Conversations with Coleman

My guest today is Richard Dawkins. I assume most of you know who he is, but in case you've been living under a rock; Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and emeritus fellow at Oxford University. If I listed all the awards he's received in his lifetime, this description will not end. His books include The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, Unweaving the Rainbow, and many others. His latest book is called "Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution" in which he explores and explains the phenomenon of flight both in the animal world and in manmade technology. We didn't get to discuss this book in this episode, but I really recommend you all check it out. 

In this episode, we discuss technological progress, whether race is a social construct or biological reality, the mystery of consciousness, the concept of a meme (which Richard invented), religion and its relationship to a happy life, whether wokeness plays the role of a religion in people's lives, and finally, Richard gives his advice to up and coming scientists. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

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My guest today is Andrew Yang. Andrew Yang is a businessman, attorney and author. He is known for his presidential bid in 2020 and his bid for New York City mayor in 2021.

This podcast was recorded at Andrew's studio and jointly released on his podcast which is called "Forward".

In this episode, we discuss my upbringing and background in music, how philosophy is taught, why race shouldn't matter, the democrats use of identity politics, office culture, the future of work, automation, and AI.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

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My guest today is David Chalmers. David is a professor of philosophy and neuroscience at NYU and the co-director of NYU Centre for Mind, Brain and Consciousness.

David just released a new book called "Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy", which we discuss in this episode. We also discuss whether we're living in a simulation, the progress that's been made in virtual reality, whether virtual worlds count as real, whether people would and should choose to live in a virtual world, and many other classic questions in the philosophy of mind and more.

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My guest today is Jacob Mchangama. Jacob is a lawyer and writer based in Denmark. He's the founder of Justitia, a think tank focused on human rights and freedom of speech. Jacob is also the producer and narrator of the excellent podcast called Clear and Present Danger.

Jacob and I discuss his brilliant new book: Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. We talk about the Danish cartoon controversy and Charlie Hebdo. We also discuss the so-called "Milton's curse"; which is the habit of hypocritically defending free speech for some, but not for others. I think this point is relevant to some of the bans that we've been seeing on Russian state news.

We talk about the notion of power relations and its relationship to free speech, the relationship between censorship and human nature, and the importance of having a culture of free speech in addition to having laws that nominally protect it. We also talk about the origins of what Jacob calls "egalitarian free speech" in ancient Athens, the First Amendment and its evolving interpretation over time, and the alleged exceptions to protected speech such as hate speech or shouting fire in a crowded theatre. We go on to discuss whether censorship actually works, big tech companies and their role in censoring speech, similarities between the rise of the printing press and the rise of the Internet, cancel culture, the threat to free speech posed by China and the CCP, and much more.

This was one of my favorite conversations that I've had so far this year, and I hope you enjoy it.

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My guest today is Briahna Joy Gray. Briahna was the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders and his 2020 campaign. Before that, she was a columnist and Senior Politics Editor at The Intercept. Her work has also appeared in many other outlets like Rolling Stone magazine, Current Affairs, New York Magazine, and The Guardian. Briahna currently hosts the Bad Faith Podcast, which I hope to go on soon.

We talk about how Briahna's international childhood influenced her worldview. We discuss American exceptionalism and patriotism, and whether they're justified, how identity-politics crowds out the issues of poverty in class, the effects of crime in poor neighborhoods, and the cancellation of Whoopi Goldberg. We argue about the extent to which culture is a cause of racial and ethnic disparities. We go on to talk about our cultural obsession with four-year colleges and the prospect of instead supporting vocational schools much more than we currently do, minimum wage laws, and socialism generally.

I really enjoyed this one and I hope you do too.

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My guest today is Cathy Young. Cathy is one of my favorite journalists around today. She is a writer at The Bulwark and also a cultural studies fellow at the Cato Institute, a columnist for Newsday, and a contributing editor to Reason. Cathy, who was born in Moscow and came to the United States with her family in 1980, is also the author of the books; Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood, Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality.

This episode is all about the war in Ukraine. Now, it's an unusually dense episode but I really recommend you pay attention to this episode because Cathy is just a wealth of information. We spend the first half-hour discussing the modern history of Russia, from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, where Cathy spent her childhood and her young adulthood to the Yeltsin era and the rise of Putin. We spend the next half-hour discussing the recent history of Ukraine, from the Orange Revolution in 2004-2005 to the Euromaidan protests and the Revolution of Dignity.

We go on to discuss the alleged role of NATO expansion and creating this crisis, the role of Kremlin propaganda, the alleged presence of Nazis in Ukrainian leadership, American hypocrisy and foreign policy. We also talk about the DIS analogy between the war in Iraq and the war in Ukraine, the cancellation of everything Russian, the prospect of NATO intervention in Ukraine, the concept of nuclear blackmail, and more.

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My guest today is Matthew Yglesias. As many of you may know, Matt was the co-founder of Vox, along with Ezra Klein, who I had on the show last year. Matt is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and writes The Slow Boring blog and newsletter on substack. 

In this episode, Matt talks about why he left Vox for substack and we discuss Matt's book "One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger", in which Matt argues that America should increase its population by means of increasing the native birth rate, as well as increasing immigration. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

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My guest today is Ashley Rindsberg. Ashley is an American novelist and journalist now based in Israel. His book is The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History.

We discuss the little-known history of major errors made by the New York Times. We also talk about the concept of authority, what makes the times different from other papers, the idea of objective truth, and the many problems with the 1619 project. We finally go on to speak about how to determine what's true in the world.

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My guest today is Jeffrey Maurer. Jeffrey has been a comedy writer, a speechwriter, and a stand-up comic. He was the senior writer for John Oliver's show Last Week Tonight. Jeffrey is now a substack writer and his substack is called I might be wrong. 

In this episode, we talk about the rise of political comedy in America, how political polarisation has changed American television, the problem of preachiness in comedy both on the right and the left, and the fine line between funny and offensive. We also discussed the mechanics of joke writing, the culture of the comedy cellar (which is my favorite comedy club), and the importance of laughter. We go on to speak about how wokeness hurts the Democratic Party, the cancellation of Winston Marshall formerly of the band Mumford and Sons, how Democrats could win in the midterms, gender pronouns, audience capture, and much more. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

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My guest today is Dr. Zubin Damania aka ZDoggMD. Zubin is a USCF Stanford-trained internal medicine doctor and founder of Turntable Health, an innovative primary care clinic. He was also a hospitalist for many years and now hosts the podcast "The ZDoggMD Show" 

Zubin and I talk about the differences between mainstream western medicine and alternative medicines, the politicization of COVID information, the misinformation around the mRNA vaccines, the hatred directed at the unvaccinated, and the absurdity of many vaccine mandates. We also discussed the social stigma associated with getting COVID whether Long COVID is biological, psychological or both, the placebo effect and the nocebo effect, and the risk of myocarditis for young men getting the mRNA vaccines. We also go on to speak about the dishonesty in public health messaging, the failures of the CDC and the FDA, the racial triaging of COVID antivirals, whether there are systemic racism in modern medicine, and much more.

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