Coleman Hughes and What it Will Take to Actually Address Racism (Replay)

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: Coleman Hughes and What it Will Take to Actually Address Racism (Replay) – April 29, 2024

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Episode Overview

In this episode of Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu has a wide-ranging, deeply introspective conversation with Coleman Hughes—writer, thinker, jazz musician, and rapper (aka Coldman)—about what it will take to actually address racism in America. Together, they critically examine narratives, social movements, and the complex interplay between race, poverty, and policy. The discussion is a blend of personal stories, cultural analysis, philosophical questioning, and data-driven argument, featuring candid reflections on protests, identity, the politics of personal responsibility, and the potential pitfalls of goal vagueness in social reform.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Human Drive for Narrative & Experience During Crisis

• Both Tom and Coleman open by discussing how COVID-19 has impacted artists (music, comedy, filmmaking), noting that creating in isolation changes the nature of one’s work but doesn’t necessarily hinder it for musicians.
• Coleman: "95% of the time you're working as a musician... it's alone. I can do 100% of what I would otherwise do." (04:58)

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2. Protests, Authority, and The Human Propensity for Rebellion

• The discussion shifts to the psychology of protest movements, especially during periods of enforced isolation and pandemic fatigue.
• Coleman: "People are at home. They're bored, they're restless... the protests are the closest thing to a concert that can happen right now." (08:34)
• They discuss how protests are fueled by multiple factors—pandemic restlessness, a desire for justice, and a pushback against authority, exacerbated rhetorically by President Trump (the “Trump effect”).
• Tom candidly shares his own “problem with authority,” relating it both to his upbringing and entrepreneurial drive.

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3. Leadership in Crisis: Who Would You Choose?

• Tom asks which U.S. President Coleman would have preferred to see leading during current racial unrest.
  • Coleman: "I guess Obama... He could credibly speak to the anger people feel about police brutality and give them a sense that the person with the reins cared about this issue." (11:35)
  • Tom stresses the importance of credibility, oratory skill, and emotional resonance in leadership, irrespective of actual policy knowledge.

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4. The Physics of Progress – Goal Orientation & Clear Metrics

• Tom outlines his approach: “The physics of progress,” starting with clearly defined, outcome-oriented goals (e.g., making race as relevant as hair color), then measuring every action by whether it moves toward that end.
• Tom: "You start with your goal... what works or doesn't work will 100% be, does it move you towards your goal? Yes or no?" (16:00)
• Both discuss the danger of vague goals and how rhetoric must always be tested against outcomes. “If you don’t know what to measure, you’re lost,” Tom argues.

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5. Modern Anti-Racist Movements: New Forms of Supremacy?

• Coleman critiques the emerging anti-racist movement's emphasis on racial identity and epistemological hierarchy (who “gets to speak”) as a reversal rather than rejection of supremacist patterns.
• Coleman: "The modern anti-racist movement is not so much a rejection of white supremacy as it is white supremacy flipped on its head... That’s not anti-racism so much as the opposite of classical racism." (18:57)
• He expresses deep concern about the long-term viability of multicultural societies built on rigid group differences.

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6. Personal Motivation & The Risk of Speaking Out

• Tom notes the intense social pressure to take sides and the fear of mob backlash. He confesses: “The only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself.” (32:10)
• Coleman explains his own motivation: a drive to challenge obvious falsehoods, nurtured in him through dissonant experiences as a student surrounded by social justice rhetoric.
• Coleman: “I didn’t really come for the topic of race so much as the topic of race came for me... there’s something deeply disempowering about putting your worst experiences at the forefront.” (25:19, 36:38)

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7. Personal Responsibility vs. Structural Victimhood

• Tom discusses his belief in radical personal responsibility and shares the backlash he received from promoting it, particularly among those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• Tom: “Your life is an exact reflection of your choices, even if that's a lie, it will empower you.” (44:36)
• Coleman concurs that limitation of imagination, rather than material lack, is the biggest challenge faced by the poor.
  • Coleman: “One of the biggest problems with growing up poor is... the lack of imagination that you grow up with—that your world is about this big.” (49:16)

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8. Role Models, Entrepreneurship, and Economic vs. Political Power

• They debate the efficacy of role models, with both agreeing on their power and noting how difficult public policy intervention is in this area.
• Inspired by Thomas Sowell, Coleman argues that economic progress through entrepreneurship, not policy or political power, has best correlated with group success in the U.S.
  • Coleman: “People have a deeply flawed model of how groups advance... groups who dominate politics end up insulated from discrimination, but it doesn't create wealth.” (53:01)

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9. Righteous Indignation & The Psychology of Protest

• Both discuss the intoxicating, even addictive, experience of moral outrage—whether righteous or dangerous.
  • Coleman: “It is similar to a drug in how it makes you feel... the Nazis felt that feeling. That feeling is a human universal, and you cannot trust it.” (61:47)
• They stress the need for cool-headed, goal-oriented evaluation after the emotion subsides.

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10. Trade-Offs, Police Reform, and Vicious Cycles

• Tom and Coleman stress the inevitability of trade-offs in policy, such as never reaching zero racism or murder.
  • Coleman: “We will never get to zero on any of these problems... unless you want to be outraged until the end of time, your outrage has to be somehow connected to reality.” (92:13)
• They explore unintended consequences: defunding police may lead to fewer or poorer officers, potentially worsening the problems reformers hope to solve.

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11. Race, Poverty, and the Data: What’s Really Driving Disparity?

• Tom notes Thomas Chatterton Williams’ idea: we often talk about race, but mean poverty.
  • They examine whether honor culture, poverty, or Southern tradition most drives violence, especially among black Americans, and find that intra-racial violence is also much higher among southern (not just poor) whites.
• Data and causal direction (poverty driving crime and vice versa) are discussed as a feedback loop: “It only matters how do you interrupt it.” (84:03)

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12. Capitalism and Racism—Is There a Link?

• Coleman evaluates the notion that capitalism breeds racism and provides historical counter-examples from Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.
  • Coleman: "There is no inherent link between markets and capitalism on one hand and racism on the other." (96:24)

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13. Base Assumptions, Conflict of Visions, and The Limits of Dialogue

• The pair end with a discussion about foundational worldviews (“base assumptions”) per Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions.
  • Coleman: "Often the argument I'm having with someone is taking place at the tip of an iceberg... but we have disagreements at the very base of the iceberg we’re not even discussing." (106:05)

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14. Rap, Jazz, and Cultural Expression

• Tom and Coleman switch gears, exploring Coleman’s dual identity as an intellectual and a rapper, the power of art to communicate through emotion and logic, and the difficulty of being allowed to be both in the public eye.
• They bond over jazz trombone, with Coleman describing jazz as his “first love” and likening it to a complex language.
  • Coleman: "Jazz is like a language... there's grammar. It takes approximately the same time to learn. And there are people who speak like no one else. They’re inimitable." (121:37)

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Notable Quotes

• Coleman Hughes:
  • "The modern anti-racist movement is not so much a rejection of white supremacy as it is white supremacy flipped on its head." (18:57)
  • "One of the biggest problems with growing up poor is... the lack of imagination that you grow up with—that your world is about this big." (49:16)
  • "There are a lot of vicious cycles we have to interrupt right now." (85:23)
  • "We will never get to zero racism... unless you want to be outraged until the end of time, your outrage has to be somehow connected to reality..." (92:13)
• Tom Bilyeu:
  • "You start with your goal... does it move you towards your goal? Yes or no?" (16:00)
  • "I believe identity is malleable." (32:10)
  • "The only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself." (32:10)
  • "Your life is an exact reflection of your choices, even if that's a lie, it will empower you." (44:36)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:23 – The solitary nature of musical creation, COVID’s impact
• 08:34 – What drives protest movements during the pandemic
• 11:35 – Which president would be best for today’s crisis
• 16:00 – Tom on the “physics of progress” and goal-setting
• 18:57 – Coleman’s critique of modern anti-racist orthodoxy
• 25:19, 36:38 – Coleman’s personal journey: from adopting social justice narratives to resisting victimhood
• 44:36 – Tom on personal responsibility, aspiration limiters
• 49:16 – The role of imagination in poverty; importance of role models
• 53:01 – Political power vs. economic success (inspired by Thomas Sowell)
• 61:47 – Righteous indignation, its addictive psychological effects
• 69:23 – Second/third-order consequences of defunding police; trade-off realities
• 79:45 – Is the real driver race, poverty, or regional culture?
• 92:13 – Acceptance that we can’t “zero out” societal ills
• 106:05 – Conflict of Visions: why debates often go unresolved
• 121:37 – Jazz as language; parallels with hip-hop and self-expression

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Memorable Moments

• Tom’s story of interviewing employees and realizing that limiting aspirations are as powerful as material poverty (44:36).
• Coleman’s testimony before Congress and reflections on being willing to “stand on the third rail” (social controversy) out of a compulsion to name the “elephant in the room” (36:38).
• Their nerd-out over both playing jazz trombone, a moment of surprising camaraderie and self-disclosure (118:45).

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Conclusion

This episode is a unique blend of philosophy, real-world experience, data, and personal vulnerability. Tom and Coleman do not shy away from the complexities and political risks of talking honestly about race, poverty, policing, and how best to measure social progress. If you want to understand the deeper root causes and possible solutions—beyond slogans or partisanship—this conversation delivers.

Listenable for:

• The candid mix of data, personal history, and vulnerability
• Deep dives into the psychology behind activism and outrage
• An articulate, centrist critique of current social paradigms
• Practical frameworks for thinking about societal progress

Check out:

• Coleman’s music (as Coldman) on Spotify/SoundCloud
• The Conversations with Coleman podcast for more of his insights

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“We should want to live in a world where the fact that you have less melanin in your skin than I do doesn't put up needless roadblocks between us.”
— Coleman Hughes (18:57)

Transcript

[A]

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[C]

What is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here with Colman Hughes Coleman. Thank you so much for joining me, man.

[D]

Glad to be here.

[C]

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 Coldman, which I was very impressed by. Are you still hard into the music scene?

[D]

Yeah, I still am. I mean, unfortunately right now there is no music scene, but at least no music scene in person. But yeah, I'm still very much producing music in my free time and to be released at some point.

[C]

Do you see music as more of an in person thing these days? Thinking about the creation of music, I would think this is kind of a cool period where if you're able to record at your apartment or something that you could go pretty hard on the music. Do you produce or do you just rap?

[D]

Produce, mix, rap, all of it.

[C]

So for you though, is it, is there something big missing in that you're not able to perform in front of a crowd?

[D]

Well, yes and no. Definitely 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 COVID and I think I and a lot of other musicians I know feel like it's kind of a godsend to be in a profession where you can Do a lot by yourself, and you don't go crazy. Stir crazy at home all day. What have comedians been up to? Their whole craft is based on testing jokes out in front of a crowd because they almost never know which ones are gonna be good. So, you know, it's sad for some folks, but for me, it's been all right.

[C]

Yeah, that would be. This would be a very brutal time to be a comic. And I know. Oh, God. Was it DL Hughley that ended up getting coronavirus from touring? I'm almost certain. Oh, I could be wrong about the exact person, but there is a very famous comedian who collapsed on stage because he couldn't bear the thought of not being. Being out performing and was going to. 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 to be performing because they're not taking the security measures and things that they need to be taking. So. 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 that you can do now are things that you can do by yourself, or was that already sort of a super solitary endeavor?

[D]

It was already a very solitary endeavor. So it really is. Is I can do 100% of what I would otherwise do. But, yeah, with filmmaking, that's another example. You know, I. And I did. I just graduated from school, and I had the last two months or so over zoom, and 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. 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 online. But I will say, if you're not inclined to pay attention, it's much harder to get anything out of the class online than you might have in person.

[C]

Do you know what shook down during 1918? I actually haven't thought about this. I've thought so many times about, okay,

[D]

we're going to, yeah, they had online classes.

[C]

Yeah, went well. 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?

[D]

I don't know so much about it, but I know that there was social isolation and at the very least there was cancellation of large events and stuff like that. And different cities did it to different extents. And whether the pandemic better or worse as a result. I know there was a rebellion against, I think mask wearing in some Californian city, maybe San Francisco. There was literally a rebellion against the law that required wearing masks at one point.

[C]

Do you know what the logic was?

[D]

People were pissed off, I think, just

[C]

like, don't tell me what to do kind of thing.

[D]

Yeah, I think so.

[C]

Yeah. That's interesting in terms of the human propensity. So actually I will say that one of the keystones of my personality is a real problem with authority. I was just talking to my wife 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, detriment 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 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. 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 that sense of I don't want somebody to tell me what to do.

[D]

And.

[C]

But when I think about COVID it's one of those where the virus doesn't give a shit 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 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?

[D]

Yeah. In terms of the protest movement, I think. Well, yeah, there's a. 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 who. Who likes the aesthetic element of protesting. The police doesn't actually follow politics very much. So that's. That's definitely an element in the protests. 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 with. With which protests that were local became national and ultimately global. I think people are at. Excuse me, people are at home. They're bored, they're restless. They haven't been. You know, normally they would have gone to a concert in the summer or a music festival. They're starved of human contact, at least, like, in large crowds. And the protests are the closest thing to a concert that can happen right now. So there's definitely that. And then there's, of course, the substance of the issue. Police brutality, police shootings of unarmed civilians. So I think. And then there's perhaps the Trump effect. To what extent does.

[C]

What do you define as the Trump effect?

[D]

Just like the fact that Trump makes everything a little bit worse with his rhetoric. Like, if the knob is at 8 without him, he, like, turns it to 8.5. I do think people tend to attribute too much to the president. A lot of times what's happening is the result of deeper cultural fault lines that would have happened under Obama. But I think Trump just kind of says the thing to piss everyone off just to kind of, like, ratchet it. So the combination of all those things, I think, has.

[C]

I have a quick question for you. So I don't know. I know that you're not 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. And it really is only this movement that has drawn me into, like, yo, I got to figure the fuck, like, what do I think about this? And I love your edict of first, educate yourself, which is exactly what I've been trying to do. Instead of popping off, like, really try to stop and just say, okay, I don't know shit about this, so, you know, how do I go about figuring it out? Anyway, the question I wanted to ask you was, if you have a sense of it, what president, through all history, do you wish was seeing us through this crisis? And why?

[D]

I guess Obama. That may be the boring answer, but I think 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 reins cared about this issue and understands it, and therefore, we don't need so much to disturb the peace and cause violence. And, yeah, I think Obama was able to hit a note 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, tight walk. A tightrope to walk, I guess, would be the way to say it, but I think he did that as good as anyone could. He's not without his faults, of course, but I can't imagine a recent president that would do better. Can. Can you.

[C]

Who. This is where I will say I have been so 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 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, 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 move is forwards or backwards, but in terms of feeling good about who our president was, I felt really fucking 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 such a powerful orator, which is something partly because it's been something I focused so much of 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. I always thought that was really fucking cool. 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 kick, 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, fuck. 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 fuck is going. Like, I don't pay attention to this shit. Obviously. It was like at an 11, you could literally, with the naked eye, look off my. My balcony and see fucking 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, fuck, man. Like, I've really got to dive into this. So the first thing I did was, is there a unified black voice? Yes or no? I had no fucking 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. What I mean by the physics is there is some foundational layer that is in step with the truth of the human animal. Right? That 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 is exactly what the physics of progress are. You start with your goal, everything is going to go off. Your goal, what 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 fucking 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. It is one of the things that led me to going so deep into your world, which is the. I think you call it the humanist approach to race, where it's like colorblindness, 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. I'm not speaking policy because I'm ignorant to his policies, but from just he'd have the credibility to say, look, I get it. And now physics of progress. How do we actually move forward?

[D]

Yeah, I mean, the thing about it is more and more people actually don't share the goal that you just described. People seem to want to live in a world where my skin color and your skin color 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, that means you have to essentially kowtow to me. You are beneath me 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. 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 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 you know that that asymmetry should inform this entire conversation. 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 rather large diversity of opinion. Diversity of opinion that isn't reflected on the New York Times op ed page, let's say, or the black activist class whose voice is often held up 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 firsthand 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 road, needless roadblocks between us 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's, you know, the notion that I would have some kind of, you know, authority over you in this conversation. That's not the, that, that's not anti racism so much as it is the opposite of, of the old classical racism. So I, I very much worry about that and I worry that many of the solutions being proposed, 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, than if you're black. You can never escape it, no matter how hard you try. And I think that is 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'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.

[C]

Yeah, you're getting to now. What makes this important enough for me to fuck with? Because I was telling 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 people that I was coming across in my research, specifically of you 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 Steele. And I was like, christopher, do you want to live on the third rail? I'm like, this shit 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, like he is so willing to say shit 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. 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.

[D]

Yeah. I think by personality, I've always been the type that, you know, if I thought the teacher was wrong, I wanted to say so. And obviously, a lot of times the teacher was right. But that's always how I've been. I've been 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 happened is I didn't really come for the topic of race so much as the topic of race came for me. What I felt like is, out of school, I went to Juilliard, initially out of high school with the intent of being a professional jazz musician. His music was and is really still my first love. But then I sort of pivoted and went to Columbia. But long story short, between the ages of, say, 16 and 20, 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, the whole social justice litany. And I found a lot of the ideas very compelling at first. 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. 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 then the message could not have been louder or more 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. 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 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 flood, you're only ever meeting people, individuals. So I, I think just, you know, planting, you know, encountering kernels 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 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. 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, 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 there's a sort of mass. There's a training en masse to get people to think that way. People of color, especially women, gay people, trans people. So as I said, 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 or useful or wise. And I think I ended up finding that a lot of them were untrue, a lot of them were unwise.

[C]

There's another part that 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, and yet you still did it, even in the middle of your testimony. There are people heckling you in the audience, which was already crazy, but then I have to imagine outside of that. And look, you've said that not so much in person, because people aren't sociopathic like that, but in terms of 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? 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?

[D]

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess I have to go back to the same thing, which is just. It is kind of a personality thing.

[C]

Well, I'll. I'll give you my example and then you can tell me. Maybe I'm just totally misreading you. 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 long story, 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 fuck in the worst neighborhoods in Southern California that you can imagine, I mean, just the stories are fucking 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 the question, how do we solve that problem? So, no bullshit. What would it take? So with morbid obesity, no bullshit, 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, no, just eat vegetables and not Oreos and go to the gym. Doesn't fucking 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 shit 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 thing for their future outcomes, just where they grew up. And that to me, is far more about it's poverty, it's not race. But it happens to align largely, certainly, and where I was working with minorities. 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 up my store and put, you know, slogans and things so that just don't destroy me, right? And that made me feel like a coward. I thought, oh, fuck. 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 to 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. And now it's collided with what's happening now. 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, and maybe I'm projecting that on you. 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, these political issues. So I'm just curious, is. Is there anything reminiscent in what I just said into why you stepped into the space, or am I just totally projecting myself onto you? Well,

[D]

that's a good question. I guess the only way I can answer it is just sort of thinking about how I got into it. I was. I guess it just was noticing the cultural zeitgeist on the issue of race. I thought was getting something extremely deeply and importantly wrong. 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. 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? 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. And 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 aware of the distance between that upbringing and my own and what it actually meant 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. And to the ex, people, you know, even tried to downplay the extent that they were from privilege. Right. And 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 was no internal limiting principle to this movement. 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 has the correct level of melanin, when all of the policy proposals happen, it's a force that has no internal limiting principle. 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 bore on my relationship with myself and with others. 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? 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. 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'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 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.

[C]

Yeah, it's. 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, and that's. It's been. So. I am intoxicated by learning. So coming into this as 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. Working at Quest, which is where I had 3,000 employees. A thousand of them grew up hard as fuck. 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. It was fucking 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 was just fucking 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 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 fucking 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 have asked 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.

[D]

Right?

[C]

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 fucking 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 la. You can't buy a fucking house for a million dollars. It's 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 are whatever the fuck. Aim for the moon, and if you fail, you land in the stars, whatever 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 know 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 2% of the people. So I started 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 20s, 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. And 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 going to 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 going to turn my life around. It's going to 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, fucking hell, do I 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, err on the side of personal responsibility is what matters. The backlash, I have gotten over that. It knows no bounds. And 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.

[B]

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[D]

Yeah, you, 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 $1 million. 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, lack of material objects, but the lack, the lack of imagination that you grow up with that your world is about this big. So when my mom grew up, 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. It's 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 more than the rhetoric, because talk is cheap. If you grow up seeing people doing amazing things at every level of society, seeing people in corporate jobs, seeing people who've been to college, you grow up with all of these things being normalized, you. You fail to appreciate the extent to which seeing those people enabled you to think that was possible for yourself. And that I think that is. That's the logic behind the idea of a role model which can, you know, it can be. It can feel like an, like nonsense advice to say, oh, we need more role models.

[C]

But do you think that sounds like nonsense advice? Because that sounds super fucking powerful to me.

[D]

I think it sounds. Yeah, that's exactly what I think. But it can sound like an unactionable thing. Like, how do you form a policy around that?

[C]

Well, so let's drill down on that because I think this may. And again, I want to just really fucking stress. I don't feel like I have deep wisdom here. I feel like I have a way of thinking that is extraordinarily useful. 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 it does not seem, and this is straight from Thomas Soule. And I know a lot of people just fucking debunk him or ignore him or 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 Sowell. So he had the data to back it up. I have not memorized any of this stuff, but the punchline 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?

[D]

No, I think that's the point you're making is so important and deep and it lies at the foundation of my views on this subject. I think it's the kind of thing that if you never read Sowell or Jason Riley or a few others who've written about this, 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. 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, but it doesn't actually create wealth. 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 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, them such as affirmative action, for example. Asians have very little political power in this country. And I can anyone even name more than can anyone name enough Asian politicians to fill up one hand? Can the typical person do that? No black politicians. Trivially easy. So I think people have a deeply flawed model of how groups advance. And that's 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 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.

[C]

Yeah, I'm the same. So my thing is I'm just obsessed with what actually works. So in business, I call it no bullshit. What would it take? And the whole reason of calling it no bullshit is because I think people bullshit themselves a lot. They get. Stories are so powerful. So 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, period. Like, life does not give a shit what you think about life only gives a shit about how you act. Right? So it's why I revolt against 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 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 fucking interesting. And I'll. I'll use. I'm so curious to know. I never hear you talk about 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 fucking 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 shaman, or chief, sorry, leader came up with a sharp rock, grabbed his foreskin and fucking sliced it off. And then he had to, with no anesthetic, dude. And he had to yell the warriors like, like credo or something. And I was like, that's some og. 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 going to become the oppressors. He was like. 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 with technology versus people who aren't. And obvious parallels between race and. The main character's name is Kida 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, 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. Like, the only way forward is together. And that, to me, just made all the sense in the world. And when I think about just, like, no bullshit, 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, 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 fucking 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 bullshit, will it solve the problem. And so this is where, you know, screaming into the wind, it feels like where I'm just like. 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 Ta Nehisi Coates, 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 the speech he did with you for reparations. And I would. Dude, I was like, he's such a good orator. Like, I fucking love it. The vibe he's giving me, like, fuck, yeah, we gotta rise up. And the irony of. Because 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, where I'm just like, yeah, like, come on. And so I get how if you can click people over into righteous indignation, you can raw, like, really get people amped. But is it serving you?

[D]

Absolutely. I mean, righteous. I think this is. 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 understand how powerful it is because I've been on the other side of it. I felt that feeling. You know, it is similar to a drug in how it makes you feel. If there were a drug that could make you feel the way that people feel when they're listening to Ta Nehisi Coates talk about all the ways in which America has wronged black people, that drug would be metaphorically flying off the shelves because it's an amazingly good feeling. 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. 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. That 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, 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. So how do we make sense of a feeling that was being felt by civil rights protesters in the early 60s, 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 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 at this moment? And is that a wise direction to go in after the feeling has subsided and we're cool headed enough and I

[C]

think 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's where I get super fucking nervous because people don't go like I. So let me finish that thought. People don't go, hey, 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 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 going to say ahead of time, here is what I'm going to. 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. When I first found Thomas Sowell, I was blown away and really unnerved by the video that I was looking at. Looked like it was filmed in the 80s. And I was like, oh, if he was saying amazing shit 40 years ago and we haven't, like, this hasn't been adopted and become the sort of dominant way that we're thinking about it, what the fuck? Like, I don't. That's the part. I don't know what to do with that.

[D]

Yeah, it is depressing, but I resonate completely with what you're saying, and I really like the way that you frame it. And this goes back to one thing we were saying earlier, which is often I hear people say I was really excited about the Obama presidency, but then I was really 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. Why do you still. Why haven't you updated your worldview 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?

[C]

But I think they did, man. I think the recalibration went like this. And now I am waiting out past what I actually understand. And I hope you will give me the grace to be thinking out loud right now. But 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 fucking racist that even with a black president, you can't overcome this shit, that there is something so insidious and so it is so wormed its way into every fucking glance, interaction, everything, every policy, everything, that 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 grab a hold of the third rail and 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 just die. So when I say that they're real, that's what I mean. But the thing that draws me to that is, now, if that is your base assumption. I alluded to base assumptions earlier. If your base assumption is, oh, 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, down and start anew. And that's what I See people acting in accordance with that freaks me the fuck out because I'm all for completely doing away with the system, but only if you've got a better one in place. First it's like the thought of being in a boat and being like, yo, our boat's leaking, so gotta fucking sink it. And then we'll figure it out. After that, it's like, what? That strikes me as a very bad idea.

[D]

Right? Yeah, I think that's. That's exactly how I think about dismantling the police. 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, 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 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.

[C]

Also, thinking about second and third order consequences, it's like, all right, people getting shot by the police is fucking gnarly. Like, watching the videos, George, Floyd, Anybody? Dude, it is so fucking unnerving. You get a real sense of holy hell. And 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. I'm like, the fuck? So I'm like, mom, hold on. I look out the peephole and somebody has their finger over the peephole. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not opening this door. And they're like, police, open up. And I'm like, yeah, right, man. And they're like, look, somebody called 911 from that apartment. I'm like, no, they didn't. I'm here alone. And they're like, okay. And they leave. So I'm back talking to my mom on the phone, and three minutes later, bang, bang, bang on the door. Open this fucking door. We're gonna break it down. I'm like, the fuck 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, 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, out. She's like, absolutely not. They're going to give you a fake number. Like, don't open the door. So I'm like, fuck, what do I do? And they're like, banging on it. And they're like, if you don't open this fucking door, like, we're going to battering ram it down. And I'm like, jesus, man. Like, this is getting real fucking 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 it a crack.

[D]

Boom.

[C]

They kick the fucking door in. I go flying. They grab me, arms behind my back. Boom. Face down on the. The bar that happened to be there. And they're like, you better fucking hope everybody in this apartment's okay. And they. And I know everyone's gonna be okay. Cause 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 fucking lucky that everybody or, you know, that 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, like I can't stop them. They're going to do whatever the fuck they're going to do. And I am literally there was four of them. I think they're going to do what the fuck 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 fucking thing. That's more terrifying because they feel like they're not like anchored by anything. At least there's some accountability with the police. So that's where I start going, yo, we have to really look at what's a knock on effect that we might not be thinking of on its face.

[D]

Yeah, I mean we've already seen crime go up in New York. Homicides are way up. 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 do think, you know, there are ways where you can have both at once where you can get the police out of doing certain kinds of work without the crime, crime rate rising. So I think we, we have to, you know, have as you, as you would say, no bullshit, 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 moment I think there's an under discussed problem of homicide and murder. Those are synonyms of course.

[C]

I can feel you preempting the YouTube comments.

[D]

Yeah. Does he not know that homicide is murdered? 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 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 I think it should be viewed as a central problem, not as an afterthought or a way of distracting from a separate conversation, but. But it should be viewed as, you know, 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 reckoning on this issue where people are trying to combat it culturally, legally, et cetera. And I think, why can't we have some kind of movement like that which is addressed to homicide, which is, after all, 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 a huge issue and it's uncomfortable to talk about for some people because the perpetrators are overwhelmingly black as well. But. But to me, I think all of that is a distraction. 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 we've just learned to tolerate this as a society and I think we have to stop tolerating it.

[C]

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. That was sort of the. Because I was already immersed in something that the more I get into this, the more I realize, whoa, whoa, whoa. 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 have put at the center of my life and have now for the last, I don't know, five or six years. So it's like that's something I'm really fucking obsessed by and thinking about. With my particular 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 bullshit 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 the 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 poverty has created these honor societies.

[D]

Yeah, I think the. You know, I don't want to say with too much confidence that I know what the cause is, because 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 Sowell has persuasively argued is that, you know, black people used to live in the South. All. All of us used to be in the south. South, 95%, basically, until about 1900, when people started moving northward. So culturally, black people have roots in the south and in Southern honor culture. So that could be one contributing factor. Why there's such a large racial disparity there.

[C]

Well, let's ask an obvious question in terms of whether that's 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?

[D]

Much higher.

[C]

Really interesting.

[D]

Yeah. There's a huge disparity between Southern white people and Northern white people, and there always has been.

[C]

That's fucking interesting. Okay. Very unexpected punchline which I will update my thinking on, 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?

[D]

That's a good question. And that's beyond my. Beyond my knowledge.

[C]

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 Gini 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 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 interracial violence goes down, then one or two intra racial violence. Sorry, is actually what I meant, goes down. Then this is a poverty thing and not a race thing and not even necessarily a southern thing. That's interesting. So this is. We are, again, we're at the sort of edges of what I actually understand. This is something to really think through. But 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, 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.

[D]

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 arrow is going in both directions at once. So like, high crime may be caused by poverty, but poverty may also be caused by high crime.

[C]

And they're 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 had never heard of the terms a positive reinforcing loop and a negative reinforcing loop. So negative is 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 positive reinforcing loop where the more you're in it the way, 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. And that is interesting. So I think they get into this positive reinforcing loop where either the more violent you are, the poorer you become, or the poorer you are, the more violent you become. And it just now at this advanced state, it doesn't matter anymore what, what came first. It only matters how do you interrupt it.

[D]

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. We can disagree on how many racist cops there are. I think there are racist cops, no doubt. I, 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 point 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 the 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. You risk being demonized even if you're good. And if you're a black person, you might be viewed as a sellout or a traitor, which has been true for a long time, but has never been more true, I think, than it is now. So 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. 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.

[C]

No question. Yeah, 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 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. 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, yeah, 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, fuck you, pig. Big middle finger, getting spit on. 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.

[D]

That's.

[C]

That's some dicey.

[D]

Yeah, it really is. I worry about that.

[C]

Yeah, that. That ranks pretty high on my list of concerns in terms of second and third order consequences of like. Like really just trying to map out, like, where. Where does this go? Or where do we go from here? 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?

[D]

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 an answer. In some sense I find it's easier to have answers to smaller questions than, than to bigger questions. Obviously if there's some small policy issue that I've gotten obsessed with and I think street lights and public housing reduce crime at night by 30%, we should do that. It's an easy thing and you never think of it, but that's an awesome small innovation that would just help society. That's an answer 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 to the big questions. I do, I often don't think in terms of solutions. 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.

[C]

And by that you mean zero racism, zero murder.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, we will never get to zero racism. It's an unrealistic and childish expectation. As much as I can understand why someone would want that, that and you know, we will never, never get to zero murder probably so long as humans are able to procure a weapon that can kill someone. Occasionally someone is going to 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.

[C]

I heard somebody talk about this and forgive me if it was you, but I thought this was really powerful. And they were saying that, that 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 as 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. 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 punishment, no diminishing returns for going all the way to thought control. And I thought like as grotesque as racism is, and by the way, and I know this is so derided what I'm about to say, people are going to fucking hate, but it's one of those goes it seems self evidently true to me as a business guy. It just doesn't make sense. And I think it was Thomas Sowell 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, 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 fuck, 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, that I'm just saying 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 this sort of mania that we're seeing now.

[D]

Yeah, I think 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 things that ostensibly are separate. One is a free market system and the other is racial bias or hatred against groups of people. But in some people's minds, they're connected 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. So this is one of those areas where, you know, people just don't. So, so here, 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 or let's compare East Germany to West Germany, let's compare North Korea to South Korea, let's compare Ghana to the Ivory coast, 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 college student might say, frankly, a smart high school student might say, okay, let's look at, over the course of US 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 just a hypothesis that capitalism is linked to racism. 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 racists, government run entities can be racist. And 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 many situations, not always, but the market tends to impose a cost on racial discrimination. My favorite example is that, that, you know, Plessy versus Ferguson, the famous court case that challenged separate but but equal was funded by a streetcar 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 street car, they couldn't fill it up with white passengers, and that was unprofitable to them. Were those people racist? Probably most white Jim Crow people in Jim Crow south were racists, but they were also businessmen. And so they, they funded that, that, that famous civil rights case. And it's, you know, it's not widely understood that, that the free market and civil rights directly aligned with each other in, in that particular instance for reasons that are generalizable. And as, as you point out, in South Africa, there were, there were areas that were officially whites only that were majority black because land, because landlords didn't want to go broke. So, yeah, in general, I, 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 link between markets and capitalism on the one hand and racism on the other.

[C]

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 sets. South Korea, East Germany, West Germany. 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 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 LA. I don't think I'm misquoting. Crime is up in LA, like 250%. Over what exact time period? I don't know if it's 2020 versus 2019 or if it's since the protesting and the rioting 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.

[D]

Absolutely, yeah.

[C]

So that, to me is, I think, going to be. 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 Ta, Nehisi 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. 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 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 colons, give me 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 fucking moron. Like, how does he not get. 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 tea. Meaning the cup of tea or what, 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 literally turning around on the freeway and driving home because I'm like, fuck this, we're not going to be able to enjoy ourselves. I took a deep breath and I said, this isn't about the tea. So what the hell is this about? 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, 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.

[D]

Yeah, I think you're. What you're talking about is there's a great book by Thomas Sowell called A Conflict of Visions. And 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? 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? And one reason is because people have different basic assumptions about how society works. And he spends the rest of the book. Book. Laying out two fundamentally different visions about human society is human nature. And identifying different famous intellectuals that, you know, 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. Of course, if you know the rest of Soul's work, you'll know he very much takes one side of that. But, you know, I. I definitely resonate to, you know, often I think about it as an iceberg, where, you know, the argument I'm. 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 top level disagreements until the end of time and just wondering why we're always disagreeing about shit. Every news story we're taking the opposite side of. What are the odds? Are we brainwashed? You know, I've had this with the different people who are smart. Just like any news story that's controversial, we're coming at it from different angles. So it's not about the news story and we're both smart. What is, is, I think, having a different picture, a different starting expectation from humans and human society.

[C]

Yeah, I'm gonna have to read that book because 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. Cool. A way to inject ideas with going through the limbic centers of the brain instead of the rational centers of the brain.

[D]

What do you think?

[C]

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 hitting the moment where your style is right to the culture so that they would elevate you as a musician, I think is going to be far harder versus your true and authentic stance as an intellectual one. You make me angry because you are so much smarter than I am and people think I'm being humble when I say things like that. But 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, fuck, 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. 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. But it will 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 fucking 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 fucking 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. 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 shit what Ja Rule thinks about. I forget what he was talking about. It's fucking hilarious bit. Right? Exactly. And. But at the same time, there's nothing about being a rapper that. That stops Ja Rule from being incredibly insightful. Right. 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 fucking incredible. But yet we have a hard time letting one person be both.

[D]

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, but, you know, I'm going to run the experiment and we'll see how it, how it goes. I, I, I take all of your points are, 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, that are more extreme in one direction and more extreme in the other. 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 and I want to contribute to both of them and I will. So, you know, 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 fuck it and do what you actually want to do and let the chips fall where they may. Where they may. I think that that's absolutely a no brainer to me.

[C]

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 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 its modes of impact and life experience has taught me that what you and I are doing right now will affect very meaningfully about 2% of the people that the broad 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 it at, about 2% of the people will change their life based on something they hear you say. And it's fucking 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. 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 and you bring these threads together, like there's something in the human mind that makes that shit incredibly powerful. Like all of that is I just find so, so, so cool.

[D]

Cool. Yeah, absolutely.

[C]

On your rap career, one I highly, highly, highly encourage people to go check your music out. 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. 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.

[D]

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.

[C]

Do you think about the element of cool in hip hop culture at all?

[D]

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 ha. 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 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 the music is articulated.

[C]

Do you play jazz trombone?

[D]

Yes.

[C]

So believe it or not, I play jazz trombone.

[D]

Wow.

[C]

For four years. I. I don't. I cannot tell you the last time I met somebody that was a trombone player, full stop. The bad news is that because I was so bad at it, I really. And I don't. 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. 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. 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 water. I tried to get into Thelonious 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.

[D]

For me, Thelonious Monk is a hard one to get into if you're not already into jazz. I would find his music is angular and jerky and unconventional, even within jazz.

[C]

Like it, I'll call it straight arrhythmic. I was like, I can't belong to this.

[D]

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 too exposed to, like, the more mainstream versions of that same song. So, yeah, I definitely wouldn't. I can definitely see that it would be hard to get into.

[C]

What is it about jazz? You've referred to jazz as your first love many times. What is it about jazz over, say, hip hop that is your first love? Was it just the order of encounter?

[D]

Yeah, the order of loving it. I was into hip hop when I was 11 or 12, but I wasn't, like, into it. 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 trying to figure out how it worked for hours every day, was jazz.

[C]

That's interesting. So, 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?

[D]

Jazz is like a language. It's like learning Chinese 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 there are, like. There's grammar. It takes approximately the same time 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. And there are people that speak like no one else. They're inimitable. So it's really just a language that takes place in the medium of harmony and melody rather than words and sentences.

[C]

So do you have a timeline for. I know you don't like to talk about what you're doing in the future, but do you have a timeline for the next album

[D]

soon?

[C]

Has some of it already been recorded?

[D]

Yes.

[C]

All right. These are very simple statements which I can respect, dude. Well, I'll be super eager to watch what you do in that world. I hope that you can translate some of the ideas to that limbic space you're fucking. Such an interesting voice, and knowing that music is the thing that you've gone harder on than necessarily the intellectual stuff. Stuff is very intriguing. So it'll be interesting to see you chase them both with much aplomb. 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. 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. Thank you much.

[D]

Thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure.

[C]

Awesome, man. All right, everybody, if you haven't, check this man out. His stuff is amazing. He has a podcast also called Conversations with Coleman. Obviously, it's fucking amazing. Definitely look him up on Spotify or SoundCloud. You will find him. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, please go to itunes, go to Stitcher rate and review us. That helps us build this community. And that is what we are all about right now. Building this community as big as we can to help as many people as we can, deliver as much value as possible. And you guys rating and reviewing really helps with that. Alright guys, thank you again so much. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care

[D]

of.