Conversations with Coleman

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.

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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.

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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.

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Today's episode is a recording of a debate that occurred a few weeks ago between me and Jamelle Bouie, who is a columnist for the New York Times. This debate was hosted by TED as well as Open to Debate, formerly known as Intelligence Squared. The motion was, "Does Colorblindness Perpetuate Racism?" Jamelle took the affirmative and I took the negative.

Now there's a long backstory to this debate surrounding my recent TED Talk on color blindness and and I go into the details of this in the intro to the episode.

I really recommend that you listen to the whole debate and do share your thoughts in the comments.

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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.

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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.

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My guest today is Lee Fang. Lee Fang is an investigative reporter, formerly of The Intercept and The Nation. His writing is focused on the influence of money in politics, security state overreach, and civil liberties. He was also responsible for releasing part of the Twitter files many months ago.

In this episode, we talk about the wide breadth of Lee's work, including his early reporting about the Koch brothers. We talk about whether there is a deep state, we talk about the collusion between Twitter and the US security state that was revealed in the Twitter files, and much more.

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My guest today is Jeannie Fontana. Jeannie is the CEO of the TREAT California Initiative. TREAT is a statewide initiative that would create a $5 billion funding agency for psychedelic research, which has proven highly effective for conditions like PTSD and Depression. Jeannie was a founding member of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which performs stem cell research. She has also advocated on behalf of patients with Lou Gehrig's disease. 

Jeannie and I talk about her background in medicine, toxicology and biochemistry. We talk about how she got into psychedelic research and doing psychedelics herself. I talk about my own experiences with psychedelic drugs, and much more.

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My guest today is Jean Twenge. Jean is a psychologist, author, and professor of psychology at San Diego State University. She's best known for her research on generational differences. Her book, "Generation Me", dealt with millennials. Her book, "iGen", which is how I first encountered her, deals with Gen Z. Now she's back with a massive new book called "Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future"

In this episode, we talk about all the differences between the various generations - differences in happiness, suicide rates, drinking behavior, personality traits like narcissism, attitudes towards love and marriage and more. We also talk about the technological and cultural trends that caused these generational changes. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

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My guest today is John Wood Jr. John is a national leader at Braver Angels, which is a grassroots organization dedicated to the work of political depolarization. He's also a writer for USA Today. He's a former vice chairman of the Republican Party of LA County and a former nominee for Congress. John is also the host of the podcast "Uniting America with John Wood Jr."

John and I talk about 2020 and the legacy of BLM. We talk about the emotional and psychological pull of wokeness. We talk about the status of the American dream. I talk about my experience as a kid switching from public school to private school. We talk about the cultural barriers to success for Black and Hispanic kids. We talk about the similarities between original sin and white privilege and much more. I really enjoy this conversation and I hope you do too.

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