I, that would have been the smart thing to do, but the incentives all aligned to not

have, I mean, who, who was going to be the person that does that? If it was a black person, they'd be accused of being an uncle Tom. If it was a white person, they'd be accused of being racist. Right. There was no vector in which that narrative could have inserted itself. I don't think. Yeah. I mean, Sam Harris tried to, I think he released like a 90 minute, 90 minute audio essay, pull back from the brink, which was very good.

One of the best for the people that haven't listened to it, even now it is. It is one of the best like monologues. I think that I've ever heard that thing is phenomenal. It was spot on in my view. Uh, and I'm sure he took a lot of flack for it. Uh, as, as my friend, Camille Foster likes to say, people like me and Camille have the melanin force field, which is, you know, no one is going to call. Me a racist.

They make, as you say, they may call me an Uncle Tom or a traitor to my community and so forth, to which I would respond. What could be more of a betrayal to your community than not speaking out when you know that policies are being adopted that are going to lead to potentially hundreds or thousands of excess deaths for black people. Cause that's what happened. The internet is obsessed with the prioritization of looking good over doing good, completely obsessed with it because the distance between our opinions and our deeds have never been greater.

So it's very easy to hide behind words that sound caring and, and, and just, and forthright and charitable and understanding. And the implications of it, what actually happens kind of no one really ever fact checks that is, oh boy, he was the guy and I'm sure he had good intentions. Who could have foreseen that defunding the police would have negatively impacted black people? Well, I don't know if you'd use a little bit of, a little bit of sub second order thinking.

A lot of people foresaw it. A lot of people talked about it at the time, me included. Uh, but mostly we were ignored because of the, the frenzy around, uh, around the moment. I mean, it's very interesting to live through a moment that I think will be written about by historians. Yeah. We're fairly close to the same age.

We haven't gotten too many of those, I think, but it will, you know, the summer of 2020, we have to acknowledge what happened. A man died in police custody in a city, uh, Minneapolis, not one of the cities, frankly, that is known by non-Americans and there were protests, not just in America, all around the world. London, New Zealand, East of the UK. And, and even more surprisingly in non-English speaking locations.

I think as far as Japan, if I'm not mistaken. So this was obviously had something to do with the pandemic and the fact that everyone was stuck at home. I don't know if you recall this, but I do remember just the palpable sense of, I don't get to move my body every day. I don't get to go out. And when there, when you finally have an outlet for that, uh, I think

the flood gates kind of open. Do you think that the same outcome would have occurred had it not been for COVID? No, no, I think, I think it would have struck a chord, no doubt, but I think it would have been like one tenth as as crazy. But, you know, the other thing that many people have pointed out is just how quickly the principles of the medical establishment disappeared and buckled. the medical establishment disappeared and buckled. So what I mean by that is in early COVID, there were all of these protests by right-wing kind of activists and citizens around lockdowns, right?

There were protests outside where people didn't wanna be locked down and they went outside. And I can't remember whether they were wearing masks or not, but those were roundly denounced by every important medical institution in the country because they were jeopardizing a herd immunity. They were killing grandma. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Mask, mask, mask mass mass mass spreading events or whatever. Yeah. Yes.

Uh, and, and then literally weeks, weeks later when you had thousands or tens of thousands of people marching in the streets, shoulder to shoulder, all over the country, the whole medical establishment just turned around and said, nah, it's okay because it's for racism, right? And even some of them said, when you think about it, isn't racism a kind of pandemic also? And people watch this on understanding

that elite institutions are capable of such hypocrisy of such, you know, such a loose relationship with their own principles and lose faith. Talk to me about the relationship between racism, anti-racism and neo-racism. So, over the past 10 years, there's been a real upswing in what many have called anti-racism. I'm talking in particular, if your listeners may have heard, of people like Ibram Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo. These are people that got a big, in the case of Kendi and DeAngelo, got a big boost by the atmosphere of 2020, but they've been around and writing for longer than that. And they have a kind of philosophy around anti-racism that comes out of critical race

theory. And their philosophy is that, you that, a white guy like you should be more or less constantly thinking about how your whiteness has given you privilege, how your whiteness blinds you to the realities that a black person like me can see. And on D'Angelo's account, you are supposed to be constantly deferent to black people in conversation. So she literally says in her book, if you and I are talking

about race, you as a white guy, me as a black guy, you are not supposed to disagree with what I have to say about race. You're not supposed to argue back. You're not supposed to argue back. You're not supposed to remain silent. You're not supposed to get defensive. So if you cross everything on the list, off the list, by process of elimination, what's left is to vocally agree with whatever I'm saying.

Now, I don't think you and I could have a meaningful conversation as adults if the rules are you have to agree with everything I say and simply defer to my superior epistemic authority. That can't paint the path towards a healthy, multiracial society where we try our best to get along despite our differences. It has to be a two-way street. It has to be that you can learn things from me and I can learn things from you based on our individual experiences. You may know stuff I don't know. I may know stuff you don't know. And ultimately,

there is an objective reality out there independent of of our perspectives. Like, I, there are facts in the world that don't depend on your skin color or my skin color. And so, uh, that's been the style of anti-racism that's been promoted. Now I view that as in fact racist. It's in fact racist to suggest that different races of people should live by different sets of books. And so I call it, instead of anti-racism, I call it neo-racism. And I substitute my own form of anti-racism, which is your race does not matter. Your race says nothing about who you are. It doesn't say whether you're smart or dumb. It doesn't say whether you're kind or mean. Uh, it doesn't speak to any of your deeper values.

And we have to be, uh, enshrining that and teaching people to think that way. If we are, if we're going to have success in the long run. Why did that particular narrative spread so effectively? What, what made it so mimetically contagious? Yeah, that's a great question. So I have a whole chapter about this in my book. The interesting part is if you go back only to 2012 or 2013, just 11 years ago, the majority of Americans, black, white, and Hispanic, all believed that race relations were good. Right? That may shock people, but very recently, the majority of Americans of all colors thought that we were in a good or somewhat good place.

Then in 2013, if you look at the polls, suddenly it just takes a nosedive. And it had been steady or getting better for many decades. So something happened in 2013 that has yet to reverse and that has literally cut in half the number of Americans that think we're in a good place with respect to race. Hypothesis one, racism suddenly increased and everyone noticed it. Well, we have ways of measuring that and it's just not the case.

There's no evidence that racism suddenly increased in 2013 however way you look at it. My hypothesis, and the only one that actually makes sense, is that 2013 is around the year that a critical mass of people had two pieces of technology. Camera enabled smartphones and social media. If you go back to the pre-2013 world, if something happened between a cop,

say a white cop was trying to arrest a black suspect and it went sideways, the only way you'd know about that is if your local newspaper covered it. It might make your local paper the next day. Perhaps it would make the six o'clock news if you were watching it. There is unlikely to be a video of it. And when you saw it, it would be surrounded with journalistic context. The journalist would have asked the police for their point of view, would have asked the family for their point of view and would be packaging it to you and with some kind of journalistic ethos.

In the post-2013 world, what happens is in that same situation, police trying to arrest a suspect, someone has probably pulled out their smartphone within two minutes, begun filming a video which is now out of context of how the interaction started. And they've uploaded it to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. And it gets millions of views as raw footage before anyone puts any journalistic or fact-checking context around what it is and what it means and why it happened. That's a fundamental change in the way that information spreads. And so I make an analogy in the book. Imagine if the speed limit on the highway in America suddenly went from 80 miles an hour to 200 miles an hour.

Not all cars would be able to take advantage of that change. So like a Chevy Spark has a top speed of what? Maybe 90 miles per hour, but a McLaren that can go up to 250, it's going to be suddenly a lot different to be a McLaren driver. This is analogous to what happened when we got smartphones and social media. The speed limit on the information highway doubled, tripled, quadrupled, or more, and certain kinds of information on that new highway were able to take advantage of that speed limit change. And others were not.

The kinds of things that spread insanely in the age of social media algorithms, it turns out in America and the West at large are videos that tap directly into the us versus them, historical guilt, white guilt, black outrage. This is somehow at the core of the American and Western European psyche in a way that leads videos that evoke that, that push that button to just spread like wildfire. And they spread much faster than the fact checking and the journalistic context can spread because those things appeal more to reason than emotion.

So there are so many of these incidents that people just experienced the initial outrage of seeing and learning about what happened that they don't experience the fact checking. And that that's in a nutshell, what happened. It created a false perception that racism was on the rise when in fact racism was in decline. This is reflected in a ton of surveys and polling data as well. Yes.

Do you think that what is the number of black people per year that are killed by police? What is the number of black people that are shot by other black people are shot by white people or how many people would have a problem with their son or daughter marrying a person of the opposite race? Yep, absolutely. So you point out a really important one because there are a lot of people that would like to say, okay, Coleman, I understand what you're saying, but isn't it just that social media and smartphones exposed us to all the racism that was out there? Finally, a window into what was going on all along. finally we just see it and that's what people are reacting to. Well, if that were true, then you would expect people who are online to have an accurate

perception of how much racism and how much police violence is out there. That's an easily testable proposition and it has been tested. And I cite one study in my book, which in 2019 asked Americans of different political persuasions, but in particular very liberal Americans who are the most on social media, and therefore on this theory should be the most educated. How many unarmed black Americans are killed by the cops every year? And the answer on average was about a thousand. The true number that year was 12. So that should put to rest the notion that social media is making us all smarter and

more informed on these kinds of issues. It's not, it's doing the opposite. Is social media and videos of black people being mistreated enough to galvanize and sustain the change in perception of race relations like that. I can totally see why that would be the inflection point 2012, 2013, but there's been an awful long time of this compounding. You would have expected that someone would have been able to come in with counter examples that everyone's sites on the scope would have sort of been come in with counter examples that everyone's

sights on the scope would have sort of been adjusted by, oh, well, here's some actual data about what's going on. Is that it? Is that in a nutshell, that's all what else has caused this to perpetuate? Yeah. Well, it's a good question because I do think that that is the main cause and the trigger. But there are some background facts that I think are also important that allow American society to be more vulnerable to division today than it would have been in the past. One is the Cold War ended.

We no longer have had a really scary external enemy that unites the country. Maybe, I mean, Putin was close, but it's not, we're kind of divided on Putin now. I mean, Tucker Carlson clearly likes him. We're not really united against China because China is not as obviously our main geopolitical rival as the Soviet Union was. And so, you know, I forget who it was. It might have been actually Kissinger that said this, someone else or someone else that war unites countries and peace divides them. So the United States is as a side effect of being a country that's perpetually at peace, even when we're at war in far away places, our homeland is never threatened, almost ever. That allows us to focus more on divisions.

to focus more on divisions. And then secondly, I think the war on terror losing its psychological hold on people also, once again, allows us to turn inward more and focus on our own divisions. This is a pretty big effect because, you know, look at a society like Israel. Israel was in one of its deepest divisions that it's ever been in in its country's history prior to October 7th over judicial reform. It was completely split. It was a society almost traumatized by its splitness.

You had people predicting civil war even over this stuff. The second it gets attacked, it's like all of that doesn't matter. No one even talks about it, right? The whole country unites around the war that they have to fight. So America, as a side effect of being so generally at peace, is quite inward looking and inward obsessed. How has this changed or impacted the way that people behave interpersonally? I think before 2013, and certainly in my childhood, I grew up in a multiracial, multiethnic town. I had friends of every race and I did not think of them as belonging to a race.

I thought of them as their individual names and their individual characters. I made innocent racial jokes with all of my friends and it was something held very loosely, not very deeply as it should be. In the new age of race obsession, I think there are many situations that have introduced paranoia and tension into the relationship of people with different races. I mean, just the fact that say I'm meeting a white person for the first time, they don't know anything about me. They just see that I'm black. Because of everything they see on social media and the cancellations of people for saying the wrong thing and the ubiquity of concern about racism, they may think to themselves, you know what, I'm not even going to risk saying what I think about

not even going to risk saying what I think about this new policy we have around this black guy. Why would I even risk it? Little do they know that I might agree with them. And that might be the opening to a really interesting conversation. Or you disagree with them, but be very interested in having a conversation and not offended. That's right. That's right. And so I think the self-censorship and, and, and, uh, you know, all of it is, I mean, I can't tell you how many employers I've talked to or have reached out to me.

That said, yeah, I mean, I, I don't even know if I want to hire a black employee, because if something happens in this day and age, or if I fire them for a genuine cause, which has to happen all the time, the possibility that they claim I'm a racist and spread it all over social media could be ruinous for me. Right. This is this, these are the things no one talks about that actually do change, uh, change the on, on the ground reality for race relations and in ways that are really, really negative. I think. There was a study that I looked at about how MeToo hurt women's careers.

Women's productivity fell post MeToo largely due to fewer collaborations with men. A study of research collaborations involving junior female academic economists showed that they started fewer new research projects after MeToo. The decline is driven largely by fewer collaborations with new male co-authors at the same institution. The drop in collaborations is concentrated in universities where the perceived risk of sexual harassment accusations for men is high. That is when both sexual harassment policies

are more ambiguous, exposing men to a larger variety of claims, and the number of public sexual harassment incidents is also high. The results suggest that MeToo is associated with increased cost of collaboration that disadvantaged the career opportunities of women. MeToo was important to raise awareness, but the intent was not to impose costs on women's

careers. Yeah, it's very interesting. I remember that result. It just shows you how, you know, in every cultural phenomenon changes incentives in a way that has downstream consequences. And that doesn't mean it's bad, you know, perhaps that was a necessary cost. I don't know. You know, I'm also, I'm curious if the Me Too movement had a similar effect on,

on like dating and approaches by men in general. It has, right? Men, men report approach anxiety increasing because of fear of being Me Too'd. Right. And I'm, and I wonder if women, uh, I wonder, I'm curious if women report wanting more approaches than they're, they're getting in the past. That's, that's, that's also true. But here's the other thing, almost like a kind of bizarre

psychological Stockholm syndrome that women are also more afraid of being approached. They want to be approached, but their sensitivity, their trepidation about being approached has also increased because what are you seeing? You're seeing, we're mimetic creatures. We look to others and the behavior and the patterns that they show as an indication of how we should behave.

And if what you're seeing is that this guy isn't to be trusted and a tweet that went viral a couple of weeks ago about how a guy paying you a compliment is a red flag because he's love bombing. So, you know, there's basically this, um, repurposing of any kind of male behavior or any kind of white behavior, any male behavior toward a woman or any white behavior toward a black person can be interpreted in a, a way that fits a narrative of perpetrator and victim. Right. It's kind of similar in a way to, you know, I remember in early 2020, I think

this is after Ahmad Arbery was killed in an attempted citizen's arrest gone wrong was killed in an attempted citizen's arrest gone wrong while he was out on a jog. And this was a tragic incident, and it was an example of just why you should never try to do a citizen's arrest, unless for some reason you absolutely have to. But you saw articles saying the dangers of jogging while black, right?

You had, you literally had a New York Times op-ed, which was, you know, a guy saying that he fears for his life every time he leaves his house to take a jog, right? Probably a guy that's, you know, like from the suburbs and no one's died, no one's been killed taking a jog in that town probably for a hundred years, right? And the odds of getting killed by a cop on a jog are probably lower than the odds of getting struck by lightning. Okay. Let's be perfectly clear about that. But what happens when you have New York Times articles saying that when you have you know just a whole narrative that plays up the risks of as a black person getting shot by the police even though they're infinitesimal.

What happens is you get everyday normal black people, if they get pulled over for speeding or whatever, actually now fearing for their lives, right? And bringing all of that fear with them to their interaction with the cops. You have just, and I'm sure cops have seen this, you just have people freaking out their interaction with the cops. You have just, uh, and I'm sure cops have seen this. You just have people freaking out when there's almost no chance that something's

going to go left in this interaction because you've done nothing wrong. They've got both hands on the steering wheel, but they're freaking out because they've seen this narrative. Yeah. Did you see the Dartmouth scar experiment? So they brought people into a lab and said that they were going to put scars on their face and then get them to go and take a job interview. And as they're about to leave from the makeup room to go into the job interview,

they say, sorry, we just need to touch it back up to make it a little bit more obvious. And as they did the touch up, the participant wasn't aware of what they were doing, they actually covered them over. So sitting down opposite the interviewer, the interviewer didn't see anything. There were no scars on their face. And then afterward they asked the study participants.

So what did you notice? Were there any telltale signs? Do you think that you were being discriminated against? Yeah, I could tell that they just couldn't stop looking at it. So you are able to create a narrative in someone's mind where the reticular activating system is so obsessed looking for a thing, the adamant that this is what they should be looking for.

It was the same. It was the reason why I think there's this dude called Joey Swole, who is a fitness influencer, I guess on Tik TOK. And he was kind of like the Vanguard pushing back against these videos of girls, videoing themselves and then voiceovering about a dude glances over and saying, I feel unsafe in this gym. There were a bunch of videos that went viral maybe a year ago, something like that. And he was basically saying, this is out of order.

Like that guy didn't do anything wrong. He came over, he tried to help you unload your 25 kilo dog shit form glute bridge exercise that you were doing or something, whatever. Um, but that was really important because I think people, especially on the internet, they look to other people's behavior as a proxy or an example of how they should behave. And if that hadn't been pushed back against a whole swath of girls that saw those videos online would have said, Oh yeah, if a guy glances over three times

in the space of 90 seconds, while I'm doing glute bridge, that is something that I should be scared about, but the internet sort of came together and the collective judgment was actually that's kind of a bit ridiculous. And that then becomes the new meta, right? That is now the new trend. Oh, okay. So I've four times in 90 seconds or five times in, oh, I don't need to worry about it as much. So this sort of safetyism culture doesn't make people safer. It just makes them more fragile and more vigilant.

Oh yeah. And I think the whole, you know, generation of people, roughly my age and younger and a little older than me too, is, is just measurably more anxious about everything. Uh, and I actually just had Abigail Shrier on my podcast who has a new book. Yeah. And she talks about this, you know, just this notion of exposure therapy, which is one of the few kinds of therapy on her account that actually works. If you have some kind of phobia, really what you have to do is just do the thing you don't want to do over and over again until it sucks a bit less, right? You're

afraid of dogs? Well, you're petting a dog today, sorry. And you're going to keep doing it until you're no longer afraid of it. And it turns out that that works really well. It's very simple and very unpleasant, but it works. And I asked her, I think she agreed with this point, exposure therapy, the lesson of exposure therapy is generalizable to anxieties, most anxieties in general, the more at bats you get in uncomfortable situations, on a first date, asking a girl out, meeting someone for the first time, public speaking, whatever it is, even for some people making a phone call is anxiety inducing. Going to the post office, whatever it is that makes people uncomfortable,

you precisely have to do that thing just over and over and over again. What's happened, I think, en masse with the younger generation, and this can be seen in, for instance, Jean Twenge's research on generational differences, is that Gen Z has just gotten less experiences around the board on every conceivable kind of thing. Less sex, less hanging out with people, less all of it. And so it's not exactly surprising that Gen Z has more anxiety about all of those things. Talk to me about affirmative action. You mentioned this earlier on. Is that useful? What about all of the corporate diversity and inclusion efforts beyond the ones that tried to get more black people on boards?

Were they not, you know, drives to get people into high paying jobs or, or, or to fast track them into higher education institutions? What's your post-mortem on that? Yeah. So there's kind of an older, healthier version of DEI that I would support, which is let's say you're a boss and you've got 10 people reporting to you. Let's say you're a white man and you might like fall into the habit of golfing with the other white men every other weekend and never really think to invite, you know, the Hispanic guy or the black woman or whatever,

not out of conscious prejudice, but just because what if they don't golf? And you don't, so you don't think to ask them. And so you can fall into a pattern of like- Golfers and non-golfers. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. You can have some kind of magnetism with the people that are more similar to you without

actually trying to exclude anybody. So a kind of innocent and useful version of DEI is just to have like corporate best practices with respect to including people like make sure you go to lunch with everyone one on one once a month. Right. Have that be a policy. Golf neutral best practices. Exactly. Yeah. So, okay. So if that's what you mean by DEI, then I think I'm all for it. Unfortunately, what most organizations mean by DEI is we have to have a certain number or a certain percentage or a certain vague range of percentages of non-white people and women, or elsewhere,

a racist and sexist institution. Now that makes me completely uncomfortable because I know that it is a sacred value to people. I know there's I mean, there's people that would listen to this and just turn it off halfway through the sentence to even challenge that. That is an important value. But I don't know about you, Chris, when I want to hire someone to work on my podcast, I don't give two flying fucks what they look like. I want to hire the most competent person that is in my price range. Same thing goes for when you produce your music, which everyone should go and

check out by the way, cold X man on YouTube. Uh, phenomenal, dude. I sent you videos of me listening to it in the car, but if it's the guy that's mastering your tracks or making your beats or helping you mix everything down or helping you film the music video, what was it? Ukraine. Did you go to Ukraine? Yeah, I did go to Ukraine. Yeah.

Before this was prior, I think I have a habit of visiting countries right before they break out into war. I think it might be considered that you might be associated somehow that you could be the Genesis film a music video in Israel on October 6th? No, but I went there like 10 months before the war. Blame it on you. Yeah. So, yeah, so DEI, right.

So I think if I reserve that right for myself, how can I deny it to a corporation? I don't understand. write for myself, how can I deny it to a corporation? I don't understand. I think that people pay lots of lip service to the idea of diversity because for like a cosmopolitan globalized person, which I would consider myself too,

a lot of us are xenophiles and we like diversity. It's nice to have people of many different cultures inhabiting the same room. It's enriching. But I think diversity is kind of like love. If you force it, you've kind of missed the point. But if it arises naturally, it's awesome. I mean, look at, there are sub fields in the arts and music that are highly diverse with no quota or bending of the merit principle necessary. Look at the comedy world, look at the music world. These are highly diverse places

and no one has to manufacture the diversity. That's great. But in a place where you don't have it, I'm not sure that you ought to manufacture it. Should we be reducing the number of black people in the NBA because it's so undiverse? I'm not sure. I mean, it may sound glib, but I give examples in the book. Did anyone think that the Beatles needed a person of color? Does anyone think that Earth, Wind and Fire needed a white person? I don't think so. I mean, if things can be groups of people can be excellent and also homogenous and who are who are we from the outside to say that that's a racist circumstance? Now, I will give one exception, which is that

if being racially homogenous prevents some institution from doing its job well, then by all means. So for instance, if the NYPD were 100% white guys, I can imagine how that might make it more difficult for the police to protect the community, because the community inevitably might perceive that as just a colonial relationship, as white people policing people of color.

So that's a situation where they actually can't do their job as effectively unless they are racially diverse. So if you're in a situation like that, by all means, pursue diversity. But most of us are not at firms and companies that are in that situation. Most of us are in situations more like, you know, at least my, my cartoon image of what firefighting is, it's like the fire doesn't care what color you are. Right. So get the best people.

Have any of the race based policies actually worked? Have any of them actually helped in your opinion? It's very difficult for me to think of any that have, have helped more than they hurt. Let's put it that way. I'm not saying none have helped, but it is difficult to think of any that have helped on the internet. Yeah.

Whereas it's pretty easy to think of ones that have hurt more than they helped. Dude, I'm fascinated by what the, what it's like to be you talking about this stuff. Uh, you know, you had this, this sort of incident with Ted a little while ago. Uh, I always say I have this, um, you know what the peak end rule is in psychology? Oh yeah. Yes. Yes. People tend to remember the most, um, emotionally salient salient and the final experience of, of, of, of one particular event.

Um, I kind of have a, the peak hate rule, um, which describes content creators and, and, and individuals in the world, world, that almost all individuals are known by their most egregious blow up and their most recent blow up. And I guess it's unfortunate that for both of yours, yours overlap over the top. Jordan Peterson, for instance, might be, he didn't want to call trans people by their name, 2016, and he lost his license

because he's a bigot on the internet or he has things to say about sports illustrated models, you know, like there's the, the peak one. And then there's the most recent one. I always wonder, uh, you know, like how many people are like, this is the last time that I'll ever step onto the field of play, whether it's this is the thing. This is my crowning cancellation or my crowning sort of moment of, of, of Fuhrer or whatever. Um, but yeah, you had this thing and it happens with Ted and I, I'm pretty

fascinated by what the response has been to you talking about this. You've just been on Belmar, tons and tons of exposure on Sam Harris's show. You've been on Rogan's show. Like it's as, as big as it can get with this. Yeah. What, what do people say? What, what's the response like to you on the negative side of the fence? Uh, the response to me is still mostly positive.

And then there's sort of concentrated stream of extreme negativity. Uh, so, and then a lot of people that ignore me that might not ignore me if I were saying something different. But look, overwhelmingly, I get a lot of support and I'm enormously grateful for it. And more and more as I've, I think gotten better at writing and speaking and as in particular as we've gotten further and further away from the height of 2020 craziness, more and more people have seen in their own lives the cost of obsessing over race, the cost of suspending reason because of a desire to acknowledge racism. More and more

people have lived those costs over the past few years. And so more and more people I think have become sympathetic to my concerns and to my message. On the other hand, there's, as there always has been, there's an, an extreme concentrated ray of hatred towards me by a burst of vitriol. Yeah. And it doesn't give me super powers, unfortunately, or maybe it does in some way. You're able, you're able to make wars happen, uh, a couple of friends after you attend different countries. Yeah. It's a weird superpower. I'm not sure I'd be a member of the justice league with that, but. War man. It's war man. Yeah.

War plus 10 month delay. Yeah. God damn it. It's really fascinating, man, to observe that, that thing unfold. I spoke to this dude a while ago on the show, um, who had researched the history of existential risk of human understanding of our own capacity to destroy ourselves and of the environment's capacity to destroy us too. And he taught me this idea called conceptual inertia, which is beautiful because it's explained

within the concept as well, that ideas take time to move. And I kind of, I think about cultural changes and, and the acceptance and understanding and then propagation of ideas, new ideas, kind of like a huge tanker that's moving across the sea. That it takes a fucking eternity to get it to go left or right, or even begin to nudge it a tiny little bit. There's that a quote about whatever it is, like a, um, science, science makes progress, one dead generation of scientists at a time. And this conceptual inertia thing is a perfect example.

This conceptual inertia thing, as a perfect example, even after it was pretty, uh, widely accepted that the earth was no longer the center of the solar system or the center of the universe, it took like two generations for that to be common parlance amongst people that were talking about it. That even after it was accepted, there was still kind of this reticence or just this delay, there was this inertia that was carried over from previously. And the problem is you think, well, ideas, they literally travel at the speed of light, they travel at the speed of understanding, but it turns out the speed of understanding is really slow and it's not just the speed of understanding.

So I get this, I reject it. Why I, there's a critical mass of, of, um, information or justification that I need to be able to believe that this thing is the case. But then I've got, it's not just me believing it's everybody else because I don't just act in a vacuum and there's a tendency for people to skew what they think or believe based on what other people think or believe or what they think other people will think or believe about them thinking or believing that thing. And then it's still, you know, it's just this so many, it's lumbering behemoth, this Leviathan that takes forever to move around.

And it's such a shame because people who are able to see, you know, I remember in 2020 hearing about the defund the police things and I could, I was listening to people like yourself, like Sam, that were highlighting the potential negative downstream externalities of these kinds of policies being implemented. And yet there's still people now, nearly four years hence, that would say, that would deny that that is something that's had a negative impact. And you know, you're right. Living through history is a very bizarre scenario, but it's even, it must be even more bizarre if you're Cassandra and you're able to, you're black Cassandra, and you're able to say, look, this was something that we didn't need to wait a decade to be able to work out that this was going to happen. We could have seen it kind of at the time. There's this, like I say, this sort of critical mass.

There's very, it's very interesting time. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, with respect to chain, you know, changing people's opinions, in some sense. or opinions, in some sense, we're both in the business of this. You know, just in that we have podcasts and so on. But you're right about your point about inertia. At the same time, there are situations where I think they could, I think they're called like an availability cascade or something like this. I've heard this guy, Cass Sunstein talk about these situations.

He wrote a book with the dude that did Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman. Yeah. I'm sure others have talked about this, but there can be situations where everyone is pretending to believe something. But no one really knows. Most people don't know that everyone else is pretending to believe something. But no one really knows. Uh, most people don't know that everyone else is pretending, right? Everyone thinks that they're the only one. The Abilene paradox is another name for this. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. And then if you get an emperor's emperor has no clothes moment where, where a few people come out and talk about it, there can be a sort of cascade where everyone realizes relatively quickly that they're not on board. And- The veils fall from their eyes type thing. Absolutely, yeah.

And with certain beliefs in the belief cluster of woke social justice, it at least seems theoretically possible that that can happen. cluster of woke social justice. It at least seems theoretically possible that that can happen. You know, uh, I would, at least I would, I would hope. At the same time, I haven't really seen it happen. So who knows? It certainly seems to be upstream and downstream in quite predictable directions. If it allows performative empathy or toxic compassion, or if it's mimetically hijacking

because there is a minority group which is being pedestalized and there is a previously privileged group which is being demonized, You can pretty reliably say that the stickiness of that idea and the rapidity of its uptake is going to be pretty quick. Right. Yeah. It's a strange, a very strange blend. What about this trend of revising American history? How has that played into everything?

Yeah. So in my book, I talk about this. There is a trend, uh, not just in writing about history, but also in Hollywood movies about history of playing up the sins of white supremacy and the sins of white people and downplaying any responsibility that black people have. So for example, there was a movie called The Woman King which came out last year. I don't know if you saw this, it was Viola Davis.

Viola Davis was one of the kind of chief military officers in an African tribe called the Dahomey, which famously had an all female warrior unit. And that's actually true. They had a warrior unit of females. In reality, the Dahomey tribe in West Africa, slave trading was essentially their whole MO. I mean, it was a huge part of their MO was raiding other African tribes, capturing them as slaves, using those slaves themselves, and also selling those slaves to the highest bidder, which in that case was Europeans who would bring them

to what was then called the New World. So the Dahomey tribe, you know, no bueno, as you would say, historically, from a historical perspective, just a lot of slave capturing, a lot of slave trading, okay? So in the movie about the Dahomey, they portray it as if the Dahomey generals had this great guilt about slave trading and they get rid of the slaves, I think, if memory serves, by the end of the movie. Or at the very least, the main character is so conflicted by the fact that they're doing slave trading.

And I think they actually do end it by the end of the movie. There's a redemption arc somehow. Yeah, there's redemption arc that ends with the slavery being them watching no more of this. Absolutely didn't happen. They were they were they were actually one of the most persistent in slave trading unanimously. It was just accepted, right? So I give that one example because the idea is like for Hollywood, for the culture of Hollywood,

it doesn't compute that a group of black Africans would just be fully committed to slave trading as an activity, even though that's what the historical record shows. It doesn't compute because slavery is something only white people do, right? I give another example, the movie Hidden Figures, which was about astronauts at NASA, probably seven years ago or so. Astronauts at NASA, there were a few black women in the 1950s that were that worked at NASA and helped them get to the moon. But they at the same time, this is during segregation. So they are living during segregation, but also working at NASA,

helping America get to the moon. And it's this kind of hero arc of these black women. And one of the black women in who it's actually about in an interview said, I didn't feel any segregation at NASA. She said that in real life, but in the movie, she is portrayed as feeling an enormous amount of racial segregation at NASA right.

Is another example whenever Hollywood gets a chance it's going to tilt history in a direction that plays up the evil. White person archetype and plays up the suffering. But morally superior black person archetype. Why? Because that fits their concept of history. The way that neo-racists think about history is whiteness is evil, blackness is good. White people are slave owners, black people were slaves. That's the whole story for them. So they don't know

that almost all the slaves that were brought to the New World were not captured by Europeans. They were captured by other Africans. They were slaves in Africa and sold voluntarily by African tribes to Europeans. They don't know that slavery, or they're not taught that slavery has existed in almost every society down through history on every inhabited continent. And it would be easier to come up with a list of societies in the past 10,000 years that didn't use slavery than to come up with a list that did because the list that did would be so long. And you'd be on every continent. You'd be with the Aztecs, you'd be with the Chinese, you'd be with the Koreans, you'd be with the West Africans, you'd be, God knows,

you'd be with the Middle East, you'd be with the Slavs of Europe where the word slave comes from because they were slaves and so on and so forth. You'd be with the Russian serfs and so on and so forth. So from my perspective, history is a story of every group and everyone having some element of oppressor and oppressed, Everyone having some element of oppressor and oppressed, not a story of the evil European white man versus the long suffering noble people of color. I mean, this is there's no honest way to look at history and filter it all through that lens. How is this perspective not only about history, but about what's going on now. How is this bifurcated between the elites and the non elites?

Like is, is that the primary difference between who views race in this way? Oh yeah, that's it's a huge difference because it's mostly in elite circles that you'll see people, people that are really sympathetic to the white is evil, people of color, good kind of frame. Also in the elite is where you'll find people sympathetic to kind of every trendy new way of signaling that you care about racism. And often the elites are clueless as to how much in an elite bubble we are and I say we because I'm as much an elite as anyone and the best example of this was with the word Latinx

and this is a as a half Puerto Rican myself. I grew up speaking around a lot of speaking Spanish and around a lot of Spanish speakers. And so when I got to college and people started saying Latin X, I was like, no, that's what because not only do like no Hispanic people actually use that word, but it doesn't even phonetically make sense with the Spanish language. It doesn't obey the typical rules of Spanish structure, which are fairly rigid.

But people would use this word when I was at Columbia University and you have major politicians in the Democratic Party, like Elizabeth Warren and so forth, referring to the Latinx community. Finally, when Pew did a poll and actually asked American Hispanic people if they liked the word Latinx, something like 60% hadn't even heard it. something like 60% hadn't even heard it. Okay. And then another, something like another 36% had heard of it and did not like it. And then the percentage of people who- What does that even leave?

Four. Right. Four percent roughly was the number of people who both knew it and liked it. Okay. So that is as good a measure of sort of what the elite is. The elite is the people in that 4% that all of them know Latinx, so they assume everyone else knows it. And they all feel comfortable with it, so they assume everyone else feels comfortable with it. And they don't realize the extent to which that sort of 4% is living on it,

almost on a different plane of reality than the other 96% of people in the country who either haven't heard of even their length, the language they're speaking or don't like it. God, that's funny. Yeah. And tragic as well. What's your solution then? What, what is a way you understand the incentive structure, you understand the

media landscape, you understand how people are responding to wanting to appear compassionate and, and, and tolerant and upstanding and all the rest of it. How do we move forward? Well, I think everyone has a responsibility to check in with their own personal lives and see if they're living by the ethos of colorblindness with their friends and their family. Step one, and something everyone can do.

family. Step one, and something everyone can do. Step two is, is to promote policies and politicians that speak to your values. I think in America, we actually have a lot of executive orders and judicial decisions that require employers and so forth to discriminate on the basis of race. And these are things that could be overturn one, undo several executive orders that require affirmative action to be implemented in the federal government. And so there should be a lot more discussion and pressure aimed at those kinds of changes. Obviously, the Supreme Court overturning affirmative action last summer, I think, is a step in the right direction. But there's more that can be done on that front too. And as a culture, we just have to insist on the ideal of a colorblind society as the only

end goal. And we have to, I hope I can help people become less shy and less fearful in expressing their commitment to live in a world where I'm doing my best not to judge you by the color of your skin. You're doing your best not to judge me by the color of my skin. And we're both doing our best to demand that the state, which has the monopoly on violence and sets public policy, does not discriminate against any of its citizens based on the color of our skin, which is something we cannot control. So to recommit ourselves to that as a culture, to fearlessly stand for it, that's what has to be done if we're going to make steps towards a colorblind society.

Coleman, you're awesome, man. And this must be the second or third time you've been on the show. We did, didn't we do, we, we did the super bowl two years ago. And yeah, we did. We did. Yeah. Remember?

Yes, we did. Me, you, Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson, which is like the oddest squad to watch a super bowl with, but it was very fun, but I, your music's fantastic, your book is fantastic. I'm so happy that everyone should go and pick it up now. The end of race. It's only, I mean, how long is the audio book? Oh, that's a good question.

I should know off the top of my head. I read it myself. It might be six hours or so. Yeah, but it's a, it's a pretty like not too long, easy read. Dude. I think it's great. And I think that you're a fantastic voice for all of this stuff. Tell people where they can check out all of the other cool shit that you do.

Yeah. So you can check out my writing at my sub stack Coleman's corner. You can also check out my writing at the free press, which is a great new publication I would highly recommend, uh, founded by Barry Weiss, um, where I'm a contributor, you can occasionally check me out on, where I'm a contributor. You can occasionally check me out on CNN where I do political analysis. And you can check out my podcast as well,

Conversations with Coleman. And I wanna just redirect the praise right back at you. You have one of the best podcasts out there right now. I love what you're doing. It's just fantastic. So I love what you're doing. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's just fantastic. So, um, kudos to you as well. Thank you. And everyone can go and listen to your music, dude.

Honestly, just go and watch the video. What was the video? Cold X-Men. Yeah. But what was the video of the first song that you released that blew everyone's mind? Blasphemy. Yep. Everyone can, before you go buy the book, while you're going to buy the book,

go and listen to Blasphemy by Cold X-Men. It's, you're awesome, dude. I'm looking forward to catching up with you again the next time you through Austin. Absolutely. Hell yeah.