Coleman Hughes and What it Will Take to Actually Address Racism | Conversations with Tom

[Music] what is up everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here with coleman hughes coleman thank you so much for joining me man glad to be here so i think i first found you on sam harris's podcast and then you introduced me to thomas chatterton williams who i recently had on the show who was amazing so thank you so much for that intro he's super fascinating dude and then in researching you i came across what you're doing as cold man which i was very impressed by are you still hard into the music scene yeah i still am i mean unfortunately right now there is no music scene but um at least no no music scene in person but yeah i'm still very much producing music in my free time and you know to be released at some point do you see music as more of an in-person thing these days um you know thinking about the creation of music i would think this is kind of a cool period where if you're able to record you know at your apartment or something that you could go pretty hard on the music um do you produce or do you just rap produce mix wrap all of it so for you though is it is there something big missing and that you're not able to perform in front of a crowd well yes and no performing in front of a crowd is the most exciting thing ever but 95 of the time that you you're working as a musician in my context it's alone because i'm making beats by myself tweaking mixes or mastering songs by myself recording vocals by myself so that's something i can completely do alone and i have been during covet and it's i i think i and a lot of other musicians i know feel like it's kind of a godsend to be in a in a profession where you can do a lot by yourself and you know you don't go crazy stir crazy at home all day you know what have comedian's been up to you know like their their whole craft is like based on testing jokes out in front of a crowd because they almost never know which ones are going to be good so you know it's sad for some folks but for me it's been all right yeah that would be this would be a very brutal time to be a comic and i know oh god was it d l hugely that ended up getting coronavirus from touring i'm almost certain uh i could be wrong about um the exact person but there is a very famous comedian who collapsed on stage because he couldn't bear the thought of not being outperforming and was going to uh he said he was like i was going to the places that will let you perform at a time like this and he was like those are probably not the ideal places uh to be performing because they're not taking the security measures and things they need to be taking so right yeah but i know i'm sure there are a lot of people that feel pretty hemmed up so my background i studied filmmaking that was my whole shtick and when i went to film school it was like literal film and you had to go and get it developed and you had big heavy cameras one of my interns is a film student and this is her senior year now going into her senior thesis project and all of that in the middle of covid and she's having to do everything remotely and i just thought whoa like the thought of doing my senior year remotely was that would be terrifying i don't know how you pull off filmmaking is so inherently collaborative there are some things i guess you could do by yourself especially now in the age of youtube but man it is to shoot something all by yourself really limits the scope of what you can pull off um i don't know if you feel is your music changing in that there's the only things you can do now are things you can do by yourself or was that already sort of a super solitary endeavor it was already a very solitary endeavor so it really is is i can do a hundred percent of what i would otherwise do um but yeah with filmmaking that's another example you know i and i did uh i just graduated from school and i had the last two months or so over zoom and it was a it was a strange experience and it made you realize how much of what's in the classroom is a result of being in the classroom and how much isn't um and you know the truth is i had some great lecturers that basically maintained a lot of what was important and valuable about them over uh over online but i will say if you're not inclined to pay attention it's much harder to to get anything out of the class online than you might have in person do you know what shook down uh during 1918 i actually haven't thought about this i've thought so many times about okay we're going yeah they had online classes yeah went well uh but how much did they use social isolation was that part of how they got past it or did it just sort of burn through the population i i don't know so much about it but i know that there was social isolation and at the very least there was you know cancellation of large events and stuff like that and different cities did it to different extents and uh weathered the pandemic better or worse as a result i know there was there was like a rebellion against i think mask wearing in some californian city maybe san francisco um there was like literally a rebellion against the law that required um wearing masks at one point do you know what the logic was um people were pissed off just like don't tell me what to do kind of thing yeah i think so yeah that that's interesting in terms of the humor propensity so actually i will say that one of the keystones of my personality is a real problem with authority um i was just talking to my wife about that in terms of what sort of driven me through my life and i'll say that i always talk about how people that accomplish a lot in their life usually have some sort of sickness in that there's something that pushes them so hard to keep going even in the face of you know detriment to your personal health determined to your social well-being like there's some animus that just keeps propelling you forward and for me it was really two things one my parents forcing me to do chores and to mow the lawn and as a kid i was just like no one is ever going to tell me what to do when i'm an adult and then the other was just not being able to um having other people tell me what i could have and couldn't have either because my parents couldn't afford it or because certainly i couldn't afford it um and so that really when i like if i think about sitting down on a therapist couch and think about what drives me what propels me forward there really is a sense of i don't want somebody to tell me what to do but when i think about covid it's one of those where the virus doesn't give a [ __ ] whether i have a problem with authority or not it's like it's going to transmit the way that it's going to transmit and i know before we started rolling you were saying that people in new york aren't really thinking about uh the pandemic right now that there are protests and things going on right now how much of that is just sort of generalized pushback against authority how much is you know i've been cooped up how much is a general sense of injustice that has to be overcome like what do you think is pushing that forward yeah in terms of the protest movement i think uh well yeah there's there's a certain type of person who who has a problem with authority i would probably put myself in that category as well and and there's a certain type of person that takes that to to to mean uh who who likes the aesthetic element of protesting to police doesn't actually follow politics very much um so that's that's definitely an element in the protests uh to what extent is it people that are restless and want to get out of their apartments i think that has a huge effect on the level of protesting we're seeing and the the ease was with which protests that were local became national and ultimately global i think people are at home excuse me people are at home they're bored they're restless they haven't been uh you know normally they would have gone to a concert in the summer or a music festival they're starved of human contact um at least like in large crowds and the protests are the closest thing to a concert that that can happen right now um so there's definitely that and then there's of course the substance of the issue police brutality um police shootings of of unarmed civilians so i think and and then there's there's perhaps the trump effect um to what extent does what do you define as the trump effect just like the fact that trump makes everything a little bit worse with his rhetoric like if the knob is at eight without him he like turns it to 8.5 i do think people tend to attribute too much to the president um a lot of times what's happening is the result of deeper cultural um fault lines that would have happened under obama but i think trump just kind of he says the thing to piss everyone off just to kind of like ratchet it so the combination of all those things i think has i have a quick question for you so i don't know i know that you're not um super drawn to politics nor am i and i consider myself one of the most politically ignorant human beings on the face of the planet um and it really is only this movement that has drawn me into like yo i gotta figure the [ __ ] like what do i think about this um and i love your edict of first educate yourself which is exactly what i've been trying to do um instead of popping off like really try to stop and just say okay i don't know [ __ ] about this so you know how do i go about figuring it out anyway the question i want to ask you was um if you have a sense of it what president through all history do you wish was seeing us through this crisis and why um i i guess obama uh that that may be the boring answer but i think he he could say the kind of thing he could credibly speak to the anger people feel about police brutality and give them a sense that the person with the reigns cared about this issue and understands it and therefore it doesn't we don't need so much to disturb the peace and cause violence um and yeah i think obama was able to hit a note of of resonating with racial justice issues while at the same time you know letting moderates know that he wasn't a radical that's a tough that's a very tough uh um tight walk a tight rope to walk i guess would be the way to say it but um i think he did that as good as any anyone could uh he's not without his faults of course but i can't imagine a recent president that would do better can can you oh uh this is where i will say i have been so um blind to who our leaders have been and what their rhetoric has been so i'll say that obama was probably the first president that i paid attention to it was the first time ah that's not true so bush uh the second bush was the first one w bush was the first one that i i sort of was like whoa this seems to matter like in terms of the rhetoric and the way that people think about him and his inability to speak i found really distressing and i again i didn't i didn't pay attention to his policy so i have no idea if that moved us forwards or backwards um but i was really unnerved by his ability or his inability to speak and when obama got elected i was so stoked on that and again did not pay attention to his policies i have no idea if that moves forwards or backwards but in terms of feeling good about who our president was i felt really [ __ ] good i remember where i was when it was announced that he won and it was very surreal because jared leto was standing right behind me at the airport just the most random [ __ ] thing ever but we were all looking up at the screen as it was announced and it was just like there was a collective sense of euphoria especially being in la which is obviously a very blue place so that felt good he was so suave he was so he was such a powerful orator which is something partly because it's been something i focus so much on my own time and attention on the ability to communicate ideas the ability to get people emotionally galvanized i think is really powerful and the ability to do that when you see it in somebody and i'm particularly sort of emotionally swayable so if somebody is able to you know whip people up into a frenzy with their rhetoric i'm sort of one of the earliest people to be swept up into that so i was always very intoxicated by the way that he could speak by how he made me feel about being an american so that was really [ __ ] cool um so i will say just out of sort of the exact reasons that you laid out i think it's important to have somebody who can speak credibly like you said to the problem i think is is the the way that we're going to get through this and so when all of this kicked off my first thought was so obviously there was tremendous pressure for me as somebody with a platform to say something right and so for the first time i felt compelled like [ __ ] there are people saying like yo you better say something you better take a side and i was like i don't know what the [ __ ] is going like i don't pay attention to this [ __ ] obviously it was like at an 11 you could literally with the naked eye look off my um my balcony and see [ __ ] la burning so i was like okay this is clearly i'm now for the first time i feel like if you don't at least acknowledge that on the spectrum of possibilities for the first time in my life growing up it was the red scare was real nuclear war seemed like unlikely but really possible and if you weren't at least acknowledging its possibility you were blind now for the first time in my life acknowledging civil war is on the spectrum of possibilities i was like [ __ ] man like i've really gotta dive into this so the first thing i did was is there a unified black voice yes or no i had no [ __ ] idea so it was really going in and just looking like what's being said and i have an obsession with what i call the physics of progress and what i mean by the physics is there is some foundational layer that it that is in step with the truth of the human animal right that in in the way that the human animal cannot be reduced anymore the way that the brain works is probably the most fundamental way to say it and so i was trying to find voices that got to that place where it's like asking only one question what is my goal and making sure that that's very clear so this this is exactly what the the physics of progress are you start with your goal everything is is going to go off your goal what what quote-unquote works or doesn't work will 100 be does it move you towards your goal yes or no so you've got a goal you've got an informed hypothesis on what the problem is that's stopping you from achieving your goal and then what levers you would have to pull binary actions that you can take that will either move you towards your goal or be a failed experiment that you can at least learn from but to have that you have to have the metrics that you're going to judge it which you should know ahead of time like okay my goal is you know i come from a business background so i'm always thinking about business so if my goal is to increase revenue or drive profitability or go into a new market whatever i get really [ __ ] specific really specific about what that goal is but i know the metrics so profitable dollars right dollars in my bank account okay cool if that's going to be the metric that i steer by i know that ahead of time i know what my goal is i start pulling levers as a test and i see did it put more money in my bank account yes or no and if there's anywhere where that breaks down either my goal is vague or i don't know what binary actions i can take so i'm just saying things like increase my revenue by doing what or i don't know what metric i'm using to steer then i have a problem so i just i went into it with that going okay well i know what my goal is i don't know that my goal is universal and i think in fact i'll i think the easiest way to sum up my goal get sort of laughed at and scoffed at which i don't still don't understand why this would be laughed at but it is one of the things that led me to going so deep into your world which is um the i think you call it the humanist approach to race where it's like color blindness in sam harris's words where it's like the world i want to live in is where race is about as meaningful as hair color so that's my goal and then the question just becomes how the hell did we get there so in terms of the initial question i asked you about what president certainly obama not i'm not speaking policy because i'm ignorant to his policies but from just a he'd have the credibility to say look i get it and now physics of progress how do we actually move forward yeah i mean the thing about it is more and more people actually don't share the goal that you just described um people seem to want to live in a world where my skin color and your skin color hash ought to have a huge impact on how we communicate as human beings so if we're talking about race the fact that you are to me a white looking person um that means you have to essentially uh kowtow to me you are beneath me in in this conversation because you haven't lived as a black person you don't know what it's like to experience anti-black racism um to to you know if you've experienced prejudice in the past it's been from a position of power as a white man these are all the arguments that are are being made right now and that means i have a kind of epistemological authority over you i know things that you can't know and therefore uh you know that that asymmetry should inform this entire conversation um i think that's that's fundamentally wrong that's not it gets epistemology wrong because you know first you know two black people can have totally different opinions and when black people are polled you find a a rather large diversity opinion diversity of opinion that isn't reflected on you know the new york times op-ed page let's say or or the the black activist class that whose voice is often held up as as speaking for the majority and it should also go without saying that lived experience doesn't directly correlate with true knowledge like you know if you've been beat up by the police that actually doesn't mean that you know more about the issue of police brutality you know you do have a kind of knowledge which is the first hand knowledge of what it feels like to suffer this injustice but it doesn't necessarily imply that you know the path forward better you know what aspects of policy make sense and you know that i think we just have to insist on that because ultimately we should want to live in a world where the fact that you're you have less melanin in your skin than i do doesn't put up wrote needless roadblocks between us um and that that i think is a it's a goal that people are very shy about right now and it's a goal that's completely compatible with fighting racism it is the opposite of racism and increasingly today the modern anti-racist movement is not so much a rejection of white supremacy as it is white supremacy flipped on its head it it's uh you know the notion that i would have some kind of you know authority over you in this conversation that's not the that's not anti-racism so much as it is the opposite of of the old classical racism um so i i very much worry about that and i worry i worry that many of the solutions being proposed um the books that are on the bestsellers list that everyone's telling you to read right now which will no doubt be pumped into the heads of our children at young ages in certain contexts are all about telling you that race is super duper important if you're white you ought to follow a different set of rules social rules thinking rules um then if you're black you can never escape it no matter how hard you try and i think that is a a horrible recipe for a multi-ethnic society where we all have to live together we're getting married to each other we're becoming friends with each other hopefully and i don't see how that can work if we're telling everyone that actually that whole thing about race just being skin deep yeah that that that's in the past now what it is now is to be anti-racist is to recognize that your race is extremely important and to live your life based on that fact yeah it you're getting to now what makes this important enough for me to [ __ ] with because i was telling um the the guy who is our head of talent who books the show for me i was telling him he happens to be black and i was telling him some of the um people that i was coming across in my research specifically of you um people like shelby steele and he goes do you want to get shelby on the show because he used to book for tavis smiley and so he's very familiar with shelby steel and i was like christopher do you want to live on the third rail i'm like this [ __ ] is crazy like of all the people i actually am interested at some point to have that conversation with him just because i find his way of thinking like he is so willing to say [ __ ] that is going to piss so many people off i admire that alone but like what makes you want to play on this third rail what makes you stand before congress and oppose reparations like it's dude your your rap is amazing first of all let's start with that i'm glad to hear by the way that your dick is fine that is very encouraging news um but what why lean into this like this is you you could avoid this i could avoid this my whole life why are you leaning into this you're becoming one of the voices yeah i think um by personality i've always been the type that you know if i thought the teacher was wrong i wanted to say so um and obviously a lot of times the teacher was right but uh that's always how i've been i've i've been [Music] very quick to become frustrated when i think something untrue is gaining traction because people are too afraid to think rigorously about it and i think what what happened is i i didn't really come for the topic of race so much as the topic of race came for me i what i felt like is you know out of school i i went to juilliard initially out of high school with the intent of being a professional jazz musician his music was and and is really still my first love um but then i sort of pivoted and went to colombia but long story short between the ages of say 16 and 20. i i was inundated with all of these new ideas at my high school and at columbia the ideas that are now familiar to anyone who's been awake since 2013 or 2014 white privilege systemic racism internalized depression um the whole social justice litany and i found a lot of the ideas very compelling at first i uh i i sort of did what a lot of relatively privileged people of color do which is rewrite their own personal history such that they are victims somehow in the wealthiest nation on earth um and i think just basically the process of being told i was a victim by authorities at school and the the general subculture i was a part of and that the message could not have been louder or more clear the process of really figuring out to what extent that is true of me and whether i should adopt that identity just was what got me into the issue something always seemed a little bit a little bit wrong about it there would just be kernels of doubt planted in my head here and there talking to a friend who didn't quite buy it pointing out you know very simple facts very simple ways of compelling ways of viewing the world like okay what if i'm black but your parents were meth addicts like i actually had a white friend that was in that situation and like what what deep reason is there to view me in terms of the group i belong to rather than viewing me as an individual unit for the purpose of assigning me victim status right when when you go to court there's a single person sitting in the witness chair at a time there isn't a whole group of 40 million so what deep reason is there to view the world as groups trumping other groups in terms of power and privilege rather than the the more naive in quotation marks way of viewing the world which is everyone is coming from somewhere different and sure there are group averages to speak of but you never meet the average person walking down the street average is a statistical abstraction when you're talking about flesh and blood you're only ever meeting people individuals so i i think just you know planting you know encountering colonels of doubt in in the social justice worldview which i at one point had adopted and the constant messaging that i was a victim being so out of touch with not just my life but the lives of many people around me and and i don't just mean that people have never suffered i mean that there is a there's something deeply disempowering about putting putting your worst experiences at the front at the forefront of your conscience um you know almost anyone who's had a rough life but is is highly successful what you notice about them is they don't dwell on the ways in which they've been harmed and you know that there are people who have almost all the privilege you could want in the world but are always thinking about the the things that they you know the things they didn't have the ways in which they're harmed and um there's a sort of mass there's a training on mass to get people to think that way people of color especially women gay people trans people so as i said that the topic really came for me and i just was very curious about to what extent all the things i'm hearing about all the time are true uh or useful or wise and i think i ended up finding that a lot of them were untrue a lot of them were unwise there's another part that i i want to understand about you though why is it important enough then that you're going to engage and engage as fully as you have you had everybody if your own words can be believed was telling you not to testify before congress for instance um and you still did it even even in the middle of your testimony there are people heckling you in the audience which was already crazy um but then i have to imagine outside of that and and look you've said that not so much in person because people aren't sociopathic like that but in terms of the the sort of mob online people have i'm sure made your life at times emotionally unpleasant so why do you care enough to dedicate yourself to this like i understand why it's a problem for you now i want to know about the amplitude why is this particular issue of such amplitude that you felt you had to get involved well yeah i mean i i guess i have to go back to the same thing which is just it is kind of a personality thing um well i'll i'll give you my example and you can tell me maybe i'm just totally misreading you um so here's why it hit of all the so i have one core thesis in my life the thing that i have chosen and i do believe that it's a choice that i've chosen to pour myself into and make the central meaning of my life so for a while it was ending metabolic disease because my family struggled with morbid obesity and then i switched what i was going to be focusing on because i was exiting the company i don't want to spend a lot of time i believe that what you focus on what your meaning and purpose is it's all malleable right so thomas chatterton williams talks about your very identity is malleable okay so that's a base assumption that i have we may have to get into the whole notion of base assumptions in a minute but for now so i believe identity is malleable i have a long story um but i've spent a lot of time working in the inner cities both as like a big brother to a kid that grew up in south central and then as an employer and having a thousand employees who just grew up hard as [ __ ] in the worst neighborhoods in southern california that you can imagine i mean just the stories are [ __ ] crazy and so when you love somebody and you see them struggle and this is definitely something that's sort of been a recurring loop in my life when somebody i love i see struggle i can't help but ask a question how do we solve that problem so no [ __ ] what would it take so with morbid obesity no [ __ ] what does it take to end metabolic disease well you have to make food they choose based on taste and it happens to be good for them because we've spent plenty of time telling people no no just eat vegetables and not oreos and go to the gym it doesn't [ __ ] work right it's just it violates a principle of the human condition so okay well if that doesn't work what would work cool make snack food that's good for them awesome so i gave myself over to that completely then as i was coming out of that and wanted to get back into storytelling i was like what is a problem i give a [ __ ] enough about to tell stories about that thing that i could have an animus that i could feed into and that i would be motivated enough at a time like this where something happens and i find whoa it aligns with something i care about and now i'm willing to actually say publicly what i think even if that means that the mob turns on me and for me that was people that i love their zip code is the most predictive um thing for their future outcomes just where they grew up and that to me is far more about it's it's poverty it's not race but it happens to align largely certainly in where i was working with minorities um so when this all started to kick off and i thought man i really want to put my head down my my impulse i cannot tell you how strong it was was to put my head down say whatever minor thing i needed to say to sort of hedge and let the mob pass me by right the the board at my store and put you know slogans and things so that just don't destroy me right um and that made me feel like a coward i thought oh [ __ ] so the thing i always tell people the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself so it just so happened that putting my head down and not trying to go find the truth because it wasn't even that i had something to say it was what if i go find something that's really inconvenient and i don't love that idea so i want to put my head down let it blow over that made me feel like a coward it made me feel like i wouldn't actually serve the people that i love and care about and want to actually serve and so now it's like well okay i'm gonna have to dive into this because it aligns with this whole the zip code for me i can't live in a world where your zip code is the number one predictor of your future success i have chosen to not let that be okay um and now it's collided with what's happening now um so that's the thing that like i don't want to feel like a coward the people that i love and care about like i want to avoid this and and maybe i'm projecting that on you um i have this vision of you wanting just to be this really unique collision of a jazz musician and a rapper and now you've become a writer on like deeply political is probably the word you wouldn't use but i would have if i didn't know your stance on politics uh these political issues um so i'm just curious is is there anything reminiscent of what i just said into why you stepped into this space or am i just totally projecting myself onto you um well that's a good question um i guess the the only way i can answer is just sort of thinking about how i got into it i was i i i guess it just was noticing the the the the cultural zeitgeist on the issue of race i thought was getting something extremely deeply and importantly wrong um and in my spare time from doing music i would just write you know pages and pages of text trying to just understand for myself where it was all coming from um why is it that in like the third or fourth ranked you know ivy league college in the wealthiest nation on earth i'm meeting so many people that are claiming to be they're speaking as if they're jean valjean from les mis like this is this is objectively one of the most interesting phenomena just to to psychoanalyze to understand what is going on here like what the hell is going on um and in some cases it was people who were from where i'm from so i knew it wasn't that they're coming from the hood um and i i also i also just grew up with a very keen sense my mother was from the south bronx and grew up there when that was synonymous with urban squalor and fires that don't get put out and i was always you know aware of the distance between that upbringing and my own and what it actually meant to to to live in poverty and to live without privilege and to you know not eat breakfast and whatnot and almost none of the people feeling themselves to be victims were from that background um and to the ex people you know even tried to downplay the extent that they were from privilege right um and i'm i was so curious why is that why is it that people want to be victims of racism there's this part in people's souls that is nourished by the experience of having been a victim of racism there there's some spiritual hole that this is filling for people and i think i understood that instinctively i understood how precisely how powerful it was and that's what made me so worried about where it all could go because i there is no internal limiting principle to this movement it will it will never stop it won't stop when if and when reparations happen it won't stop when you know every politician or person is is the has the correct level of melanin when all of the policy proposals happen it it is a it's a force that has no internal limiting principle um and i became worried about that because it seemed to not care about collateral damage it seemed to not care so much about facts and it was personal because it it it bore on my relationship with myself and with others was i was i a black person who by virtue of blackness was a victim and therefore could can speak in certain ways and make claims on on someone like you um or was i coleman hughes with whatever particular background i had and i you know and my blackness is only relevant to you know making jokes and applying sunscreen um so all of that mattered a lot and i felt like there was something really wrong that almost nobody was talking about that was the that was i think really what you know like if there's an elephant in the room that that's what i felt like i felt like there was an elephant in the room and there's and nobody's talking about it you know the emperor has no clothes would be the better analogy and so it's it's really crazy making to be in a room where the emperor has no clothes and everyone's pretending that he does that's the type of thing that makes one dedicate one's life to saying something so that's the position i felt that i was in yeah it's uh the emperor has no clothes is a really great way of saying it and as somebody who i don't feel like i know what the emperor is wearing um and that's it's been so i i am i'm intoxicated by learning uh so coming into this is somebody just on the outside being like okay i've never really thought about this because i had a default position that seemed so universally true and so obviously true to me and that my life experience had taught me was obviously true that i thought it was merely that one needed to utter the words and that the problem i was facing was one of people had not encountered the idea and because they had not encountered the idea i simply needed to make the idea known to them so i'll be specific um working at quest which is where i had i had three thousand employees a thousand of them grew up hard as [ __ ] and i thought oh i began to realize we have a mindset problem and i'll just i'll give it to you really quickly so we were growing so fast we grew by 57 000 in our first three years in manufacturing so that's people dude you're just people people people people people square footage equipment is [ __ ] crazy it wasn't like software we have the same eight people that build instagram and you sell for a billion dollars i mean this is just [ __ ] people and i was having to interview them sometimes two and three at a time just to like get enough people in the door and so i began to shorthand the interview process and one of the questions that i asked was the magic genie question now the magic genie question is is predicated on my base assumption that if i can align my selfish desires with the employee meaning that i can trust them to be selfish they can trust me to be selfish i'm going to do what's in my best interest they're going to do what's in their best interest and if we're both when we're at our peak selfishness we're pulling in the same direction then we're going to win like because i don't have to change their behavior they don't have to change mine so i wanted to know what do you really want in life because if i can offer you that through the job now we're [ __ ] in business because we're going to be going in the same direction but if what you want is something i can't offer then i want to tell you that up front so anyway magic genie question was you can get one wish can't ask for more wishes can't bring somebody back from the dead or cure cancer it's just something for you because i'm trying to figure out what you actually want and dude without exception i must ask that question two or three hundred times and i got the same answer every single time now it's a job so of course they're going to be going in one direction which most people started by saying i would ask for a job it's like no you wouldn't right it's a magic genie job may be shorthand for money so i get that i was sort of leading them down a primrose path but ultimately every single one of them said a million dollars and i walked away from that going that doesn't make [ __ ] sense like this is a magic genie why would you ask for a million dollars why don't you ask for an unimaginably large amount of money and then i realized oh my god for them that is an unimaginably large amount of money they didn't ask for a trillion dollars or a machine that printed money that would always be accepted for all time by anybody they asked for a million dollars and i'm like in l.a you can't buy a [ __ ] house for a million dollars this is crazy so i was like oh my god like i need only give them this more expansive view of what's possible like hey you know aim for the stars and if you fail you you or whatever the [ __ ] aim for the moon and if you fail you land in the stars whatever that the phrase is it's like if you're aiming so big even a failure that is only some fraction of that is still far better than when your your goal is small and so i was so hyped and i'm telling everybody this and i'm like i will come in early i will stay late i will teach you anything you want to do about entrepreneurship anything i will teach you how to build a competitive nutrition company it was just like i wanted to teach them anything because if they were aligned like that and it actually did work but it in terms of true life transformation it only impacted about two percent of the people so i start getting really frustrated with like what's really going to have the kind of big impact but anyway that's beside the point my main point is this so i thought i need to only utter the words and this will change everybody's life so i thought okay what took me from scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car because that's where i was in my early twenties to building a billion dollar business and having just extraordinary financial success what was it was there one thing that i could pass on and i was like yes the answer is to accept responsibility for everything in my life i was like oh my god that's so easy to encapsulate the first blog article i ever wrote coleman i was so excited i was like i'm gonna detail how if you're hit by a drunk driver it's all your fault now i sincerely believed that i would be met with rose petals and cheering and people would just be like this is it tom thank you so much this is amazing i'm gonna turn my life around it's gonna be incredible and people were so angry and they were so upset and i was caught so off guard i had no like no sense of i'm literally giving you the keys to the kingdom i'm not even saying the world should work this way i'm just saying it does work this way and if you take responsibility and say hey my life is an exact reflection of my choices even if that's a lie even if it's a lie it will empower you in a way where you will now act in a fashion that will be so advantageous that even if it isn't true it will propel you forward because it gets you to act as if it were true as if you could control everything and it will move you forward and it's like i just i feel like if i give people two choices hey you can control everything or you can control nothing ah it's your choice but you you only get to pick one which would you choose now if people in and of course people are going to say oh it's a false dichotomy and all that and i'm like [ __ ] hell do i really have to argue that point yes of course it's a false dichotomy i'm just saying if you're going to err on one side air on the side of personal responsibility is what matters the backlash i have gotten over that it knows no bounds and i i am still to this day beside myself with surprise that people wouldn't rather that be true and to try and see if that would help them yeah you made a few few really good points there one i just want to go back to what you said at the beginning which was that they all asked for one million dollars um i think it's a huge one of the biggest problems with growing up poor is is not necessarily the lack of things per se um lack of material objects but the lack the the lack of imagination that you grow up with that your world is about this this big so when my mom grew up she didn't she was a brilliant woman and got into stuyvesant but she didn't apply to college and the reason she didn't is for no reason at all is because she just didn't know anyone who had been to college i think if you grow up with people constantly telling you you can be president and you know more than more than the rhetoric because talk is cheap if you grow up seeing people doing amazing things at every level of society um seeing people in corporate jobs seeing people who've been to college you grow up with all of these things being normalized you you failed to appreciate the extent to which seeing those people enabled you to think that was possible for yourself um and that i think that is that's the logic behind the idea of a role model um which can you know it can be it can feel like an like nonsense advice to say oh we need more role models um but do you think that sounds like nonsense advice because that sounds super [ __ ] powerful to me i think i think it sounds yeah that's that's exactly what i think but it can it can sound like an unactionable thing i'm like how do you how do you form a policy around that but well so let's drill down on that because i think this may and again i want to just really [ __ ] stress i i don't feel like i have deep wisdom here i feel like i have a way of thinking that is extraordinarily useful um what the outcome of this line of thinking will be i'll speak to in three to five years when i feel like i actually have my head wrapped around this but um it does not seem and this is straight from thomas soul and i know a lot of people just [ __ ] debunk him or or ignore him or um deride him however you want to think of it but he's so just like stats driven and he's like look political power does not lead to the outcomes that you want like look at any group like forget stop looking at it by race just look at any group that pursued economic well-being through politics they all lose they all lag behind and it's people that pursue it and again this is thomas soul so he had the data to back it up i have not memorized any of this stuff but the the punch line seems so self-evidently true to me the people that pursue it through direct economic well-being through entrepreneurship or business they win over and over and over over and over and over and it seems like the moment right now is all defaulting to policy and so to me going back to the physics of progress okay cool that seemed like a valid experiment to run let's try policy get get political power change the policies and then see what outcome right because we should know what the metrics are that we're going to judge success by that experiment has been run by other groups before now and it doesn't seem to have worked so why do you think people lean so hard into policy even though the evidence is there saying hey that's probably not the fastest most effective way to get the kind of economic well-being you actually want no i think that's the point you're making is is so important and deep and it is it lies at the you know at the foundation of my my views on on this subject i think it's the kind of thing that if you never read sowell or you know jason reilly or a few others who've written about this you will you'll never question your unthinking assumption that the way groups advance is by getting political power and then securing policy that is favorable to their group which then uplifts them that seems like too obvious to even be worth noticing that you believe but then you just look at the history you know forget people of color just look at the history of different white ethnic groups and you know the irish show up at the bottom of every social indicator from crime to alcoholism to poverty relative to you know the germans say but the irish are the ones famously dominating politics uh and then you see the same pattern show up in other countries where the groups that that are dominating politics are the ones at the bottom of society and their domination of politics ends up it insulates them against discriminatory laws um but it doesn't actually create wealth uh and and then you see the groups creating wealth today i mean asian americans there are lots of very poor asian american groups in various pockets in the country but on the average higher incomes than white people native asians that are born here uh have higher wealth than white people and they have they don't even have enough political power to get rid of laws that discriminate against them such as affirmative action for example asians have very little political power in this country um and i c can anyone even name more than can can anyone name enough asian politicians to fill up one hand can the typical person do that no um black politicians it's trivially easy so i think people have a deeply flawed model of how groups advance and that is that's a fundamental a fundamental difference between the way i think about the world and the way the modern anti-racist movement thinks about the world and i'm pretty sure that i'm on the right side of that i haven't seen super compelling evidence for why it is true that that that that you should have a politics first view of the world view of group advancement i haven't seen the evidence but i'm open to it yeah i'm the same so my thing is i'm just obsessed with what actually works so in business i call it no [ __ ] what would it take and the whole reason of calling it no [ __ ] is because i think people [ __ ] themselves a lot they they get stories are so powerful so you're you're talking to somebody who's dedicated their life to the power of story being able to change one's identity and behavior patterns ultimately all i'm ever trying to influence is behavior because your life is going to be an echo of your behaviors a period like life does not give a [ __ ] what you think about life only gives a [ __ ] about how you act right so it's why i revolt against uh the notion of the secret if you've ever seen that video or heard people talk about that where half of the secret is amazing which is hey you have to believe it before you're going to pursue it it's what i call the only belief that matters now the reason i call it the only belief that matters is if you believe that your time and energy of trying to improve will reward you with improved skill set then you will go down the path of trying to improve yourself if you believe that your talent and intelligence are fixed traits and there's nothing you can do to improve them then you won't go down that path so it literally is that bifurcation point from which everything else in your life will spring because if you believe hey i can get better like i control it even if the [ __ ] system is trying to keep me down i can get so good they can't ignore me and like that to me is [ __ ] interesting and i'll i'll use i'm so curious to know i never hear you talk about um nelson mandela and he is like you want to talk about somebody long before this was a question of race for me it was just a question of that [ __ ] guy is so inspiring and i'm inspired by two things in his life one he grew up in a time where at the age of 14 he was brought naked before his tribe sat on the ground splayed his legs open and a shaman or chief sorry a leader came up with a sharp rock grabbed his foreskin and [ __ ] sliced it off and then he had to with no anesthetic dude and he had to yell the warriors like credo or something and i was like that's some [ __ ] oh gee take the kid out in the woods kick his [ __ ] teeth in like write a passage [ __ ] that having read joseph campbell really [ __ ] influenced me and i was like dude i that that is some badassery on the level of which i'm not prepared to do that's [ __ ] rad and then the other is dude went to prison for 27 [ __ ] years and did not come out and say like we're gonna become the oppressors he was like look it so i wrote a whole thing it's called neon future and it was subtly is the only truthful way to say it it was subtly influenced by having read long walk to freedom and so it's about this it's about people who are augmented um with technology versus people who aren't and obvious parallels between race and the the main character's name is kita says look there when you're oppressed there are three options before you remain oppressed become the oppressor or find a third way of unity basically which is to me that without him using those words is exactly what i thought of as nelson mandela saying and so he comes out and even has people on his protective force as the president that were obviously racist and his own guard was like what are you doing like they're going to create a vulnerability they're going to intentionally open you up to violence and he was like the only way forward is together and that to me just made all the sense in the world um and when i think about just like no [ __ ] what would it take to move forward it's like look at the experiments that have been run stop telling yourself a narrative about what all this is and that ties back into part of why the narrative takes hold is something you didn't use these words but i think it's what you meant righteous indignation that moment where you realize i'm a victim and that fills you with this this certainty the intoxication of certainty of i have been wronged and i have every right to [ __ ] go after somebody that feels good man like all the times in my life i'm i'm my wife is quick to get to righteous indignation and i see the way it makes her a bulldog and despite her she's very physically demure despite that she's [ __ ] tough as nails man because she's so quick to be filled with that like righteous indignation and so i have wanted in my life for moments of that kind of clarity and certainty and so any narrative that gives somebody that can be really powerful but no [ __ ] will it solve the problem and so this is where uh you know screaming into the wind it feels like well i'm just like look at the results what's your goal what do you want are you getting are you moving towards that so taking someone like um tony heezy coats who who i am wildly ignorant to i know essentially only because he's been involved in comics oddly enough which is a world i know a lot about and then um the speech he did with you for reparations and i would dude i was like he's such a good orator like i [ __ ] love it the vibe he's giving me like [ __ ] yeah we gotta rise up and the irony is it's only after the fact that i'm like wait it's rise up against white people but but because it's so like i said i'm so i get so moved by that [ __ ] i'm just like [ __ ] yeah like come on and so i get how if you can click people over into righteous indignation you can like really get people amped but is it serving you absolutely i mean righteous i think this is um it you know it's interesting i often think the people who are most opposed to something are often the people who understand it the most at a visceral level and understand how powerful it is it's not that i don't get why people enjoy righteous indignation about race it's that i completely get it and i'm i'm i understand how powerful it is because i've been on the other side of it i felt that feeling um you know it is similar to a drug in how how it makes you feel you know if there were a drug that could make you feel the way that people feel when they're listening to tahasi coates talk about all the ways in which america has wronged black people um you know that that drug would be metaphorically flying off the shelves because it's it's an amazingly good feeling um there's a little bit of a toxic edge to it but it's it's overwhelmingly a feeling that people crave so yeah but the the problem is you know you ca it's not it need not ever be aligned with reality you can you can feel i mean that and the the easiest way to see that is the fact that white supremacists feel that same feeling i have to imagine right when they're thinking about whatever it is white supremacists think about so that that feeling you know the nazis felt that feeling feeling is a human universal and you cannot trust it it's not to say that it's never right often it is right and it's there's something important about it too because it's an impetus for change where you know the and the the let's say the inertia of society is to remain at a status quo you need that moral outrage and righteous indignation to even really want to change things and change is needed sometimes um so so how do we make sense of a feeling that was being felt by civil rights protesters in the early sixties but is also felt an emotion that is also probably felt by white supremacists and nazis how do we go about trusting or mistrusting a feeling that is so that is so present at the best moments in history and at the worst moments in history and the only way to do that the only way to address that feeling is to observe it appreciate it and then very rigorously look at what where is this feeling pointing me in in the direction at this moment and is that a wise direction to go in after the feeling has subsided and we're cool-headed enough to i think we have to we have to define wise and this like if i were to put my finger on the thing that scares me most about all of this is what outcome are you expecting and did you actually get it and that that's where i get super [ __ ] nervous because people don't go like i so let me finish that thought people don't go hey i'm i'm going to get into power and i'm going to try to make change and then they don't go well did i make change or not and they don't value themselves for this sincere attempt they only value themselves for the outcome and thusly the need to feel good about themselves the psychological immune system will kick in and it will paint a narrative over what they have done that will eschew facts and and try to look beyond that because they may not have even though their intentions were so beautiful and so good they may not have actually gotten the outcome that they wanted and so being able to go okay cool i'm gonna say ahead of time here is what i'm gonna here's my goal here's what i'm trying to achieve here's the metrics by which i'm going to judge that and at the end of all this i'm just going to look and say did the things that i tried or hopefully even along the way so we're just adjusting course adjusting course adjusting course are we actually getting where we want to go and that's where i find that people just fall back on rhetoric i when i first found thomas soul i was blown away and really unnerved by the video that i was looking at look like it was filmed in the 80s and i was like oh if he was saying amazing [ __ ] 40 years ago and we haven't like this hasn't been adopted and become the the sort of dominant way that we're thinking about it what the [ __ ] like i don't that's the part i don't know what to do with that yeah um it is depressing but um you know i i i i resonate completely with what you're saying and i really like the way that you frame it um and this goes back to one thing we were saying earlier which is often i hear people say you know i was really excited about the obama presidency but then i was i was really um dismayed to find that after eight years we were still struggling with the same problems of racism and police brutality and so forth and then i think to myself so why did you exp why do you still why haven't you updated your world view to accommodate the fact that obama didn't solve things why didn't you come out of that experience with a new belief that presidents with a with a you know a recalibrated sense of what a president can do but i think they did man i think the recalibration went like this um and and now i am waiting out past what i actually understand and i hope you will give me the grace to to be thinking out loud right now but um i think it went something like this oh my god this is amazing this is going to solve our problems dude i felt that so palpably when he was elected it was so exciting and then it doesn't solve the problem and you go i knew it man the system is so [ __ ] racist that even with a black president you can't overcome this [ __ ] that there is something so insidious and so it is so wormed its way into every [ __ ] glance interaction everything every everything that you even even a black president won't be able to overcome it and so now you have where literally i don't this is part of what gives me the animus to to to grab a hold of the third rail and and like make my life and my wife didn't know what that was by the way the third rail in the subway system is the thing that carries the electricity so if you touch it you die um so when i say that they're rail that's what i mean but the the thing that that draws me to that is now if if that is your base assumption i alluded to base assumptions earlier if your base assumption is oh the the the very structure of western society is such that even a black president can't overcome the inherent racism you must burn the system down and start anew and that's what i see people acting in accordance with that freaks me the [ __ ] out because i'm all for completely doing away with this system but only if you've got a better one in place first it's like the the thought of being in a boat and being like yo our boat's leaking so gotta [ __ ] sink it and then we'll we'll figure it out after that it's like what like that that strikes me as a very bad idea right yeah i think um that's a that's exactly how i think about dismantling the police um so that yeah there's like the defund idea and this dismantle idea and strangely i find the dismantle one makes much more sense provided that you have another police force that's better to to do the job so you know this is what happened in camden new jersey they just got rid of the city police and then replaced it with a county police that was culturally better for many reasons and so that kind of thing you know that's getting rid of the boat but having a pretty good sense that you have a better boat right next door um you know whereas the defunding the police makes very little sense to me because it seems like you just want to poke holes in your own boat like let's just make our boat weaker to hurt the boat because we get we get a a sense of pleasure out of doing something that hurts the institution of the police so let's just take away some of their money let's not ask the tough questions about you know is that going to lead to fewer unarmed americans getting shot for example let's just hurt them in some way also i'm thinking about second and third order consequences it's like all right people getting shot by the police is [ __ ] gnarly like watching the videos george floyd anybody dude it is so [ __ ] unnerving um you get a real sense of holy hell um and i i have been i've been manhandled by the police i think that's the right way to say it so i was once in an apartment a friend's apartment bang bang bang on the door talking to my mom on the phone talking to my mom on the phone bang bang bang on the door like the [ __ ] so i'm like mom hold on i look out the people and somebody has their finger over the people and i'm like yeah i'm not opening the store and they're like police open up and i'm like yeah right man and they're like look somebody called 9-1-1 from that apartment i'm like no they didn't i'm here alone um and they're like okay and they leave so i'm back talking to my mama phone and three minutes later bang bang bang on the door open this [ __ ] door we're gonna break it down i'm like the [ __ ] is going on so i go and look out the door again and i realize oh nobody had their finger over it i'm actually just seeing the other wall because they're not standing in front of the people and so i'm like dude i'm not opening the door i cannot see who you are so i got this and then they duck back out of the way and like really fast i could see okay they are wearing a uniform and my mom goes um or i said hey give me give me the number i need to call and verify that this is really the police and my mom's freaking out she's like absolutely not they're gonna give you a fake number like don't open the door so i'm like [ __ ] what do i do and they're like banging on it they're like if you don't open this [ __ ] door like we're gonna battering ram it down and i'm like jesus man like this is getting real [ __ ] freaky so my mom comes up the brilliant idea because there was no chain on the door she goes okay put the phone down put all your weight against the door and just open it a crack so i'm like okay cool i'll do it and i'll check and see if this is really the cops i put my weight against the door open to crack boom they kick the [ __ ] door in i go flying they grab me arms behind my back boom face down on the uh the bar that happened to be there and they're like you better [ __ ] hope everybody in this apartment's okay and they and i know everyone's gonna be okay because i'm the only person and they're they're like searching the apartment and they come back out and they're like man you're [ __ ] lucky that everybody or you know there's nobody here i'm like what is happening first order consequences you can reduce the police brutality you can reduce police shootings but by defunding the police or you know whatever the strategy is going to be what's the second and third order consequences do other crimes go up does violent crime go up robbery homicide like there are i'm not in any way shape or form trying to make light of the horrifying reality of police brutality and what it felt like in that moment to be like i can't stop them they're gonna do whatever the [ __ ] they're gonna do and i am literally there was four of them i think they're going to do what the [ __ ] they want to do and there's nothing i can do to stop them and that is a really icky feeling but it's also gnarly when it's a mob of in fact it's probably more gnarly to face a mob of just normal people that are angry that especially if they're armed and living in america that's like a real [ __ ] thing um that's more terrifying because they feel like they're not like anchored by anything you know at least there's some accountability with the police so that's where i start going yo we we have to really look at what's a knock on effect that we might not be thinking of on its face yeah um i mean we've already seen crime scene crime go up in in new york homicides are way up um i think there are ways so like on the one hand there are ways where less police just does lead to more crime i think unfortunately i think that is a true fact about the trade-offs of civilization but i i do think you know there are ways where you can have both at once um where you can get the police out of doing certain kinds of work without the crime crime rate uh rising um so i think we we have to you know have as you as you would say no [ __ ] um you know conversations about what are the areas where we can really get the best of that trade-off where we're not losing one for the other and then at the same time we just have to realize that there are situations where the trade-off just is there and we have to find a way to live with the balance that we can live with i mean at the at the moment i think there's an under under discussed problem of homicide and murder um those are synonyms of course um i can feel you preempting the uh the youtube comments yeah does he not know that homicide is murder um i mean it is it i think as you say when you see the video of a cop doing something horrible to someone george floyd it is just gut-wrenching uh and without at all minimizing that there is a separate problem of people murdering other people and it's a problem that is very it's non-existent in most places and then extremely existent in certain pockets certain corners of the country that most people would never live in much less even drive through but it's real and um i think it should be it should be viewed as a central problem not as an afterthought or a way of distracting from a separate conversation but it should be viewed as you know i i i think of the analogy to the campaign against drunk driving in the 1980s you had mothers against drunk driving and just a kind of national you know reckoning on this issue where people are trying to combat it culturally legally etc and i think why can't we have some kind of movement like that which is addressed to homicide which is after all the the leading cause of death for black men in their 20s and it need not be a racialized movement right the whole point is that skin color doesn't matter here we have we have a huge issue and it's uncomfortable to talk about for some people because the perpetrators are overwhelmingly black as well but to me i think all of that is a distraction you know it ultimately we have an issue of life or death and we need some kind of movement around it that is compassionate and at the same time fact-based and goal-oriented because you know we can't just we can't we've just learned to tolerate this as a society and i think we we have to stop tolerating it yeah the fact based and goal-oriented that to me is the the powerful combination there thomas chatterton williams said something that i thought was so profound which was we often talk about race when what we really intend to talk about is poverty and i thought oh my god that that feels true as as as i dip my toe into this world um that was sort of the because i was already immersed in something that the more i get into this more i realized i thought this was totally separate i thought what we were talking about over here is race and those are definitely the words and the rhetoric that we're using but as i look at the underlying problems i actually think we're talking about poverty and poverty the whole notion of your zip code should not be the determining or the predictive factor of your future success i i have put at the center of my life and and have now for the last i don't know five or six years so it's like that's something i'm really [ __ ] obsessed by and thinking about with my particular um interests and passions and skill set how can i be useful to that and that's my entire business model is about that and as i go into that if we start playing the no [ __ ] game and say okay this is actually more a question of poverty because when i think about the crime rate or the sorry homicide being the number one killer of black men in their 20s if you ask a question why is that true do you think to me it seems to lead to the notion of honor and i'm curious if you think that's a big part of the underlying cause of that that it that um poverty has created these honor societies yeah i i think that you know i i don't want to say with too much confidence that i know what the cause is because it it gets into it gets into a very i think you're right that a culture of honor and like you killed my friend and i'm so i'm gonna kill yours that has been very normal throughout human history that's been in a sense it's weird that we live in a culture where that's where most americans don't feel that way where if someone kills you know someone close to me i expect the police to deal with it even if i may have personal feelings of anger i do think there has always been a tradition particularly in the american south of you do it yourself and you know one of the things that seoul has persuasively argued is that um you know black people used to live in the south all all of us used to be in the south 95 basically until about 1900 when when people started moving northward so culturally black people have roots in the south and in southern honor honor culture so that that could be one contributing factor why there's such a large racial disparity there well let's ask an obvious question in terms of whether that's a um a southern thing or whether the ultimate punchline is going to be poverty because like you i don't feel like i know the answer i have informed hypotheses in terms of what i know about human nature but is homicide among whites higher in the south as well much higher really interesting yeah there's a huge disparity between southern white people and northern white people and there always has been that's [ __ ] interesting um okay very unexpected punchline which i will update my thinking on um actually no wait a second so that would now let me ask the next question which will determine whether i actually need to update my thinking or not does that hold true regardless of socioeconomic status that's a good question and that's beyond my beyond my knowledge because if that is only true at a certain level of income disparity i'm going to say is far more important than income so the ginny coefficient which says that violence happens when there is a localized disparity so everybody being poor is fine everybody being rich is fine some disparity between rich and poor is fine but when the disparity is too great people no longer believe that they can cross that chasm and when you don't have socioeconomic mobility then the only way to gain status for young men who of course are trying to do that to get access to women is going to be through violence right so again this is no [ __ ] is all about breaking things down to um that the the physics of what how a human is and just thinking about that and so if all of that is true and you have as people's economic power goes up their um interracial violence goes down than one or intra racial violence sorry is actually what i meant it goes down then this is a poverty thing and not a race thing and not even necessarily a southern thing it's that's interesting so this is we are again we're at the sort of edges of what i actually understand this this is something to to really think through but i i'd be so curious to see the actual breakdown of the data on this to find out if this is breaking on racial lines economic lines north-south lines um because my gut is the data will already give us the answer that we seek we just haven't looked at the right data or whoever has looked at it doesn't have a big enough platform yeah well then there's the there's the problem of which you know when you find the two things are correlated which one is causing which so and you know then it gets tricky because often the the causal arrows going in both directions at once so like high crime may be caused by poverty but poverty may also be caused by high crime and probably they become reciprocal at some point it's a positive reinforcing loop like birth or like labor excuse me so it's like once once labor starts there's no unwinding it right whereas the shift so this was told to me by a neurosurgeon and i'd never heard of the terms um a positive reinforcing loop and a negative reinforcing loop so negative is um going from the parasympathetic nervous system to the sympathetic right fight-or-flight versus rest and digest as you go into the parasympathetic you will calm down the sympathetic nervous system so that's why meditation is so powerful because it it you can't be both like [ __ ] freaking out and agitated and calm at the same time it doesn't work they're a seesaw whereas labor is a re a positive reinforcing loop where the more you're in it the worse it gets the more that you're moving towards just birth is the only way to end the cycle of labor so all the things that are going on neurochemically and physiologically in the body it does end in birth every single time um and that is interesting so i think they get into this positive reinforcing loop where um either the more violent you are the poorer you become or the poorer you are the more violent you become and and it just at now at this advanced state it doesn't matter anymore what cause what came first it only matters how do you interrupt it yeah exactly i think there we there's a lot of vicious cycles that we have to interrupt right now another one that comes to mind is how are we going to increase the quality of police forces there are a lot of bad cops um we can disagree on how many racist cops there are i think there are racist cops no doubt uh i tend to think there are fewer than than you know the typical black lives matter protester might think but beside the point for here there are a lot of bad cops cops that are not good at their jobs incompetent how do we change that so one problem is that not that many people want to become cops to begin with there is a small initial applicant pool and what that means is given a certain number of cops we literally need to maintain a society the typical cop is going to be of lower quality than if there were more applicants what is the current cultural moment going to do to the number and quality of the applicant pool i have to imagine that the more that this mood has swept the nation the typical 12 year old right now is less inclined to become a cop than he or she was 10 years ago because it's viewed as a lower status thing it you know you're you risk being demonized even if you're good and if you're a black person you ha you might you might be viewed as a sellout or a trader which has been true for a long time but has never been more true i think than than it is now so what what that means is a the type of person that becomes a cop now is the type of person that's comfortable or more comfortable with all of those assumptions about him or her which might attract the wrong type of person and there might just be fewer such people to begin with so in the in the medium term that might create more bad cops like it might degrade the quality of the average cop and then we might end up seeing more police brutality which will lead to more outrage which will make becoming a cop even less attractive i don't i don't know if we're really in that vicious cycle yet but it seems like an obvious vicious cycle to avoid before we get in it no question yeah that that is very scary i don't know like if i had a friend come to me and say yo i want to be a cop i'd be like you sure like this does not strike me as a great time to be a cop like man you start getting into the it's kind of like going into the military man i remember when the second gulf war kicked off and i was just like if somebody came to me and they said you know my kid is considering going into the military i'd be like [ __ ] i i am of two minds because on the one hand i'm like truly thank you for your service like anybody that goes into the military and affords us our way of life like i'm not even getting into whether politically it was the right move i'm just saying [ __ ] like you are putting your life on the line and thank you um that is such an extraordinary thing to do but when you've got people seeking advice from people and the only advice they get is yet don't do that that's where it becomes well you're not necessarily then going to get the ideal candidate going into the military unless they're able to equalize the incentives and if you're talking simultaneously about defunding the police so there's going to be less money less training all of that and you're saying it's not prestigious anymore it isn't like the hey man thank you for being a cop thank you for keeping me safe it's like [ __ ] you pig middle finger getting spit on um all cops are bastards i think was the acronym being thrown around why would you do it it's like you're you're just not like you said unless you have a certain temperament you're not going to go into it that's that's some dicey [ __ ] yeah it really is i worry about that yeah that that ranks pretty high on my list of um concerns in terms of second and third order consequences of like really just trying to map out like where where does this go or where do we go from here um which is actually an interesting question to ask you directly like when you think about getting into this arena riding on race riding on the emperor has no clothes do you see your voice as merely being driven to ask the right questions or are you trying to go down a path where you have prescriptive actions ultimately that you want people to take i i guess it depends on what topic there are certain topics where i feel like i've thought about it and researched it enough where i have i have an answer in some sense um i find it's easier to have answers to smaller questions than than to bigger questions obviously um if there's some small policy issue that i've i've gotten obsessed with and i'm you know i think like street lights in in public housing reduce crime at night by like 30 like we should do that it's like an easy thing and you never think of it but like that's an awesome small innovation that would just help society that's like an answer that i have but it's small it's not it's not small to the victim of crime in public housing at night but it's not the big question um to the big questions i do i often don't think in terms of solutions uh i think and that's something i've i've definitely gotten from reading thomas sowell you know there are these inherent trade-offs in society that are just baked in to the fabric of reality and i i i always am trying to get myself and others to understand those trade-offs and to to understand that you know we will never get to zero on any of these problems and there are reasons for that that are baked into human nature and yeah by that i mean zero racism zero murder yeah yeah we will never get to zero racism it it's an unrealistic and childish expectation as much as i can understand why someone would want that and you know we will never get to zero murder probably so long as humans are able to procure a weapon that can kill someone occasionally someone is gonna kill someone else that doesn't mean be complacent but what it means is you know unless you want to be outraged until the end of time you have to have some way your outrage has to be somehow connected to reality such that if the problem is getting better much better quickly that your outrage is to some extent correlated with the degree to which the thing is a problem i heard somebody talk about this and forgive me if it was you um but i thought this was really powerful and they were saying that you if you think of racism as being like a virus where it's contagious and therefore it like with polio it makes sense to chase it down and truly eradicate it and there is no point at which there are diminishing returns because until it is eradicated it will be re-contagious and re-explode and so you really have to get it down to zero versus thinking of it as something that isn't contagious but is individual acts and therefore it will be there will you reach a point of diminishing returns where you're so trying to clamp down it becomes so draconian so 1984 it goes beyond what you can do to what you can say goes beyond what you can say to what you can think and then it becomes like really terrifying you know orwell got it right a very long time ago in terms of what that dystopian future of thought control looks like um and i thought oh that's a really interesting dichotomy to make because the way that people are acting right now is as if it's a virus and we have to that there will be no um punishment no diminishing returns for going all the way to thought control and i thought like as grow test as racism is and by the way and i know this is so derided what i'm about to say people are going to [ __ ] hate but it's one of those it's it seems self-evidently true to me as a business guy it just doesn't make sense and i think it was thomas soule who said the market puts a cost on discrimination it doesn't eliminate discrimination but it puts a price on it and if you look at apartheid south africa they were actually hiring more blacks than they legally could because it was like well if they can do the job better for cheaper then i'm going to hire them now again i'm not saying that's good or bad i'm just saying that when you think about running a business the reason people are they'll do things like that violate a stipulation is you you're so desperate for your business to win like when your house is on the line it really does make you go like i don't give a [ __ ] man i don't if i need 99 women in my business cool i'm down like what whatever is going to allow me to deliver the value that i want to deliver such that i can charge more for it than it costs me to make because look there are scummy business people i'm not advocating for that i'm just saying if if truly your business is predicated on delivering value to people at a cost to you that is less than what they're willing to pay and working your ass off means that you can upgrade your own life and your amount of control and all of that then it's like it doesn't even make sense to discriminate so you just want to find whoever's going to move you forward so discrimination to me seems idiotic in that sense it's like whatever's going to get me where i want to go like i'm beyond open to it but if you think of it as that sort of rapidly spreading contagion you get the sort of mania that we're seeing now yeah i think um this is a i'm glad you brought this up because this is something that i hear more and more nowadays which is the idea that capitalism is racist you have these two two things that ostensibly are separate one is you know a free market system and the other is racial bias or hatred against groups of people but in in some people's minds you know they're connected in this in this very tightly wound way where the more capitalist something is the more racist it is and vice versa and part of fighting racism means supporting policies that curb the free market um so this is one of those areas where you know people just don't so so here's what a like a smart college student would do in order to test that they would say let's look at let's compare the soviet union uh or let's compare east germany to west germany um let's compare north korea to south korea let's compare um you know ghana to the ivory coast you know similar countries that took different economic routes with regard to the free market and let's see how much racism existed in one versus the other that way we can sort of crudely test the hypothesis that capitalism is linked to racism or a smart a smart college student might say frankly a smart high school student might say um let's look at over over the course of u.s history public institutions and private institutions and see how much racism existed in those institutions government run and private that way we can test this idea which is you know just a hypothesis that capitalism is linked to racism i've never seen anyone who makes that claim do it all i've seen is folks like thomas sowell and also walter williams look at it empirically and find that actually at minimum there's no inherent link right capitalists can be racist um government-run entities can be racist and there it's it's very difficult if not impossible to predict whether the free market will lead someone in one direction or the other and there's of course the point you mentioned which is that the market does impose a cost in in many situations not always but um the market tends to impose a cost on on racial discrimination um you know for my my favorite example is that you know plessy versus ferguson the famous uh uh court case that challenged separate but but equal was funded by a street car company a jim crow transit company that was sick of racial segregation because it hurt their bottom line you know they had to separate whites from blacks in the streetcar and that meant that if if a streetcar was you know mostly empty but was the black streetcar they couldn't fill it up with white passengers and that was unprofitable to them were those people racist probably most white jim crow you know people in jim crow south were racists but they were also businessmen um and so they they funded that that that famous civil rights uh case and it's you know it's not widely understood that the free market and civil rights directly aligned with each other in in that particular instance for reasons that are generalizable and as you point out in south africa there were there were areas that were officially whites only that were majority black because um land uh because landlords didn't want to go broke um so yeah in general i i you know i don't want to be taken to say free markets can't be racist or always militate against racism because i think that's much too general a statement it's just that in my mind there is no inherent inherent link between markets and capitalism on the one hand and racism on the other i love what you're saying about a lot of the experiments that you would want to run have actually been run and you just need to look at what results you get so north korea south korea east germany west germany that that's a great example and one of the things that first struck me from shelby steele was that he actually started with sort of a a more aggressive like yeah overthrow the system sort of mentality and he was like oh my god wait a second there actually have been places that had these violent revolutions and let me see how they worked out and so he took a trip to africa to visit countries that had had violent revolution to see are they doing better than places that had peaceful revolutions and he was like it was not pretty and he said that there was rampant corruption in a lot of the countries they had no sense of what the way forward was and he was like it was very eye-opening to just sort of realize that somebody had run that test already and i needed only go look at the results for myself and i thought wow that's so powerful like you know where are the areas where we can say okay cool we have a hypothesis we need to burn this to the ground we need to defund the police whatever and go look at places i forget the name of the county that you said where it was like they actually did this well cool like what did they do what can we learn from that where places that have done it that haven't had the outcome that we want look at that like even now i feel like we're running a social experiment i know crime is up in new york crime is up in l.a if i i don't think i'm misquoting crime is up in l.a like 250 percent um over what exact time period i don't know if it's 2020 versus 2019 or if it's since the protesting and the writing kicked off i'm not entirely sure i'd need to look into that but there are tests being run all the time inadvertently or intentionally but we have to look at the data and then have the base assumption that there's something to learn from that absolutely yeah so that to me is um i think going to be getting getting people on the same base assumption is going to be pretty i think important and when i see people colliding whether it's you and tony heasy coates or anybody i just want to ask okay define your goal for me like say it in a single sentence and this in business i find my big frustration and i run into this a lot is if you say if you ask somebody what their goal is they'll talk for five minutes it's like stop tell me in a single sentence what your goal is and people don't under they don't they actually don't understand that they're unclear and um oh god i forget who said it yeah i forget who said it but forgive me for not having the time to write you a short letter right it's harder as somebody who is so effusive when i'm thinking out loud because i'm actually like not thinking so much so that i can be understood but so that i can understand right that's a quote i forget who i'm ripping off there but um i've always loved that quote so when you force people to be succinct you force them to sort through their own values and realize what they actually want so there's always two things when i see people debating where i just want to say give me in a single non-run-on sentence no no colons give me your your goal then as you go to what it is that you're going to do to get to that goal i want to ask you what your base assumptions are it becomes very hard to know where to press people until you sort of hear their plan but as people begin to re reveal their plan you realize oh my god you have a base assumption now the notion of base assumptions came to me because one of my business partners we would butt heads sometimes and i'd be like in the middle of it like thinking he's a [ __ ] [ __ ] like how does he not get this and he's reacting to me like he is clearly thinking tom is a [ __ ] [ __ ] how does he not get this and so one day i just stepped back and i thought i know he's smart when two smart people are disagreeing like this we almost certainly have some foundational assumption that we're disagreeing on and it's what in my marriage i have i have come to call arguing about the t meaning the cup of tea or what's really going on underneath that so the biggest argument my wife and i have ever had to this day was over a cup of tea and at one point like two hours into this cup of tea argument where we're yelling at each other we were supposed to be going on vacation i'm i'm literally turning around on the freeway and driving home because i'm like [ __ ] this like we're not going to be able to enjoy ourselves i took a deep breath and i said this isn't about the t so what the hell is this about like what are we actually arguing because there's no way two sane people can be this heightened about a cup of tea so like what are we really saying and once we started talking about that and it took us a minute to actually know what our motives were but once we could identify oh my god like this is my base assumption that your behavior means this and your base assumption is my behavior means this but that actually that actually isn't what i mean what i mean is this then it's like okay now we can start having a rational conversation about how we actually achieve our goals but if we don't get to that point we'll just keep disconnecting yeah i think you're yeah what you're talking about is um there's a great book by tom sowell uh called a conflict of visions and the the the question he starts with is why is it that people seem to reliably line up on opposite sides of issues that seem to have nothing in common with each other gun control abortion taxing the rich none of these issues climate change these seem completely unrelated and yet you see people line up predictably on the same sides of them and why is that um and you know one reason is because people have different basic assumptions about how society works and he spends the rest of the book laying out two fundamentally different visions about human society's human nature and identifying different famous intellectuals that typify each one and the result is you get to the end of the book you know you could read the book and not not even know which one he was that's the that's the style of book it is um of course if you know the rest of souls will work you'll know he very much takes one side of that but um you know i i definitely resonate to you know often i think about it as an iceberg where you know the argument i'm having with someone is is often taking place at the tip of an iceberg but we have disagreements at the very base of the iceberg that we're not even discussing right now but that are producing the higher level disagreement and ultimately if we don't reconcile what's at the bottom of the iceberg we're going to go on having these you know top level disagreements until the end of time and just you know wondering why we're always disagreeing about [ __ ] like every news story we're taking the opposite side of what are the odds are we brainwashed you know i i've had this you know with with the different people who are smart just like any new story that's controversial we're coming at it from different different angles so it's not about the news story and we're both smart what is it it's it is i think having a a different picture a different starting expectation um from humans and human society yeah i'm gonna have to read that book because uh that that is so true speaking about the sort of fundamental way that we come at something do you ever think that you would have more impact by leaning into your rap career than taking a very intellectual approach which i guess i just revealed my base assumption which is one is sort of steeped in emotion a cool uh a way to inject ideas um with going through the limbic centers of the brain instead of the rational centers of the brain uh what do you think i think it would be so much more difficult for you to do it because to cut through the noise and to know that you were um hitting the moment where your style is right to the culture so that they would elevate you as a musician i think is is going to be far harder versus your your true and authentic stance as an intellectual one you make me angry because you're you are so much smarter than i am and i people think i'm being humble when i say things like that but what what i mean is i have a definition about intelligence which is the ability to process raw data quickly people confuse my ability to speak quickly with my ability to think quickly and i promise you i unfortunately do not think very quickly which is why you're never going to see me in public debates and things like that because i'd have to be like [ __ ] yeah let me go think about that i'm prone to being swayed by emotion and only later having to sit down and be like okay i know to run this through the physics of progress and so i can get to a usable conclusion but it often takes me time so when i think about how uniquely positioned you are as an intellectual i think you will ultimately you will get reinforcement for that that you might struggle for on the rap side um but having actually gone pretty hard on your music you have a unique voice there and i think there is i would be really sad to see you abandon that um but it would be weird to watch the public grapple with you as an intellectual and as a rapper because you're exploring very different parts of the human condition and you're this is so funny i'm very easy to make sound crazy so i stopped doing print interviews because if you extract extract any one sentence from my part of the discussion today you can make me sound like a [ __ ] lunatic i speak with like a lot of hyperbole and a lot of energy and so if you abstract that i i have seen it happen where i look crazy i heard somebody talking about you as the person speaking in opposition of reparations and they they said only things about you that were true and they made you sound like the worst conceivable candidate they're like this guy's a [ __ ] soundcloud rapper with a song called my dick works fine it's like like it was so funny to hear them say it because i had listened to the music and i was like but the music's [ __ ] insightful the music is good it's [ __ ] good music and as an intellectual he's amazing he he triggers a level of insecurity in me that i don't even like to be honest about like so but there is this there it's limbic and logic and your ability to speak to both one will almost certainly be rewarded more than the other and one isn't respected on the other side it's very hard it's like when dave chappelle said do we really give a [ __ ] what ja rule thinks about i forget what he's talking about it's [ __ ] hilarious a bit right exactly and but at the same time there's nothing about being a rapper that stops gel rule from being incredibly insightful right i i am utterly blown away by jay-z as a social commentator right listening to his music i have been profoundly moved by and as a lyricist he's [ __ ] incredible um but yet we have a hard time letting one person be both yeah so without i don't like revealing too much of what i'm going to do in the future i don't like talking about stuff i just like doing it but um you know i'm going to run the experiment and we'll see how it how it goes i i take all of your points are good and they're they're things i i think about all the time you know there's a certain person that isn't swayed by logic and there's a certain person that isn't swayed by limbic and ultimately you know everyone the typical person has a balance of both of these in their brain and there's some people that are more extreme in one direction and and more extreme than the other um and a lot of you know there are whole you know whole domains of society that operate more in one space than the other and they don't always see each other or care about each other and that's always something that's bothered me because i think they're both important they both matter um and i want to contribute to both of them and i will so you know we'll see we'll see to what extent i'm accepted ultimately you only live once and you know you can either just do things that you know will be accepted and then die having limited your you know your options in that way or you can say [ __ ] it and do what you actually want to do and let the chips fall where they're made where they may i think that that's absolutely a no-brainer to me yeah i i find myself in in a similar-ish situation i'm way more behind the scenes as a filmmaker and i think my team this has always been sort of a weird disconnect for them but i don't view myself as a ceo in terms of what is my identity my identity is an artist like i think of myself as a filmmaker and i only got into business so i could control the resources so i could control the art and when i think about like i think about comics a lot man and it is most people think of me as um an influencer is probably the word they would use i really hackle at that or they may think of me as a motivational person that's maybe even worse for me but i think about it it's modes of impact and life experiences taught me that what you and i are doing right now will affect very meaningfully about two percent of the people that the the broad um public so not obviously people self-select if they're already following you they've already put themselves into a very rarefied group but the sort of broad world i'll ballpark a dead about two percent of the people will change their life based on something they hear you say and it's [ __ ] amazing to have that kind of impact but when i think about shaping a culture which is ultimately what i'm trying to do that leads me to storytelling and so it's my first love it's the you know you only live once and let the chips fall where they may it's like i want to tell stories i am i am at my most lit up when i'm by myself and i'm writing and but writing a story like finding a way to speak through imagery and characterization and human flaws and foibles like that and and quite frankly learning story structure and being like [ __ ] if you time this right you bring these threads together like there's something in the human mind that makes that [ __ ] incredibly powerful like all of that is i just find so so so cool yeah so absolutely on your on your rap career um one i highly highly highly encourage people to go check your music out um coldman c-o-l-d-m-a-n i assume you're still using that the music is i thought it would be more you playing with the same ideas and it was that you do in your intellectual life and it was really interesting to see you playing with something different um do you have like a core thesis to your lyrics or is it you're just sort of channeling emotion and it's all intuitive i'm hoping if i i leave the silence long enough you'll you'll say more well i mean i don't know what rat what like writing is like for other people but it's just like as i said it's completely intuitive it's like you know i i just have some words running through my head and it feels right over this beat and this beat is this particular mood and it moves me to rap about a particular subject that might have to do with my career as an intellectual and a writer and it might not and i don't yeah go ahead do you think about the element of cool in hip-hop culture at all um yeah i guess i guess i do i mean i think whatever you write has to be cool or else what's the point like it has it like i don't there's a kind of there's a swagger that is inherent to rap and i would also say jazz where you know a great musician jazz musician or rapper will say something or play something in such a way that it just communicates the coolness of it just inherent in the way that it's that that the music is articulated do you play jazz trombone yes so believe it or not i played jazz trombone wow for four years i i don't i cannot tell you the last time i met somebody that was a trombone player full stop um the bad news is that because i was so bad at it i really and i i think there's something about jazz as i perceive it that i fundamentally do not understand so even though i was in jazz band for my entire high school career i never enjoyed it i didn't understand it i don't know how to improvise well i never understood the relationship between math and music and i never got math anyway like whatever if i got an extra helping of anything it was certainly verbal ability i feel that that may have come at the expense of mathematical ability so i enjoyed pep band a lot that was really fun i enjoy music a great deal but because there's some collision of ability and it's triggering insecurity in me that i just i could never fully get into jazz band i just felt like a fish out of water um i got i tried to get into felonious monk one of my best friends still to this day was so big into jazz and i really wanted to like it partly as a way to connect with him but i could just never i don't know there's something about it that i fundamentally doesn't land for me felonious monk is a hard one to get into if you're not already into jazz i would i would find his music is um angular and jerky and unconventional even within jazz like it i'll call it straight a rhythmic i was like i can't yeah this like a lot of times instead of just like playing a chord so you hear the harmony he'll like suggest the chord which is precisely the kind of thing you can only appreciate if you're already if you've already been to exposed to like the more mainstream versions of that same song so yeah i definitely wouldn't i i can definitely see it it'd be hard to get into what is it about jazz you've referred to jazz as your first love many times um what is it about jazz over say hip-hop that is your first love was it just the order of the encounter yeah the the order of loving it i i was into hip-hop when i was 11 or 12 but i wasn't like into it like i i liked listening to it every day on my ipod i would listen to hip hop and classical music a lot but the first thing i fell in love with to the point where i was like trying to figure out how it worked for hours every day was jess that's interesting so ah god i imagine this is a nearly impossible question to answer but how does it work like what are the things that make something jazz jazz is like a language it's like learning chinese um and almost any it's almost a perfect parallel it's just a language that takes place in the medium of pitches instead of words so they're like there's grammar um it takes approximately the same time uh to learn takes like a few years and the more you're immersed in it the quicker you learn it and once you learn it there's a difference between someone who speaks incredibly well and someone who speaks just proficiently um and there are people that speak like no one else they're inimitable so it's it's really just a a a language that takes place in the medium of of harmony and melody rather than words and sentences so do you have a timeline for i know you don't like to um talk about what you're doing in the future but do you have a timeline for the next album um soon it has some of it already been recorded yes all right these are these are uh very simple statements which i can respect um dude well i'll be super eager to watch what you do in that world i hope that you can um translate some of the ideas to that limbic space you're [ __ ] such an interesting voice um and knowing that music is the thing that you've gone harder on than necessarily the intellectual stuff is is very intriguing so it'll be interesting to see you chase them both with uh much a plum so thank you for coming on the show today dude thank you for being a voice out there at this point that just seems so metered and so willing to be swayed um focused on data it's rad i'm super glad that i found you and the people that you've introduced me to i'm beyond grateful for so thank you much thank you so much this has been a real pleasure awesome man all right everybody if you haven't check this man out uh his stuff is amazing his he has a podcast also called conversations with coleman obviously uh it's [ __ ] amazing uh definitely look him up on spotify or soundcloud you will find him uh and until next time my friends be legendary take care in any event the reason why my dad named before him was because um you know he said he felt that he had a very tough life and that um and and that we often name our children after great men and wealthy men and important men but he wanted to name me after somebody um who didn't have that kind of prestige he wanted to name me after somebody that maybe if i wore his name i would i would i would bring honor to that name