← Conversations with Coleman
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- [00:00]
A
Every once in a while, someone makes something that feels bigger. Not another Hollywood reboot, but a story built on courage, faith and meaning. The Daily Wire did just that with their new seven part series, the Pendragon Rise of the Merlin. Based on the book series by Stephen R. Loughead. It's a retelling of the classic King Arthur legend. The first official trailer just dropped and you should go check it out. In this world, while pagan gods fall silent and empires collapse, one man's visions ignite a civilizational rebirth. Merlin becomes the bridge between myth and history and shapes the destiny of kings. The Pendragon Cycle Rise of the Merlin premieres exclusively on Daily Wire January 22, 2026. Go watch the full trailer now at.
- [00:48]
B
DailyWire.com Common hears welcome back to an Ask Me Anything.
- [00:54]
A
Good to be back with you, Poppy.
- [00:56]
B
It's almost Christmas and so this is a real end of year roundup. I was looking back at some of the top stories. Ukraine, Russia talks, Iran attacks. Doge, is there one news story that you think defines 2025?
- [01:11]
A
Wow. Well, I don't know if there's one story, but we are back in the Trump news cycle to some degree. Donald Trump's ability to absolutely dominate people's attention is maybe more than anything what makes him different from most politicians. He was able to do that in 2015 when he got so much free publicity from the mainstream right wing media because he knows how to say the exact thing that will get the headlines that will drive the story. And so if anything defines the news this year, it's simply the Trump factor. Simply the fact that everyone, everyone I know and their mother is sort of constantly thinking about Donald Trump and the Trump administration in a way that most people with any other president would not be thinking about politics. And that's obviously by design. I think Trump likes it that way. I think he's good at that. I think it's the same thing that made him good on the Apprentice. I also think it's probably bad for our culture to be thinking about politics as much.
- [02:21]
B
What do you mean by that when you say it's bad for our culture? What does that mean?
- [02:25]
A
Well, for the most part, normal people can't do very much about national politics. And so paying more attention to the news, it doesn't actually do very much for you. It doesn't actually do very much for the country. What it does do is, is make your day to day mood a lot lower, a lot more fearful, a lot more extreme. The nature of the news is that bad news is news right there's like millions of things going on every day that are good. None of those things are news for the most part. Whereas whatever goes wrong is by definition news. If it bleeds, it leads. Right. That's the newspaper journalism saying so. So insofar as we're all paying more and more attention to politics, because we have a president that is a master controller of the media, essentially, or controller of our attention, to be more specific, I think it makes everyone's affect and mood more stressful, more fearful, without there being much by way of positive good that comes as a result of paying more attention.
- [03:34]
B
Yeah, it's a really good point, but it's a sort of weird dichotomy because we want an engaged society where people know what's going on, but on the other hand, maybe makes us miserable.
- [03:43]
A
So, yeah, like anything, there's a happy medium where a certain level of engagement keeps government accountable. Beyond that, it just makes us all miserable.
- [03:53]
B
Let's go to your question. So this one I put right at the top. I'd seen someone write in and I'd never heard you talk about this issue. So someone said, what's your thoughts on the birth rate decline on almost everywhere around the globe? We've seen a lot of stories this year about encouraging people to have lots of babies. What do you make of all of it?
- [04:12]
A
Yeah, the birth rate decline all around the world. It is one of the most important trends of our, our lifetime. I've had Eric Kaufman on the podcast twice. I think he was one of the very first people to talk about this. He wrote a whole book on this subject in something like 2010, like, long before it was really on most people's radar. And, well, it brings up a few things. First, you could talk about the causes of it. What's going on? Why is nobody having kids? There's lots of theories. Some people say it's because having kids is too expensive, which really doesn't make sense because if you think about it, it's actually the wealthy that are having fewer kids. The poor actually have higher birth rates, first of all. Second of all, every single government in the world that has tried an economic innovation, whether it's, we're going to give parents tax breaks for every extra kid. We're literally just going to hand you a check if you, if you have more kids, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. None of it's worked. And so clearly, you know, this, this, when you're looking at a problem, you have to, you have to think like A scientist, Right. So this birth rate decline is happening in every single western capitalist country in the world. That's America, Canada, every single country in Western Europe, Japan, Korea. What does this tell you? It tells you it's whatever's causing it. It's not the policy of any specific country. It's not because we zigged and Japan zagged on economic policy. It must have to do with something, a cause that is affecting the entire world. So in my view, what it is, is it's just, it turns out that as GDP per capita goes up, the experience of being a single person in a middle, middle class lifestyle gets better and better and better and better. We have more and more opportunities, right? But the experience of being a parent to small children is essentially the same as it was 50 years ago. All this innovation we've had, we have endless entertainment now. There's so much you can do in the world that our grandparents couldn't do. But if you're going to have three kids, your life is basically going to be carrying your two year old playing with your other two year old with a little truck. It's going to be the same as it was 50 years ago. And all this technological innovation is, is not really gonna save you that much time and effort with your kids. And so just the attraction of having kids and having a family has gone down in comparative terms all around the world. And there's very little that can be done about that. I mean, the one country that is a peer country of America where this hasn't happened is Israel. The reason is because Israel has this super intense culture of we have to have lots of kids. We. Why? Because they tried to kill us in the Holocaust, they tried to kill us in the pogroms. You know, we're not going to diminish ourselves just by being. Because we want to be lazy and not have a lot of kids. So they have an unusually intense culture that fights back against this trend. America doesn't. And I don't think we're about to develop one. I do think it's a problem. I'm pronatalist in that sense. I do think we should make it easier to have children. It's going to present problems for society if our whole welfare state is a pyramid scheme that only works insofar as the next generation has enough workers in order to provide tax revenue to take care of grandma. And now that pyramid scheme is inverting, it's going to cause Social Security is not going to be funded in very short order. And the problem is only Going to get worse because it's an exponential problem in reverse. And so yeah, I do. I don't know what to do about it because the problem is so deep and fundamental and it's just a side effect of economic growth, which is itself a good thing. But yeah, I think we need to be thinking about it more.
- [08:27]
B
It's interesting with the Israel comparison as well, because there's also a social aspect because when you have a culture that kind of embraces kids, people can continue to have their social life because you can mix with other people with kids. I think probably both of us, most of our friends don't have kids. And so to do that would be the anomaly. And then you're kind of excluded from all the social interactions potentially. And I think that's really tough. You know, you'd have to be a bit of a unusual 20s or 30s person to suddenly pop out a bunch of kids in the kind of middle class groups that we probably hang out in.
- [08:57]
A
That's exactly right. And so it makes it that much harder. Whereas when everyone is doing it, you know, it's, there's economies of scale is another way of putting it to having kids where if everyone you know is doing it well, you can all send them to play with each other together. You can bring your kids to dinner knowing that you're not going to be imposing on anyone because there's already kids running around everywhere. Adding a few extra kids doesn't change the vibe as much as adding the first two kids.
- [09:25]
B
Exactly.
- [09:26]
A
Yeah.
- [09:27]
B
So maybe there just has to be some kind of social change. But how does that, has that ever been successful in history trying to change social norms from the top down? Probably not.
- [09:36]
A
You know, I think, yeah, I've heard of an example. I think it was, it was either in Mongolia or in Georgia, the country, Georgia, where it was like something like the highest religious official in the land, like the, almost the pope equivalent or like the state bishop would personally give like a medal and meet any woman that had like four kids or more. And so it became this. They were basically trying to use social status as a way of incentivizing people to have more kids. And according to some it had had some measurable effect which, which is interesting and says it's more about status than about, than about money. I don't see how any of that really works in American culture, but I would, I am in general very. For people strongly kind of encouraging their friends to have more kids because I. And framing it as like a cool thing instead of as, you know, the End of your life, like you're never going to have fun again. Yeah, I think kids are awesome. I plan to have three at least. We'll see. What you know, it's not entirely up to me as a man. I can't split like an amoeba.
- [10:50]
B
Three plus. Okay. I'm excited to have more Coleman Hughes in the world. So there's another question which is on a kind of different, I guess, issue of our time. It says, given the mental health crisis, should psychedelics be treated with the same approval speed as operation warp speed with accelerated FDA approval?
- [11:12]
A
Yeah. So my understanding was that MDMA in particular actually was on track to have some kind of fast track FDA approval and then suffered a setback recently. My view, I would be a little more cautious. I mean, I'm a big booster of mdma. I've used it myself. I think it's helped my mental health. I think it gets misused as a rave drug. People take mdma, they go to the music festival and just have the most indescribably incredible time of their life, but then they don't actually take much from that other than a really bad hangover. And to me, you know, I've never used MDMA in that way, though I'm sure it would be awesome. Whereas I think way more useful is it allows you to like whatever it is you have in your life, whatever baggage or history or trauma that, or blockage that prevents you from a certain openness to, to new experiences. Those things are incredibly difficult to talk about. Like the proverbial example is the guy who goes to war, loses his best friend in war, and then can never talk about the war. Right. Like why does, why does granddad never talk about the war? There are reasons, right? Mda. MDMA is a kind of drug where you can take a dose of mdma, talk about things you've never talked about before in a very healthy and healing way and reframe them so that they feel differently to you in the future. And that's a very powerful, I mean it's extremely powerful. I mean it's what people do therapies for years in order to get to and often don't get to because just the routine of therapy for some people can't really lead to breakthroughs. And so I'm a big fan of MDMA for that reason. I hope it gets approved and used safely. When it comes to the other psychedelics, LSD and mushrooms, I think the experience there is a lot more double edged. There are people that have a similar experience to what I just described on mdma. But on the other hand, there are people for whom LSD or mushrooms opens the door to psychosis that would not have been opened if they hadn't taken those drugs and, and everything that comes along with that, like psychosis, potentially even leading to suicide. Right. I, I think that's a, you know, I think it's a rare case, obviously, but it, I think it's just dishonest to say that it doesn't happen. So I, I would be wary of sort of fast tracking that as if it's a, a, a slam dunk as opposed to going through all of the necessary checks and processes.
- [14:08]
B
But you are not someone who believes we should legalize all drugs, for example.
- [14:13]
A
I would be wary to do that. I mean, I would. Let me put it this way, I'm highly open to persuasion on that, but that doesn't mean I want America to be the guinea pig. In other words, I would love for another country to try it and then we could look at the consequences for 10 years and make an informed decision here. I'm not really sure that I want to legalize all drugs and be the guinea pig for that change.
- [14:42]
B
Okay. I'm hitting all the big hitters first. So the next one is about. Do you view AI as something that will replace or exist alongside the Homo sapien in the long run?
- [14:53]
A
I think it will exist along alongside Homo sapiens. I know many people are afraid that AI will take away all human jobs. Right. I honestly think that that is just a misunderstanding of economics and in a way, human desire. Right. Because one of the insights of economics is that demand is limitless. What does that mean? It means there's actually no bottom to what people want. The amount and type of goods and services that people want. There's no such thing as satiation. You might be you get full after one meal, but the truth is, in general, human desire is limitless. It's a bottomless pit. So even if artificial general intelligence replaces many jobs that currently exist, which is going to happen, there are, you know, the, the space of things that human want is just going to. Humans want is going to shift and change such that there is still going to be something for human beings to provide. Right. That I can't just by virtue, not of being better than AI, but of being different. Humans are always going to have some kind of comparative advantage relative to AI even if AI becomes smarter than us. Because smarts is not the only thing that the market demands. And the market demand is limitless, ever changing, ever morphing. Ever expanding. It expands to fit the size almost of what can be provided. So people will figure out how to make themselves useful to others, even if AI becomes smarter than us. So I'm not really worried about that. It's always worth remembering that 99% of our ancestors were farmers and almost all of those jobs have been taken by machines. And yet, you know, so many kinds of jobs that our ancestors literally could not have imagined came into being as a result. Again, because demand is not something fixed in the present, it's something that literally will evolve as the world evolves.
- [17:14]
B
Is that all to say it's not one of those issues that you find yourself waking up in a cold sweat about, or you're now a professor at a college and then you must be hearing from kids who are saying, well, what's the point? What's the job market for me? You know, all of that anxiety, do you find that easy to kind of step away from and say it's overblown?
- [17:33]
A
So I would say the doom, doomsday scenario of AI replaces humanity and we all have nothing to do all day. That's what I'm rejecting like that. I don't, I don't spend any time worried about that. However, if I were an 18 year old right now, I would have anxiety about what I should do. Why? Not because we're going to a doomsday scenario where human beings will be replaced, but because the world is changing so fast that I would be afraid of making a wrong bet right now. In other words, when I was a teenager, everyone was saying, coding, coding, coding, coding. You know, if you can code, you're going to be in the future and we've got to get women coding, girls who code all the. Well, I mean, that was all in retrospect, if you could take a time machine 10 years ago, you would probably say not to do that because it turns out what AI is sort of best at is just that rote coding. Now that's not to say coders are all currently out of a job. The ones that are doing the best right now are the ones that are learning how to use AI to do the grunt work and then spend their mind share on higher level coding, managing tasks, in a way creative stuff. So. So I would have anxiety just because the pace of change is, is both fast right now and also somewhat unpredictable.
- [19:00]
B
Well, staying on a similar theme, we had a couple of questions around Social media. Australia is obviously trying to ban social media for children under 16. I believe it says, you know, there's endless Discussions about people being unhealthy, people being disconnected, and whether we should limit children's use of it and the dangers of trolls. Do you, how do you kind of conceive of those types of policy measures? And is the use of social media something you think people should worry about?
- [19:26]
A
Yeah, I do think it is something people should worry about, especially when it comes to children. Social media is designed to be as addictive as it possibly can be. I think, you know, we all know what it's like to have Twitter fingers or TikTok fingers or Instagram fingers as adults. I mean, these things, these products, they've just been working on them like, like they're the cure to cancer and there's billions of dollars and tons of IQ behind getting us to spend more time on this stuff. Those are just the incentives. I'm not saying they're evil. That's just, that's literally how it, that how that's how it's going to be. Just like candy has gotten better and food has gotten better, social media has gotten better. Children are not equipped, I mean adults are barely equipped to handle this level of addiction in our, in our pockets all the time. Children are literally neurologically not as equipped as we are to resist the temptation of this stuff. So I think to me it's obvious that you should restrict your kids usage of social media. That doesn't mean they can't use it at all. That's a judgment call. But they should be time restricted. They should not be able to scroll all day. That seems obvious to me because you know what happens there is especially for girls, they're just obviously they're going to be driven towards content that is sexualizing and, and then they're going to be comparing themselves to what they're seeing Kim Kardashian do. And you know, okay, some of that's unavoidable in life, no doubt. But that doesn't mean that you just, because you can't avoid your kid having a cup of coffee that they should be therefore given free access to cocaine 24 7, right?
- [21:15]
B
Yeah.
- [21:16]
A
So I think more than a law restricting things, you know, that that kind of, that stuff tends to be heavy handed. I'm not saying there's no place for it. There has to be a culture of, you know, no phones in the classroom. Like why does any kid need a phone in the classroom? You know, we all survived without it and in fact we all survived without cell phones at all. No kid I know got kidnapped. No kid I know, God forbid, sometimes you have to wait 30 minutes for your parents to show up. But I don't see why there shouldn't be a widespread norm that kids can have like old style flip phones until a certain age and then, and then they'll be in the same boat as us trying to resist wasting all their time scrolling.
- [22:02]
B
Well, it's, there's always this ridiculous reason given that it's a learning aid. But the thing is you have to have all the steps of doing your own research for it to even be an aid. And like that shouldn't. If it's just look it up and Google it, then what are they even doing in that classroom? It doesn't make any sense to me.
- [22:16]
A
Oh yeah, no, for the classroom learning aid stuff, that doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, although, you know, if, if I had a 10 year old kid that was super curious and wanted to ask ChatGPT questions all day, I would encourage that. And so the question becomes, it becomes a keyhole solution question. How do we give kids access to the parts of the Internet that will help their curiosity and restrict or limit their access to just absolute slop, you know, just. Which is most of the Internet.
- [22:51]
B
Absolutely. Okay, pivoting. Then someone's asked here, you know, why you're an atheist? And they said, what's the strongest evidence in your mind that there is no God?
- [23:04]
A
The first thing I would say is that the question is framed backwards. The onus is on religious people to prove that there is a God. Right. And I know, you know, any analogy is bound to offend here, but if you're the one proposing, like just as Richard, as Richard Dawkins might say, forget God, let's say I were trying to prove the existence of Zeus or Athena, would you accept an argument that said, well, hold on, what's your evidence that there isn't an Athena or that there isn't a Persephone or a Zeus? Right. That question wouldn't even make sense because it would be so obvious to you. The onus is on me claiming that there is such a creature, such creatures, to prove that there is. So that's my starting point is I never was raised with religion to begin with. And so I start from the assumption that unless there's evidence that there is something out there, I'm, I'm basically, I have no opinion about it. Right. Or I'm not gonna. And agnosticism isn't really the, there's a misunderstanding about agnosticism because I'm kind of agnostic about all gods, I'm agnostic about Zeus, Athena and Zoroastrianism. I'm agnostic about all of it, but that doesn't mean I actually am 50, 50 with respect to, to whether they're out there. I just, I see no evidence. But I also won't sit here and pretend that I know how the universe was created. I know why human beings are conscience conscious. I know why the miracle of the atoms arranged in this kind of a pattern yields an identity. But atoms arranged as my table yield no identity. Like science has no good answer to that question. Currently, religion has an answer to that question, a very confident one for which there is no evidence. So I think it's more intellectually honest to say that it's a question mark than to say that any of us have a, have a, have a confident answer.
- [25:17]
B
Does that mean sometimes when you see the famous atheists in the world, the Dawkins, that you find them a little bit too dogmatic in their certainty around atheism as well?
- [25:27]
A
Not, not in like the metaphysical sense. So what I like, I agree 100 with Dawkins and Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens and Dan Dennett in, in saying that the, the burden is completely on the religious to prove that there is a God. Like you. If it were any other issue we would start from. There are some from the assumption that there is nothing unless you can prove to me that there's something. Right. What's the evidence for this? So I don't think they're too strident there. I do sometimes think they are too dogmatic about the idea that religion is always and in every case bad for human societies.
- [26:08]
B
Yeah.
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A
That I think is a lot less clear.
- [26:11]
B
Yeah. And in fact, a lot of the happiness evidence as we've talked about in the show, points that it, you know, religious people are happier and that shouldn't be discounted as nothing.
- [26:20]
A
That's right. That, that you have to incorporate that evidence into your worldview somehow. Right. And also just because, you know, just because I don't believe that God exists, to me it's a, it's just a totally separate question whether the idea of God or, or, you know, any particular religion would be a force for good. Those like, it might seem like one follows directly from the other, but it's actually not true. We might live in a reality where stories, whether or not they're true, can be useful to believe and to bind communities together.
- [26:57]
B
One listener asked, what's your current most liberal belief and your most conservative belief?
- [27:05]
A
That's a good question. I, I tend to be fairly liberal on Gun control issues. And this came out a little bit in my podcast with Ben Shapiro. And even that's not quite the right way to describe. Seems to me that the second amendment is not nearly as important or as sacred as the first amendment or many of the other amendments. And that it might even have been a mistake in retrospect, just our inability to control guns better. I mean, I, I don't see all these other countries suffering for their lack of a second amendment. However, it's very easy to see how the UK is currently suffering from its lack of a first amendment because the police are knocking on grandma's door for an anti Muslim Facebook post and taking her to jail, which is insane. So that, that's, I don't, that might be one of my more, more left wing instincts, let's say. Even though I do agree with a lot of the points that pro gun people make and a lot of some of the ignorance about guns they point out on the cultural left.
- [28:20]
B
Yeah. But also say if there was a kind of, you know, let's get rid of semi automatic weapons, for example, any kind of limits you would broadly likely support.
- [28:29]
A
Likely. I mean, if they, if they actually made sense from a gun perspective. Like sometimes liberals just don't even make sense because they don't know guns. And so they like restrict the wrong ones that aren't dangerous and fall for branding about guns that are dangerous and stuff like that. So assuming it was actually, it actually made sense and it restricted the deadliest kind of guns. Yeah. By instinct. I'm pro gun reform. My most right wing opinion, what would it be?
- [28:58]
B
Economics. I mean, where are you?
- [29:00]
A
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it's hard to say that that's a conservative position anymore, but I'm very much pro free market. I think that, I mean, you know, I was just thinking today, just, you know, a $15 burger, like the beauty of free markets is so right in front of our noses that we just don't even notice it. Right. A $15 burger. What am I actually paying for $15? Right. You might think, okay, burgers used to be $10, now they're 15. Jesus Christ. Capitalism is just absolutely destroying us, man. It's just like taking us for everything we're worth. If you actually understand what it is that you are paying for, for $15, you're paying for the equivalent amount of work you would have to do to create a burger. You would have to learn how to kill a cow, take enough meat for a burger, get the tools, make the tools in order to do that. Never mind how much the know how itself would cost you in terms of time. Then you'd have to do it all. And then you'd have to figure out how to make bread from wheat. I don't even know how that's done. Right. The equivalent amount of time and energy you'd have to spend in order to make a single burger would be like years. It would be years of your life if you were doing it from scratch. Yet the end result of capitalism turning its engine of innovation over hundreds of years is that I can pop into a store, trade $15, which in my time equivalent is very little time, and just get a burger. And, and at the end result of that, all people can think about is the fact that they're $15 lighter and they've got a burger of dubious quality or something like that. But what they don't see is how much the world has changed for the better if they can just trade $15 for that burger instead of doing what our great great great grandparents would have had to do. Their entire lives were defined around survival. And now we get to trade survival for a sum of money. That seems like a lot to us only because we're not actually comparing it to the only alternative that's ever existed. And so I, I do think fundamentally, people, because of the reality of human envy and the fact that we hate more than anything we hate when people have more than we do, we, we. The existence of billionaires and rich people blinds people through envy to a hatred of capitalism, which has actually been the biggest, best system for humanity that the world has ever seen.
- [31:50]
B
That is all true. And I, I think you always make a really good case for the benefits of capitalism. What do you say to those, and I would probably put myself in this camp until maybe more recently, but who say, okay, yes, capitalism does a hell of a lot of good, but free markets implies that left to their own devices, businesses would and single operatives would act in a way that's good for the community. And that the best type of capitalism is a social democracy in which we say, okay, you can for example, build all this new housing, but you have to have social housing, or you have to consider other the environmental aspects or anything else that's for the good of the community. We need that too. The too far free market is also bad.
- [32:32]
A
No, so what I would say is a few things. The insight that actually businesses pursue their own good and they are not pursuing the good of the community goes back to Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, who wrote the wealth of nations in 1776, same year America was born. And famously said that it is not from the benevolence of the butcher that you expect your meat right or the benevolence of the baker that you expect your bread. And yet capitalism ended famines essentially, right? There has been no famines in a modern capitalist country. The only famines in recent memory were in places like China or pre industrial societies like places in Africa. So I would not confuse free market for the idea that businesses will do good on their own left to their own devices. As Adam Smith pointed out, businesses will try to collude, they'll try to become a monopoly, they'll try to fuck over the consumer, jack up prices and become uncompetitive. That's why the role of governments in an actually free market is to prevent monopolies from forming, to enforce contracts so that companies can't be predatory. They can't have you sign one thing and then reneg on it because business can't happen if there's no trust. So what a free market refers to is actually freedom. Not in the sense that a company is free to do whatever it wants. It's actually that companies are regulated, prevented from doing certain coercive things so that the market can be freely entered by newcomers that can compete. That's the freedom. It's the freedom to enter the market, to challenge the behemoths, to try to make your own product, make it better, make it cheaper, make it higher quality. That's what keeps businesses honest. That's what keeps them providing services, goods and services to consumers. Their fear of being out competed. So that's where the free comes in. And free market. Where I'm from, we don't wait for the highlights or watching live start to finish. No spoilers, no score alerts. I want to feel every play as it happens. And now on Fox one, you can stream all your favorite live sports. NFL Sundays, college football, nascar, mlb, postseason and more. I'm talking those nail biter finishes, those high octane moments that get the whole state buzzing. Like if the Cowboys ever actually get it together and win a game with Fox one, you get it all live. The passion, the plays, the pride. Fox one, we live for live streaming now. Hey, Coleman here. If you're enjoying the show, then you probably care about how political decisions really get made. If that's you, I want to tell you about the new podcast on Notice, produced by the nonpartisan newsroom Notice. Each week, journalist Reece Gorman sits down with lawmakers for candid conversations not just about the headlines, but about but about what makes them tick and what brought them to Washington in the first place. On Notice gives you an insider's view of the people shaping policy in the U.S. reese's approachable style has earned him trust on both sides of the aisle, unlocking unguarded conversations that you won't hear in traditional interviews. So tune in to On Notice. That's notice spelled N O T u S. It's available every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube.
- [36:11]
B
I thought this was kind of an interesting one. So, one listener said, how would you define merit in your life? Which institutions have you experienced that best exemplify meritocracy? Inversely, which institutions least exemplify meritocracy?
- [36:26]
A
Yeah, so meritocracy is just the idea that you gain according to how good you are at the thing and nothing else matters. So the perfect case of a meritocracy is something like sports. If you are really good at basketball, you will make it to the NBA. Period. Right? As long as you're not more of a nuisance to the team than an asset because of your behavior off the court or something like that. Just the better people do better. It doesn't matter whether you're rich, doesn't matter whether you're poor. It doesn't matter whether you speak English. It doesn't matter whether you can crack jokes. It doesn't matter whether you're hot or whether you're ugly. There are some pretty ugly dudes in the NBA. All, all, all that matters. And coaches are extremely sensitive to who's contributing, who's not recognizing talent that isn't showing up in the stat sheet but is actually impacting the game. There's deep statistics. There's a why? Because there's a deep incentive to accurately rank a player's contribution to the game and to pay them roughly accordingly. So sports is the closest thing we have to a perfect meritocracy. Music and performing arts is not a perfect meritocracy, but it's a lot closer to a meritocracy than most sectors in life. I grew up as a jazz musician, and I will say the culture of jazz music is much closer to sports than it is to other domains. In that, okay, let's say you're the son of a very famous jazz musician, okay? That gets you a little bit of goodwill. But ultimately, if you take your instrument, go on stage and don't sound great, people aren't going to want to have you on their gig, right? At the end of the day, it's about how you Sound and what reactions your sound is getting from an audience, it's kind of unfakable. I would say that stand up comedy is an even better example of this. Why it's even better than music because whether or not the crowd is laughing is a signal, a publicly available signal to everyone of how funny the comic is that can't be faked. Laughter is involuntary. And so if you get laughs on the New York comedy scene, eventually you will become a top comic in proportion to how many people you can make laugh with your jokes. It just happens that way. And then the second part of the question was least meritocratic. Least meritocratic.
- [39:13]
B
Comedy, music and sport. But what's. Maybe, I mean, what do you think about education as a meritocracy?
- [39:22]
A
Like jobs in education or.
- [39:24]
B
I mean, is it students? I mean, you know, I guess we hear horror stories about the American system that getting to Harvard or Princeton, let's say.
- [39:33]
A
Oh, yeah. I mean, well, yeah, we, we knew for a long time, for instance, that Harvard and the Ivy Leagues, that many people were children of professors or they got in because they did rowing. And it's like, not clear what, why being a mediocre rower in high school should get you into Harvard. But you have to be like, you can't be mediocre at most other sports and get into Harvard. Right. So. But when Students for Fair Admission sued Harvard over affirmative action because they were discriminating against Asians, they were forced in the lawsuit to release all of their data. And it was shocking to discover that it wasn't like 10 or 20% of students that got in as a result of Daddy's a professor or Daddy's on the board or Daddy made a big donation, it was like 40%.
- [40:24]
B
Wow.
- [40:24]
A
It was like if you added up all the categories of student athletes, donors, children of professors and all the rest, it was something like 40%, I think, of the white students, if that. It was in that ballpark, which is. I mean, that's not a meritocracy by any means. I think every controversy regarding college admissions, whether it's student athletes, student of professor, student of a donor, affirmative action, you're a black or Hispanic student, they give you a leg up. If you're an Asian student, they give you a leg down. All of those controversies have been a result of departing from meritocracy. People just, it's a. I think it's an inherent part of human nature that people are generally okay with unequal results if they know the process was a meritocracy. This is why Nobody cares that LeBron James is a bajillionaire. Nobody really cares that Dave Chappelle gets tens and tens of millions, millions of dollars in a Netflix deal. Because we understand intuitively that sports and comedy are basically pure meritocracies. We understand they're absolutely the best. That's why they're worth tens and tens of millions or maybe billions of dollars. But when the reason we get so mad at these billionaires, whether it's Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, you know, Sam Altman, yada, yada, yada, is because there is this sense of doubt as to whether they are the LeBron James equivalent of their field or whether they just kind of got lucky betting on a good idea, made the right connections, met the right people. And that really with one or two differences, that could have been, that could have been us, that could have been me. And that's why there's so much more anger targeted at those types of billionaires. What I will say is that it's no accident that all of those types of people do their work behind the scenes and not in public. So, like, if Peter Thiel is a genius, his true genius isn't necessarily going to show up in his public interviews. His true genius was whatever he was doing at PayPal behind the scenes, working 18 hour days, seeing the future clearly. Those kind of like, if you've ever seen the Steve Jobs movie, what he was doing in those private scenes, that was Steve Jobs genius. It's not. We just see the iPhone, whereas with LeBron, we can see him dunking like a maniac on everyone. And, you know, so, you know, meritocracy, in a way, it explains, it connects with envy, it connects with the impulse to socialism. It explains the sectors of society that people attack and the sectors of wealthy society that people leave alone.
- [43:30]
B
And do you think, were you, were you saying education is a good example of a not meritocratic space, but the economy is maybe a good economic? I mean, yeah. How do you conclude on those examples?
- [43:42]
A
Yeah, I guess, like, like education, higher education, it's clearly not meritocratic. I mean, there's all kinds of perverse incentives. I mean, there's even studies just looking at, like, how, how attractive people are graded differently than, you know, unattractive people. Like, there's just all kinds of distortion mechanisms in education. It's, it's not a pure meritocracy. And you know, but the, the irony there is that people, people really try hard to defend the unmeritocratic parts of it and every critique of it is just asking it to be merit more meritocratic, which you wouldn't think is such a terrible evil thing until you hear how people would attack you for opposing affirmative action, for instance, it's, it's really.
- [44:36]
B
Hard as well, because anyone who's successful doesn't want to engage the idea of a non meritocratic system because then it would imply that you haven't got there on your own skills and assets. So I feel like meritocracy is one of those weird subjects people actually can't really talk about neutrally because of the way our system is constructed.
- [44:57]
A
That's right. That's right. I think that a lot of people have a problem say admitting maybe I got into college because of affirmative action. First of all, you didn't control it. It's not the system you chose. It really has nothing to do with your own choice. But to acknowledge honestly that maybe that is the reason I got in and that doesn't negate my self worth as a human being. People have a lot of trouble with that for sure.
- [45:22]
B
And to your point about, I'm very interested in beauty, privilege and how that operates in the legal system. There's terrible studies that ugly defendants are twice as likely to be convicted as good looking ones. And you just think, you know, if the world is that superficial, it's worrying. Okay, so final question, because we're talking about success. This is a kind of funny one, but I wanted to put this to you. Someone said, am I a failure for not being as well read or successful as you despite being the same age? And this is funny, but I'm curious to ask the question of like, what do you think drives maybe your success and also other people's success? Like how do you conceive of that sort of motivation?
- [46:05]
A
So yes, you are a failure. No, obviously not. So first of all, I've had a very strange and unconventional career that's not easy to replicate because I started speaking out about an issue that affected me as a black student at Columbia in 2018 and 19, writing long essays about it. And part of my success was not simply that I was writing essays that people appreciated. It was also that I was who I was. It was more interesting coming from someone who was black at the heart of wokeness than it would have the same words would have been coming from someone else. Secondly, I benefited from the fact that I was young when I started. I'm still kind of young, I'm approaching 30 now. But there is a, there's just like a general bias towards young people in the market people, just people like young people more in 9 out of 10 cases. Sometimes there's the reverse preference, but so there's that. And that's, again, something I didn't control. It's something I had the kind of personality at a young age to want to read voraciously, write long essays, figure out what was true in the world. I wasn't afraid of controversial opinions. I was okay being disliked by many of the people around me if I felt that I was being a good person privately to them. I had a sense of esteem that wasn't super connected to being liked. So my advice to people is, you should think about your career as a Venn diagram overlap between the things you are good at and the things you will be paid to do. And, and so for me, I'm. I'm. I'm curious, I'm intelligent and I'm. I'm. I'm better than average at explaining. Explaining things and arguing. And so the Venn diagram overlap of those things and what I can get paid to do is like podcasting and writing, for example. So it's like, this is a job I would actually like to do regardless, even if it. Even if I weren't paid a dime, I would like to. I would probably have a blog and I would probably want to have a podcast. And similarly, my other passion in life is music. So, like, I do music as a hobby. I was a professional trombonist before I did this, and I still do it, even though I don't really get paid to do it. Like, I play gigs around New York City. I don't do it for the money. So try to find the Venn diagram overlap of either the things you like to do, or even better yet, the things are more realistic, yet the things you are naturally good at. You have some comparative natural strengths. Everyone does. You have something that you're better at than most people that you meet, something that's easy for you. Some people find it sucks to look at a spreadsheet. I'd rather claw my own eyes out. But you actually enjoy looking at a spreadsheet for some reason. It's calming to you. Okay, that's. Where do you find the overlap of that and something people will, will, will pay you to do? So I think that's a lot more practical advice than follow your dreams. Obviously, follow your dreams is like what my whole generation was raised on, which is. It's just. It's not exactly that helpful. Like, my dream was to be a basketball player or a baseball player. It was like that was never going to happen for me. So follow your dreams at any cost is actually not good advice. What is better advice is find your comparative strength and find a job that will pay you to do that.
- [49:52]
B
I think that's good advice. And also the thing is, if you're doing something you're good at, you'll feel good because you'll get the rewards and the recognition for it. You know, there's no point forcing something you can't do, though. Maybe you could have been a great basketball player. I've never seen you play.
- [50:05]
A
No, I couldn't have. I could not have.
- [50:08]
B
Well, on that note, it's been a great 2025. We'll be most likely seeing you. I'm not sure if this will be quite the end of the year, but we're heading towards the end of the year. How are you going to spend New Year's Eve?
- [50:18]
A
Oh, I'm probably going to spend New Year's Eve playing music and drinking a little bit too much.
- [50:23]
B
Perfect. Well, I'll see you in 2026.
- [50:25]
A
Merry Christmas. Happy New Year's. I don't know if. Is Hanukkah around this time? Who knows?
- [50:30]
B
Yeah, something around this time.
- [50:32]
A
Happy holidays. Bye.
- [50:34]
B
Bye.