Conversations with Coleman

My guest today needs no introduction, so I won't give him one.

Today's guest is Steven Pinker, and he has a new book called "Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters."

We talk about what rationality is, we talk about rationality's PR problem, whether rationality has increased or decreased over time and how to apply reason to everyday life choices. We also discuss the behavioral economics revolution and cognitive biases, what it means to be intellectually humble, why people love conspiracy theories and when is it okay to be irrational. We go on to talk about the role "reason" has played in the enormous progress humanity has made since the dawn of civilization, and much more. 

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My guest today is Nicholas Christakis. Nicholas is a physician, a sociologist, and a professor at Yale University. He'll be known to some of you as the professor who kept his composure in front of a mob of students screaming about Halloween costumes back in 2015 or he may be known to you as the author of many books, including "Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social networks and How they shape our lives", "Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society" and "Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live", which will be the focal point of our conversation today.

Nicholas and I talk about how the polarized media has harmed our ability to deal with COVID. We talk about the end goal of herd immunity. We talk about whether the incredible speed of the rollout of the vaccine is suspicious. We talk about the ethics of requiring or strongly pressuring people to get the vaccine. We talked about the ethics of encouraging booster shots when many around the world have yet to get their first vaccination. We also discuss Ivermectin and much more.

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

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My guest today is Ryan Holiday. Ryan is the best-selling author of many books, including "Trust Me, I'm Lying", "The Obstacle is the Way", "Ego is the Enemy", "The Daily Stoic" which is also the name of his podcast, and his latest book: "Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave". Ryan is also the former Head of Marketing at American Apparel.

In this episode, we talk about Ryan's strange career path from marketing to becoming the modern face of stoicism. We talk about stoicism, what it is and how to apply it to your life. We talk about mindfulness meditation, how to deal with traumatic experiences, and how to pursue goals while also letting go of the results. We talk about narcissism. We also talk about far-left campus-style politics and its adversarial relationship with the principles of stoicism. We talk about social media and the battle for our attention and much more.

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

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My guest today is Andy Norman. Andy is a philosopher and the director of the humanism initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the founder of CIRCE, the Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative. In this episode, we discuss his new book "Mental immunity: Infectious ideas, Mind parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."

We talk about how bad ideas operate like parasites. We talk about the notion of a mental immune system. We talk about the virtues and dangers of being open-minded. We discussed Richard Dawkins's notion of selfish genes and his coinage of the word "Meme". We talked about conspiracy theories, we talked about whether you should seek out disagreements with your friends and family or whether you should simply keep the peace. We talk about policies like stop and frisk and how to weigh lives saved against more abstract moral gains. We talk about what makes good ideas, "good" and bad ideas, "bad". We talk about the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment. We talk about cultures of cheating and cultures of honesty in different sports, and much more.

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My guest today is Kmele Foster. Kmele will be known to many of you as the co-host of The Fifth Column Podcast which is one of my favorite podcasts.

He's also the co-founder of a media company called Freethink, and a former co-host of The Independents on Fox Business Network.

This episode was sort of a post mortem on two other recent episodes, the one with Christopher Ruffo, and the one with David Hogg. Kmele was one of the co-authors of a New York Times op-ed, critical of the anti CRT laws that Ruffo had a hand in writing. And it seemed to me that that piece had misrepresented the content of those laws. So we spend the majority of the conversation talking about anti CRT laws in general, that op-ed in particular, and the wider conversation about indoctrination in K–12 education.

Towards the end of the podcast, we make a hard pivot and discuss gun control, because Kmele is a proud gun owner. Many of you didn't like the podcast with David Hogg because he's not a gun violence expert. And that's true, of course. But I just want to make it clear that this podcast is not reserved for experts. If you have 1.1 million Twitter followers due to your activism on some topic, that's reason enough for me to have a conversation with you.

Kmele is also not a gun expert by any means. So if you're upset by that, you can consider this your trigger warning.

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

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My guest today is Jesse Morton. Jesse has an incredibly interesting life story. He was born in America, converted to Islam as a young adult, became radicalized, and devoted his life to doing everything he could to help Al-Qaeda from America, including creating the very first English language jihadist propaganda magazine, which later famous magazines like Inspire and Dubuque would be modeled after.

So after a long journey away from Islamism, he now runs an organization called Parallel Networks, which works on deradicalizing people who are involved in extremist political and religious movements of all kinds. I enjoyed this one a lot, and I hope you do too.

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My guest today is Professor Abhijit Banerjee. Professor Banerjee is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, an econ professor at MIT, and a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Banerjee and I discussed the difference between empirical work and theoretical work in economics. We talk about Banerjee's Nobel Prize-winning research on alleviating global poverty. We talk about whether immigrants drive down wages for native workers, the role of financial incentives and driving human behavior. 

We speak about welfare, the effect of globalism on American industries like manufacturing, and the social consequences of having whole industries die out, and much more.

#ConversationswithColeman #CwC #ColemanHughes #AbhijitBanerjee #nobelprize #Economics101 #Economics102 #poverty #globalism

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My guest today is Helen Joyce. Helen is a staff journalist at the Economist magazine, and has been an editor there since 2005. She also has a PhD in mathematics from University College London. Helen just released a controversial new book called "Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality." Now, this is one of those books that is likely to be misrepresented on Twitter and in some media as transphobic but is in fact a deep and thoughtful attempt to navigate all the complex issues at the intersection of gender identity and public policy. 

Helen and I discussed the difference between gender and sex, evolving definitions of gender, the different waves of feminism, gender dysphoria and related phenomenon like autogynephilia, trans identity as well as gender neutrality. We talk about hormone treatments, puberty blockers, detransitioning, and the age at which people should be able to make these kinds of decisions. We discuss gender pronouns, the logic of sex-segregated spaces, such as locker rooms, bathrooms, sports, and prisons. And finally, we talk about the phenomenon of social contagion as it applies to gender identities. 

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My guest today is Professor Peter Doherty. Professor Doherty is a Nobel Prize-winning veterinary surgeon. His prize-winning research focused on how the immune system reacts to viruses. He is also the author of "Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know", "An Insider's Plague Year" and many other books. 

This episode is about all things COVID. Professor Doherty goes into detail about the physiology of COVID and what happens when you get infected. We talk about the way MRNA vaccines work, whether masks and lockdowns work, the ethics of pressuring people to get vaccinated, the reasons why people choose not to get vaccinated and more. We also talk about Ivermectin and its potential use as a treatment or prophylactic. I assume I have some audience overlap with a Darkhorse podcast, which is run by Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying. I know that some people have drawn the lesson from listening to that show that taking Ivermectin is better than getting the vaccine. So if that describes you, please listen to Professor Doherty discuss Ivermectin. 

Finally, there's a lot of biological detail in this podcast, but I highly recommend you stick it out because Professor Doherty is a brilliant thinker and an excellent communicator. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. 

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#ConversationswithColeman #CwC #ColemanHughes #PeterDoherty #COVID19 #virus #vaccination 

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Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman.  

My guest today is Amy Chua. Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School. Her books include World on Fire, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, The Triple Package, Political Tribes, and many more. She's made Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people in 2011 and has been a guest on many TV shows, including Good Morning America, The Today Show, and Real Time with Bill Maher. 

Amy and I spoke on August 26 and discussed the situation in Afghanistan. We talked about how our failure to recognize the importance of ethnic differences hampered our military efforts there. We talk about our inept withdrawal and abandonment of our allies. And on a lighter note, we discuss a now resolved situation with her employer, Yale Law School.

#ConversationswithColeman #CwC #ColemanHughes #AmyChua #Afganistan #Americanforeignpolicy #Tribes #Whatwentwrong #America #War #Withdrawal

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