Conversations With Coleman | Members Exclusive

My guest today is Yascha Mounk. Yascha is a German born political scientist, author, and lecturer known for his research on the rise of populism and the challenges to liberal democracy. He has authored several influential books, including "Stranger in My Own Country", "The People vs. Democracy", and his new book, "The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time"A few episodes ago, I had Christopher Rufo on the podcast to discuss his analysis of why wokeness came to dominate so many institutions. Yascha's asking the same question in this book, but he's coming to a different answer. Yascha focuses less on people like Herbert Marcuse and more on intellectuals like Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Derrick Bell, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. We also talk about why there are so many former Marxists in the writing world, but so few people who convert into Marxism later in life. We talk about how Foucault's critique of language differs from George Orwell's critique of language, and much more. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

The organization’s tagline is “ideas worth spreading.” But they attempted to suppress mine.

My guests today are Scott Adams and Noam Dworman. Scott Adams is an American writer, commentator, and cartoonist best known for creating the comic strip Dilbert. In addition to his cartooning work, Adams has authored several books and frequently comments on a range of topics from media bias to psychology to the mechanics of persuasion. Noam Dworman is the owner of the Comedy Cellar in New York and is a good personal friend of mine who has his own podcast called "Live From the Table", which is actually one of my favorite podcasts. I'm co-releasing this episode with Noam, so check out his podcast as well.Now there is an interesting backstory to this conversation surrounding Scott's recent controversial comments and I go into the details of this in the intro to the episode. In this episode, we also address Scott's comments, we talk about mainstream media bias, we discuss Trump's efforts to overturn the election, where Scott has a very different view than myself and Noam. We talk about racism and also double standards around the kind of speech that's acceptable, given your race. Finally, we go on to discuss Scott's recent self-help book called "Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success"

My guest today is Christopher Rufo. Christopher is a political activist and filmmaker known for his opposition to Critical Race Theory or CRT. He's a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute and he's the author of a new book called "America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything"In this episode, we talk about the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the role he played in popularizing critical theory. We talk about the legacy of the weather underground. We talk about the admiration that left-wing intellectuals in the 20th century had for Mao and Stalin. We discuss the relationship between Critical Theory and Marxism. We talk about the psychological and emotional appeal of communism. We discuss the effect of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the Western left. We disagree somewhat about the legacy of McCarthyism. We talk about the political leanings of public school teachers today. We talk about the strengths and weaknesses of classical liberalism as a philosophy. We also go on to talk about the teaching of CRT in public schools and much more. 

My guest today is Jens Heycke. Jens is a researcher, writer, and competitive cyclist. He studied economics and Near East Studies at U. Chicago, the London School of Economics, and Princeton. His book is called "Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism in the World's Past and America's Future"In this episode, we talk about the origin of the term "melting pot", as well as the origin of the concept of multiculturalism. We talk about the goal of cultural assimilation. We talk about how ancient Rome tackled the issue of cultural diversity among its subjects. We discuss the early Islamic empires; modern-day Sri Lanka; Rwanda and Botswana; the Ottoman Empire; the French color-blind system; Singapore; and much more. This conversation is basically a survey of how all of these different societies have tackled the issue of cultural diversity and what lessons we can draw from their successes and failures. I enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too.

My guest today is Garett Jones. Garett is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. His interests include macroeconomics, the micro foundations of economic growth, IQ, the power of culture, and public choice economics. The books we focus on in this episode are "10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less" and "The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left"We talk about the intellectual environment of George Mason University. We talk about about UAPs. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of democracy. We discuss the possibility of so-called benign dictatorships. We talk about the crisis of expertise, the Electoral College and then we move on to the topic of immigration. We talk about whether and in what ways immigrants assimilate. We talk about the idea of the melting pot. We discuss high trust versus low trust cultures and much more. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Jamelle Bouie, columnist for the New York Times, joins the speaker in a debate on whether color-blindness perpetuates racism. They discuss the concept of color-blindness and its implications, the importance of healthy debate, the reality of race, the role of color consciousness in addressing racial inequality, the impact of increased diversity, and closing statements on systemic inequality and race-based policies.

My guests today are Hyram and Verlan Lewis. Hyram and Verlan are brothers. Hyram is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University, Idaho, and Verlan is a political scientist at Harvard Center for American Political Studies. Together, Hyram and Verlan have written a very interesting new book called "The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America"​​​​​​​In this book, they challenge the widely held belief that the political left and right represent two distinct philosophies, liberalism or progressivism on one end and conservatism on the other. Instead, they argue that people on the left and the right are more like sports fans. They are born into a particular tribe and then they adopt the random assortment of beliefs that tribe currently holds. Now they acknowledge that there are such things as political philosophies, like libertarianism, for example. They just think those philosophies have nothing to do with what we call the left and the right in everyday speech. In other words, the words left and right do not name philosophies. They name arbitrary tribes that then invent convenient, but false stories about what their philosophies are. That thesis is the topic of this conversation and I think it's very interesting. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too.​​​

My guest today is Philip Goff. Phillip is a philosopher known for his work on consciousness and the philosophy of mind, particularly for his defense of panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe. He's an associate professor at Durham University in the UK. His books include "Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness", and "Consciousness and Fundamental Reality".Phillip is an advocate of a controversial but very interesting theory of consciousness known as panpsychism, and he defends it as well as I have ever heard it defended. However, before we get there in this conversation, we rehearse what may be familiar ground to some listeners. We talk about the hard problem of consciousness as opposed to the easy problems of consciousness. We talk about the problem with materialist explanations of consciousness. We talk about the problem with dualist explanations of consciousness. Phillip challenges my narrative about scientific progress in a really interesting way. We talk about the global workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness. We talk about the principle of parsimony in science and how it relates to rival theories of consciousness. And finally, we get to Phillip's case for panpsychism. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too.

Today's episode is a roundtable discussion about AI safety with Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gary Marcus, and Scott Aaronson. Eliezer Yudkowsky is a prominent AI researcher and writer known for co-founding the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, where he spearheaded research on AI safety. He's also widely recognized for his influential writings on the topic of rationality. Scott Aaronson is a theoretical computer scientist and author, celebrated for his pioneering work in the field of quantum computation. He's also the chair of COMSI at U of T Austin, but is currently taking a leave of absence to work at OpenAI. Gary Marcus is a cognitive scientist, author, and entrepreneur known for his work at the intersection of psychology, linguistics, and AI. He's also authored several books, including "Kluge" and "Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust".This episode is all about AI safety. We talk about the alignment problem. We talk about the possibility of human extinction due to AI. We talk about what intelligence actually is. We talk about the notion of a singularity or an AI takeoff event and much more.It was really great to get these three guys in the same virtual room and I think you'll find that this conversation brings something a bit fresh to a topic that has admittedly been beaten to death on certain corners of the internet.