Content of Character, with Coleman Hughes

Fred

How much should we use the idea of race in our judgments?

This hotly debated question has been setting our societies on fire seemingly forever

We once thought the question was settled – in 1963, Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial, challenging us to judge one another on the content of our character, not the colour of our skin. Merit, not race, was the basis of sound judgment. This message brought back the idea of a universal morality, and the biblical notion that each individual was made in the image of god, and so, deserves inherent dignity.

Debate settled, correct? Hardly. Since then, we’ve invented a slew of new reasons why judging each other on the basis of race is actually needed or beneficial or justified.

From government to academia to large corporations, let alone in social life, where the culture war rages on, we’re increasingly expected not to judge one another solely on the basis of merit or character – in fact we’re taught that these things either don’t matter, or that they don’t exist at all

Many intellectuals hailed as progressive go even further, arguing that it’s actually a necessity to use race in our judgments

In the words of activist professor Ibram X Kendi, and I quote, “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” And according to author Robin DiAngelo, in order to be less oppressive, one must strive to be “less white”.

Are these things true? Do they not fly in the face of what appeared to be the powerful moral consensus of the civil rights movement? One thing’s for sure, more than 60 years after MLK’s iconic speech, his vision of a colourblind society remains very much in limbo 

My guest in this episode of the podcast, The Free Press’ Coleman Hughes, has emerged as one of the bravest and most original young voices on this topic

His book, The End of Race Politics, lays out a fresh, and nuanced argument for a colourblind America, one that’s adapted to our complex, even dizzying 21^st C

Instead of hypocritically pretending we don’t notice race, or that it never plays a factor in our personal choices, Coleman calls on us to be specific and rational about the cases where it’s ok to refer to it in public life.

One example of this is his “Policemen versus Firemen” example: firemen are hired to perform a specific task as well as possible – putting out a fire – whereas policemen are called to enforce complex rules and promote cooperation among the population. In the case of a police force, it’s understandable that it should be somewhat representative of the population it serves to foster trust … but in the case of firemen, or surgeons, or air pilots, would everyone not be better served if the job were done by the most skilled, and in being fully colourblind, as called for in Dr. King’s vision?

He also warns against the twisted outcomes that race politics amplifies – like increasing future racial tensions via so-called “positive” discrimination, and trapping the benefactors of racial points in a game where their value lies in their suffering, and where “the system” must continually come to their rescue. This not only rigs society along lines of unfairness, it also subtly debases the self-confidence and sense of worth of the people it’s meant to help

It’s a damning indictment of our times that a message like this should generate so much mainstream controversy – like when Coleman got attacked on The View for being a “charlatan of sorts” – really, a laughable claim – to when TED delayed the publication of his talk, then conditioned it to his participating in a debate, only not to promote it when they did publish it.

I personally could not recommend Coleman Hughes’ work highly enough to anyone interested in these issues, as the people I talk to regularly know, as I refer to him all the time.

There’s also I might add something almost old school about Coleman – he’s become a calming voice of reason in a time of wild emotional outrage. On the heels of the catastrophic Charlie Kirk murder, he embodies a spirit of civil and principled disagreement that our democracies desperately need. 

It was a real honour having the opportunity to discuss these topics with him, along with other questions, like the impact of social media politics on mental health, why he grew up thinking race was boring, and which aspects of religion we should adopt, whether we believe in its stories or not

Hope you all enjoy it, this is my conversation with Coleman Hughes.

 

CHAPTER 1: Making Sense

Fred: Coleman, thank you so much for being here. It’s really nice to meet you in person.

Hughes: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Fred: Before we dive into your work and, and your book in particular, on your substack, you write, I started the Substack as part of my ongoing effort to make sense of an increasingly senseless world.

Um, this is a feeling I think that, you hear many people express today, from young to old in all kinds of different ways. Not always as directly as you put it. So I wanted to start with, why do you think the world is increasingly senseless today, and what’s your basic approach to trying to make sense of it?

Hughes: That’s a great question. So, at some level, the world – makes just as much sense as it always has. So it’s not that the world has changed so drastically in the past a hundred years, or that the world has, become crazier and – more ridiculous in any way. But it’s that the way we learn about the world has become far more complicated, and difficult to grasp.

So, you know, 50, 60 years ago, every American was watching the same 12 channels, getting their news from the same source, essentially watching the same movie of reality, even if they had different takes on the movie. Every individual is getting their information from totally different sources, from algorithms tailored to show them specifically what will enrage them or excite them as individuals.

We’re all essentially watching personalized movies unique to us, and then being asked to have a common conversation about it. I mean, for, instance – I mean, it could be any news story, but, the week we happen to be talking right now – there are riots happening in Los Angeles and a response to those riots from police and National Guard and – state government and – national government and so forth.

And this came up in conversation yesterday with some friends. Each one of us had seen just totally different information on our social media accounts. So, someone says, you know, “did you hear about the riots?” And I go: “Yeah, I mean, I saw, you know, they were burning Waymos and waving Mexican flags.” And he goes: “Wow, I didn’t see that at all.”

I just – I saw cops beating up a bunch of protesters that really weren’t doing much, and then a third person had seen something else entirely – Right? How are we supposed to all have a conversation about the riots happening and actually explore the disagreements we have? If we just, we’re just watching totally different movies of reality.

So when I say I’m trying to help make sense of a senseless world, I feel like a lot of my job is, is trying to absorb a 360 picture of what’s going on and bridge the gap between the echo chambers that we’re all living in as individuals.

Fred: So, is it fair to say this, sense of the world not making sense is a function of fragmentation?

So the fragmentation of information and how we consume it, and how, as you very rightly pointed, it’s sort of – individualized. The individual, the version of the world that we, consume. So there’s that. There’s also the sense maybe of,you know, back in the day when we used to watch politics or political news, uh, politics was, as a friend of mine was telling me the other day, politics was something that happened over there.

Like it didn’t feel so close and it didn’t feel so, invasive as today with our smartphones, it’s like twenty four seven bombarding us. Um, so there’s – there’s maybe that sense – and then – also maybe the idea of like novelty, like we’re exposed to so much. New information all of the time is just sort of difficult to process all of that, and that can sort of rise the feeling of uncertainty.

Is that something that, echoes with your approach?

Hughes: No, absolutely. I think, yeah, there’s the, rise in personalization, the, the rise in just the volume of content we’re all being bombarded with all the time, the rise of the attention economy so that the, smartest and most well-capitalized companies in the world are doing everything that they can to keep our eyeballs on – screens every second of every day.

Um, I think the – I recently saw a video of the comedian Bo Burnham putting it, you know, interesting. You know, like he said something like, “they’re coming for every second of your life”. Right? And it’s not because they’re evil it’s – because of the financial incentive structure of the –

Yeah. So they’re coming for every second of our life, they’re coming for anything that gets our blood pumping. Regardless of whether it’s true, accurate, fair, and so navigating that – that maelstrom is incredibly difficult for, uh, even for a journalist, much less a – normal person that doesn’t have time and effort to devote to understanding any topic at a deep level.

 

Chapter 2: The New Race Politics

Fred: In this very charged, politicized – conflictual, sometimes, environment. You publish a book – The End of Race Politics, arguments for a Colorblind America – from my perspective, a breath of fresh air after decades of identity politics, and a really needed book. But you published this book, which, on some level, you know, the argument is very simple and should not be that controversial.

You’re essentially arguing that we should treat each other the same, irrespective of race, and that we should stop using the concept of race to justify unequal treatment in public policy and law and life and so forth. But of course you are exposed to a tremendous amount of controversy as a result of publishing this book.

But, I wanted to start with, your personal perspective. So you start the book with a very interesting take and one that I felt, uh, made a lot of sense from the standpoint of how I grew up. You write: “I’ve always found race boring. Sure it can make for good source material for jokes, but in most real-life situations, a person’s race tells you next to nothing about them.”

And personally, I’ve always felt that people who grew up in multicultural neighborhoods kind of know this at a visceral level. The reason why you sort of abandon racism almost naturally when you grow up in a multicultural neighborhood is it just doesn’t tell you enough that you need to know about this particular person.

It doesn’t tell you about their honesty level. It doesn’t tell you about what their interests are. It doesn’t tell you about, so you kind of like –  you look past race almost naturally before you even are exposed to all this – sort of idea, you know? The history of racism and then – the evolution in the legal system and so forth.

So before we even get into that, like the statistics and the political arguments and so forth, is this discrepancy between your actual lived experience with race growing up and the rise of identity politics and, you know, the media and the political system and so forth, was that sort of part of the fuel for why you personally care so much about this particular issue?

Hughes: Yes, I think it was definitely part of the fuel. So as I write in the book, I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, which as you just described, is a racially diverse place where I had friends of every race and I didn’t think of them as belonging to a race. I thought of them by their first names and their qualities as people.

Not everyone grows up in that situation. I would definitely acknowledge. but one thing that it at least can give you – if you’re available to receive that wisdom – is that, as you said, really the moment you start talking to someone for more than a few minutes, you’re now learning more about them as people than any racial stereotype could have told you.

And so it no longer makes sense if it ever did to stereotype and, to discriminate. So armed with that default as a child, I was really shocked and surprised to enter spaces that had a totally different approach and philosophy towards racial identity. And the first time I entered such a space was when I was 15 or 16, I described in the book going to this thing called the People of Color Conference through my high school. It was basically a conference for teenagers around the country where we learned the doctrines of intersectionality and critical race theory. Though I would not have known to call it that at the time. We learned, you know. We talked about concepts like whiteness, as an abstraction, as a kind of abstract, evil, systemic racism, which this is, you know, 2012 sort of before most people had heard of these terms. Internalized racism and white privilege and so forth – A lot of these words that would enter the mainstream a few years later. And the strange thing about it was that where I had grown up believing that being black as opposed to being Asian, as opposed to being white, it doesn’t matter because what matters is who you are as an individual, right? How do you treat people? What are your values? What are your skills?

At this conference, it was the opposite. It was – to be black was like to kind –  to have a kind of inherent automatic magic about your soul. And to be white was to be living without that magic essentially. Really to, be of color in any sense, was a positive good.

And it was talked about, similar to how, you know, like in the early scenes of Harry Potter, when he discovers that he’s actually not just another kid, he’s actually a wizard, right? That kind of “call to greatness”, is how it was treated to be a person of color at this retreat, and I thought: “Okay, that’s kind of strange because that violates my belief that these things are only skin deep.”

Fred: Was there any part of you that was kind of like bribed by that, like almost like: “yeah, you know, maybe I do have some magic in me.” Was there any part of you that enjoyed that, or was it really just this sense of like: “No, like, you know, what? What I believe in – morally, is sort of incompatible with that”?

Hughes: I think because of my personality, I don’t think there was any part of me that was sold by that aspect of it because – you know – I don’t know, if someone comes up to me and tells me my fart smell like roses, my first instinct is not to say: “Oh my God, maybe they’re right.” My first instinct is to say: “Okay, why?”

Why am I being buttered up in this way for doing nothing? I mean, there’s something fishy going on here. Not to say that it was insincere because I think it was sincere. But I, guess I have a reflex towards skepticism of those kind of like just unearned compliments, like when I haven’t done anything.

And so – but I think to – I imagine to many other black kids, especially maybe some, that had low self-esteem in their own attractiveness, or their own worthiness would, would hear that as sweet honey, you know? So I understand how that’s an appealing message.

Fred: There, you sort of get exposed to, you know, this whole universe of identity politics and, you reference a couple of, really, really interesting, quotes in your book – by the way, your book is, a really great read. I really recommend it to everybody. And one thing you sort of realize when you read this book, because – this was always a topic I was interested in, but more peripherally. I mean, I was sort of like personally always so – into things like, you know, just merit and character and actual virtue that I think just very, very early on I was – I just really, truly had a colorblind version of the world that I sort of lived in.

So I wasn’t following really a lot of the activist rhetoric on this. So a couple of quotes that you refer to really, you almost have to love the total lack of nuance, to the point almost of lacking a certain form of self-awareness when they say these things.

So one of them from Ibram X. Kendi: “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” So basically, the argument there is that there’s a kind of discrimination determinism. Once a society has discriminated once, it has to keep discriminating forever and ever, and there’s really no way to break this loop.

And in another one, uh, that I found really kind of – wow – in her kind of white shaming manifesto, White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo writes: “I strive to be less white. To be less white is to be less racially oppressive.” Ignoring, of course, the lengthy history of Western Caucasians, in particular fighting against racism, and that whites have no particular exclusivity over racism.

But both seem to agree on the basic point that racism in the past means that some form of racism today is justified. When you look at this through the lens of human history, Coleman, are these not just further examples of human beings putting race at the center? You know, MLK and others, and I think we’re both in that camp, had this sort of ideal of making race irrelevant to how we sort of judge and discriminate among each other.

And now we’ve got these, so-called progressive ideas that justify various forms of racism. But in reality, is this not actually just a regression to the mean of human beings putting race at the center of their perceptions and sort of tying their politics to that?

Hughes: Yeah, so I, think it is, and the premise of my book is that white supremacy, or what I call old fashioned, old school bigotry is not the opposite of “wokeness.”

They’re just the same thing with different underlying rationales. So old school bigotry is. You know: “I don’t want a black man marrying my daughter because they’re all no good for this, this reason – and, this, that, and the third.” Wokeness is essentially the same thing with the polarity reversed in terms of “whiteness is inherently evil. Blackness, or, of color-ness is inherently good.” It makes you, it gives you a kind of morally superior, innate wisdom to just not be white, to not have grown up in the world of whiteness. And so it creates a hierarchy of people along a different metric and for different reasons, but it still creates a racial hierarchy.

And that’s why someone like Robin DiAngelo can say: “I strive to be less white.” And white is inherently a negatively coded word, right? She means being less ignorant. And so forth. So in the book, I call it neo racism rather than wokeness or racial justice ideology or critical race theory. I call it neo racism, to really underscore the fact that this is just a new flavor of racism that presents as an acceptable ideology only because we’ve sort of failed to recognize that it’s the racism of the day.

I mean, the biggest – it’s very easy to see that white supremacy was racist from our modern vantage point, but at the time, you know, a lot people just breathed it in and it wasn’t clear to many people that it was morally wrong. And the same thing has happened to a generation of people, at least in politically progressive spaces that you – You can breathe in that this whiteness is evil thing and just not realize that it’s bigotry because, you know, we haven’t developed the antibodies on the left towards this ideology to a sufficient degree.

Fred: Yeah. And one of the things you also write about in the book is, you know, when we look at old style bigotry and then the very necessary, fight to combat it and to instore, you know, equal rights and non-discrimination and civil rights and so forth – I don’t think anybody is arguing that that was not a necessary battle.

But along with that battle was also the idea – It’s almost like a tension between two ways of looking at it. One way of looking at it is, you know, we’ve gotta still keep race as central and just sort of discriminate in the opposite. And then you’ve got the other view which you do a very good job calling out.

And then there’s this other – you also – that’s supposed to sort of – bring forward the idea that we’re all the same, that race doesn’t exist, and so that we have to be sort of color colorblind in a sense of being racially blind, like completely not noticing the race of other people.

I just had Stephen Pinker on the podcast a couple months ago, and he wrote about a similar idea in The Blank Slate, which is the notion that, you know, everybody’s the same. Everybody’s born exactly the same, and the only differences between us are the differences that society sort of paints on us.

Um, so you also point out that we don’t have to pretend that we’re all 100% the same to justify equal treatment, that we can notice differences between us. We could even have preferences of different types, but this doesn’t have to compromise equal treatment or, you know, judging individuals by their race rather than their merits.

We can sort of zone in and be a little bit more precise. Where is it exactly from your perspective that distinguishing based on race becomes a problem and a step back towards the nasty racism of the past? This sort of old-style bigotry that, you know, still exists today?

Hughes: Just to put a point on one thing, the version of colorblind I advocate in the book is – it allows for you to notice race, right?

Like there’s no reason to be naive. I can tell that you’re not a Chinese woman in front of me right now, and you can tell that I’m not. So there’s no reason to pretend not to notice race. And in fact, this has been one of the most effective tactics by, people who disagree with me and disagree with the colorblind philosophy is to say: “You know, how can you defeat racism if you refuse to see race? Right?” And people say this as if it’s the most brilliant thing in the world. But it really doesn’t make any sense because the kind of colorblindness that I’m advocating for is not literal. It’s a metaphor. Colorblind is a metaphor, like the word, you know – kind, warm hearted.

Like, I’m not actually saying your heart is hotter than anyone else’s. I’m saying you’re kind. Right? So colorblind is a metaphor for the idea of trying your very best to treat people without regard to race. Understanding that you may fail sometimes, because we do have prejudices and not at all requiring me to pretend I literally don’t notice what race you are. Right. So that said, you asked sort of when, where is the line with where we should – racially – insist on really colorblind treatment and where we can recognize certain of the inevitabilities of human prejudice and so forth. I guess I think of this in two ways.

One is when you are – when discrimination is allowed and when it isn’t. And – Yeah. So, I’ll just start with, the first way I think about it is if you imagine sort of an X-axis and a Y-axis, and, along the X-axis you have kind of low stakes to high stakes situations, and on the Y-axis you have low information to high information.

So if you’re in a situation that is high stakes, but low information, what do I mean by that? I mean, you’re a TSA agent at the airport and you just learned that someone has entered with a bomb. You don’t know who the person is, but this is a very high-stakes situation. You’re a cop and you’re pursuing a nine one one call on a murder suspect, and all you know is the racial profile of the person. You don’t know anything else. So, high stakes, low information. These are precisely the kind of situations where you do have to racially discriminate because as the TSA agent, you know, you’re probably not looking for someone that, that looks like Barbara Walters. You know, you’re probably looking for a, a man between the age of 20 and 50 and you’re probably looking for a man that is brown skinned.

Fred: So if you can pause right there, Cole, I find it interesting. So right in the profiling, you’re not only using race, you’re also using other statistics, right? Like age, like, it could be, country of origin, it could be – right?

Hughes: Gender being the main one.

Fred: Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, it’s so you can take any information that would be relevant according to, you know, good, dependable studies that can sort of help you hopefully in that it like very quick imperfect situation, make a higher quality decision. So you’re not limiting it to race, you’re just including it as part of the package of what you can use as information to make that decision.

Hughes: And so if you’re in a situation that is high stakes, low information, that’s a scenario where it is okay to racially discriminate. But the truth is most of us, most of the time are just not living in that quadrant. Most of us, most of the time are living in the other three quadrant. Right. Where maybe it’s a high stakes situation, but you’ve got a lot of information about the person. So you don’t need to, you don’t benefit from racially discriminating or, but, but most of our lives are lived in much lower stakes situations. You’re meeting a friend for coffee, you’re meeting a stranger you haven’t met at, in a public place for coffee. Right. What is the use of racially discriminating in such a scenario when you’re, you’re going to get more information about this person at whatever pace and it’s okay.

Right. So that’s that, you know, that’s what I think. In terms of racial discrimination and in terms of something else you mentioned, which is: “is it okay to have your own cultural and racial preferences for say, who you want to marry, who you want to hang out with?” I think to some extent, yes. You know, I’m half Puerto Rican, right?

So I grew up eating a lot of Puerto Rican food that my grandma cooked, listening to a lot of Puerto Rican music. And so I have an attachment to aspects of that culture that most people are not going to. Right? It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside to think about or engage with those elements of the culture in a way that like, I just don’t know much about, say, you know, Lebanese culture, right?

So, you know, if it were important to me to spend a lot of time in that culture, or even to marry someone that, that could relate to that, I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, if, if, if you’re honest with yourself and you know what you want, you should go for, for what you want, the line comes when you, you say, well, I feel my culture is special, therefore you all should feel that my culture is special and the government should treat my culture specially, right?

The, there’s a difference between saying. You know, I want to spend most of my time around the culture I grew up in, which is not hurting anyone really, and saying, I think the government should have a special program and subsidy that helps people in my culture specifically because we are objectively special, right?

That’s breaking an implicit contract that is at the heart, I think of the American creed, properly understood. Namely that if you’re an American citizen, the government should not be discriminating against you or for you on the basis of these traits that you can’t control. So that’s where I would draw the line in terms of cultural, in-group preferences.

Fred: And, you know, Dr. Pinker mentioned how the great taboo in social science is that different groups have different – different groups are not the same on almost any metric, right? If you take different groups of people and you try to look at race, for example, if you break it down, whether it’s – you know – income, education level, so on and so forth, it will almost never have a perfect equality there.

So there’s always gonna’ be a difference. And if I can sort of, quickly break down your approach, which I find very interesting. So if we almost look at it, you mentioned private to public – so in other words, if you’re in a much more private space, then you can make those kinds of small distinctions or what you call benign discriminations, and it doesn’t – it’s not necessarily wrong, but you don’t want those discriminations to port over into the public space. Low stakes, high stakes. And then – which low stakes, you know, again, you would want to make sure that you’re properly ascertaining the individual; High stakes, maybe you want to use some of that information about groups.

This is by the way – it’s such a minefield to even talk about these things. I think that’s why your book is really kind of, I think, contributing and starting a very, very, needed conversation about how we make those distinctions. And then, of course, the stakes question as well.

So, would that be a good way of sort of breaking it down?

Public/private, high stakes/low stakes and high information/low information as kind of like some of the knobs that we can use to kind of see like – okay here we’re making a distinction, but it doesn’t cross over into the land of dangerous racism.

Hughes: Yeah. I think that’s, that’s pretty accurate. I mean, one thing I would add though is not all kinds of private discrimination are things that I would, I would consider acceptable or wise.

You know, like if you really sit here and tell me you just don’t want to have any friends of a certain race, right? It’s like, that’s private. But that’s, that’s an insane preference because – well, I guess it really depends what your value system is. If your value system is that:“I can only become friends with people that share my culture.” Even in that case, I would push a person to try it, right?

Try becoming friends with someone that you share an interest with. For example, if you share – if you’re into basketball, try becoming friends with someone on the basis of loving basketball equally, even if they’re not the same race as you. And what you would pretty quickly find is that people of different cultures and races do share enough in common that you can have the deepest of friendships and the deepest of relationships with people of other races.

Fred: No, I totally agree, and I find it interesting that Martin Luther King doesn’t say that he doesn’t want his kids to be judged at all.

He says he wants them to be judged for the contents of their character. Right? Good or bad. I mean, he’s kind of implying that they could be judged negatively if their character doesn’t measure up. And so, as you mentioned, it’s like the actual end of race politics may not just be the removal of race, but also replacing it with something else.

So we’ve talked about merit or competence, but also character. So those values. A lot of times when people make these kinds of in-group determinations and they judge each other and they say: “well, no, I only want to hang out with people of my particular group”; if you sort of push them. “Why?” They’ll start pointing to certain qualities that in fact can act as human universals.

They’ll say because they’re more honest or because they’re more courageous, or because they’re more warm. But then when you actually kind of take a look at, people from other cultures, they can also exhibit a lot of these same qualities. And so there’s almost like these disconnected discussions that I think we need to connect.

On one hand, there’s this focus on identity and race and judging people based on race. Then there’s the other side of it, and it’s – you know – looking at things like standards of quality or traditional values like discipline or honesty or empathy and making determinations on that. Do you find that this focus on identity almost came with a, um, corresponding focus away from things like merit and character?

So it’s not just that we judge each other on the wrong stuff, but that we also don’t judge each other on the right stuff?

 

Chapter 3: Identity: Race or Values?

Hughes: Well, absolutely. I mean, the doctrine of critical race theory explicitly says that there is no such thing as merit – as race, neutral merit. It doesn’t exist. So if you really buy into that – if you buy into that schema then you just – you basically put a lens on the world where there is no way to judge a person’s competence independent of their race. You can’t, in this world, you can’t give two kids a math test and say, the one that scores 20 points higher is better at math. You cannot say that in this worldview, because those two kids have different backgrounds or different races, different levels of, you know, they, they exist in a – the white kid exists in a society that’s built for him, and the black kid doesn’t.

Right? That’s the idea. And so there’s no such thing as – there’s only merit, I guess, within each race. There’s no merit, there’s no measuring merit between races. Which creates an enormous problem in an education system that has to, at some level be responsive to merit. And if not, then at least the market will always be responsive to merit at some level. So, people are in for a rude awakening. If you try to get rid of merit from the age between the age of zero 18, and then you get into the world, and lo and behold, merit matters. Merit matters to consumers, right? It matters to the market a great deal.

Fred: Demand is selfish.

That’s what people forget. Demand is very selfish. It wants the benefit, and it kind of doesn’t care where the benefit is coming from. It wants the benefit at the lowest possible cost. And so it doesn’t kind of matter. And that’s why I’ve always claimed that the free market is probably the most inclusive institution of all, because it gives everybody a chance to satisfy this inherently selfish demand.

Hughes: Yeah, I mean, Shelby Steele makes this point, which is a profound one, but it’s also really obvious and right on the surface is that: in the Jim Crow era during segregation. Pretty much all desirable spaces of American society. The door was closed to black people when those doors opened. All of those spaces were still incredibly racist in terms of their attitudes and prejudices, but the most merit based of those, the prejudice had to melt away very quickly.

Right. So why is it that three quarters of the NBA is now black people? Right. The NBA used to be white. It was completely white, pretty much, and it was just forced by the meritocratic excellence of so many black basketball players to allow the league to become predominantly black, not because the powers that be were progressive in that era. No, they were all this, they were of the same cast as the rest of white American society, that was fine, keeping black people excluded. It’s that sports is so meritocratic and so objective and African Americans excelled to such a degree in this sport that it was quickly undeniable. Right. And prejudice couldn’t hold it back.

So, I mean, that’s an obvious example. But it goes to the point that merit really doesn’t care what your skin color is. And, you know, there’s even – you know, to, to even put a finer point on it, there was a, I think a famous study in Broward county, Florida, where they administered universal IQ testing essentially, to children. I can’t remember exactly what age, but, maybe teen or preteen and what they found is that doing universal IQ testing was very good because you could identify poor black kids, poor Hispanic kids that were incredibly gifted and track them to different programs based in a way that never would have been apparent from grades or, you know, teacher information alone. Right? Because you don’t really know what it means for a kid at a failing public school to have an A. Right? We don’t really know. There could be grade inflation, there could be totally subjective judgment on the part of the teacher, but if you, if you administer IQ testing to everyone, then you can identify and that’s how someone like my mom who grew up in the South Bronx ended up at Stuyvesant, it’s because she was identified basically off of an IQ test.

And so by getting rid of the idea that merit is important, the idea that an IQ test is meaningful. You basically forego the opportunity to identify all of those talented black and his Hispanic, those gifted students, that could really have a bright future. If they’re identified at an early age.

Fred: It’s really sad how we’ve lost the universalist assumptions of the civil rights movement, which the whole energy behind, the fight against discrimination used to be this idea that merit is universal and, you know, some people from different racial backgrounds, different genders, different, however, you wanna break down society, individuals from all these different groups.

Even if those groups can be measured to be different as groups, individuals can transcend that and individuals can actually be brilliant at math. And it’s those individuals who are being kept back and it’s all of the contributions they can make to society that we lose when we have a system of discrimination.

And the same thing, I would argue also applies to character and values. There’s the sort of so-called father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, id across cultural study where he sort of analyzed the values of cultures from East and West, from dozens of different cultures. And he identified sort of six cultural universals values that are universal across all different human groups.

So for example, you know, the value of courage or the value of justice, and then you have of course, variations. But you do have people that are virtuous and that are meritorious in all these different groups. And it used to be part of the assumption of the civil rights movement that the reason we wanna remove discrimination is in order to get these people contributing to society.

Whereas today, it’s almost as though we’re just monomania focused on – in the context of these programs, the DEI programs and so forth. Monomaniacal focused on past discrimination and victimhood and, you know, what can we do to redress? And this idea that we just have to keep discriminating in the other way.

And we’re losing this very universalist conception of mankind that people from different groups can transcend and can have very high character and can have, can make all kinds of contributions to all kinds of different areas if we just allow them to.

 

Hughes: Right. I think the, the other aspect of this that is never talked about is that people often support policies that benefit them because it benefits them.

Right. So, I mean, if you ask an American farmer, if he supports subsidies for farmers, he’s very likely to say: “yes, I support giving money to me because –” No one ever says it. No one ever admits to this self-interest. No one ever says “Yes, I support the subsidies to people like me because I like to get money.”

Right? No one ever puts it that way. It’s always glossed in moral terms: “I support subsidies to farmers because farmers of the heart, blood of this country, and yada yada yada.” And there may even be truth to those arguments, but no one will ever admit to the self-interest aspect. So, even though it’s universal, it’s a human universal.

So when it comes to DEI, when it comes to affirmative action, you know, you very rarely hear someone say: “Well, yeah, I support DEI programs because I’m a black man and it directly benefits me. Like, it leads me to get a higher paying job than I otherwise would”, you know, and so forth.

So, you know, we – one has to admit that like, to oppose these programs., you’re never going to hear it from the horse’s mouth that, you know, the reason I’ve been supporting this and the reason we’re always going to support this – there’s gonna be no end date, is the point that I’m getting at with these policies.

There’s gonna be no point at which, people say, okay, it’s been 200 years of DEI and affirmative action and racial preferences. I think we have sufficiently repaid what happened – that date is never going to come because it’s always going to be in the self-interest of those who benefit from the policy to continue advocating for it.

 

Chapter 4: Race Politics in Corporate America

Fred: So why do you think, Coleman, that a lot of the pushback and blowback that you got for the book, came from whites, right? From, that perspective of like arguments that are to their benefit.

There was of course the TED controversy where the Ted organizers played all kinds of games to sort of dilute and delay your talk. Adam Grant called you a conservative voice and called your message inaccurate.

I felt from that perspective, like, what’s the benefit to them? And I felt – I don’t know how you probably – you’ve had time to think about this, and I’m curious how you sort of frame it and understand it today, but I felt there was almost like a careerist element to this pushback. From not just blacks but whites as well. A sense that, people were attacking you because you criticized ideas that were central to their professional identity and even to their privileges.

I mean, here’s a young person of color who would’ve been on the receiving end of a racist system and who makes a principled argument for colorblindness. And the approach isn’t “Let’s engage with his ideas substantively openly”, but “We need to take him out and we need to take these ideas out.” It was, there was something almost like rehearsed and automatic about it.

How do you sort of understand this blowback from precisely this, perspective that – okay, we can understand it from blacks. It’s like you’re trying to take some privileges away from them. It also felt like you were taking privileges in a sense away from certain white people who were sort of tied their careers to this, this issue.

Hughes: So yeah, in the TED case, which is a stand in for a lot of other cases, I think it’s still a matter of incentives, but in a different way. So at a place like TED, they have, they had an organization called Black@Ted, which was their black staff and employees that objected to my message, for many reasons. One of which being they probably view DEI policies as narrowly in their self-interest. And so they support it for the same reason. You know, a Wall Street banker would support tax cuts for the rich. Like it’s actually not rocket science; why you would support a thing that just directly leads to more stuff and more benefits for you.

But in the case of the white people in leadership positions, in those programs, many of them are very effectively – I mean – many of them are terrified of nothing more than they’re terrified of being labeled a racist by black people at their organization. To be labeled a racist is, you know, it’s like for many people – it is one or two notches shy of being labeled a pedophile or something. It’s just the worst thing that could happen to you if you live your life in the spaces of the liberal elite. And so, he’s in a position where his staff has the ability to, in the worst case, organize a public letter against him, calling him a racist for supporting me, for bringing me in, which was a controversial choice, right?

So, you know, he’s in a tough position where he’s being asked essentially to mistreat me as a guest, blackmailed essentially by his staff on the implicit threat of creating more trouble for him and labeling him a racist. On the other hand, if he mistreats me, I’m gonna’ make that public as well, because I’m not gonna’ stand here and be mistreated.

And so that’s what happened. He was in something of a lose-lose situation. The real question for organizational leaders is how do you avoid your company, your nonprofit, your organization from getting into that situation to begin with? And you know, there’s a few pieces of wisdom here. I mean, one is the maxim that personnel is policy. At the end of the day, who you hire matters more than – what you kind of –  “the organizational culture” you set. Because as the organization grows, the culture is just gonna be the sum of the people that are there and the beliefs that they came in with. So if you wanna’ avoid scenarios like that, you have to really conduct thorough interviews when you’re hiring people as to how they operate, what their values are, to see if they’re a good fit. Or if  two years from now they’re gonna’ be doing a letter writing campaign against you to, you know, because you, I don’t know – because you didn’t support Defund the police or something. So there’s that, and then there just is – and the quality and utility of being a strong leader. Almost the definition of a strong leader is having enough trust to do what is unpopular, not to simply go along with what your staff and your employees want in any moment.

Definitionally, it’s the quality of a good late leader is shown when he or she does the opposite of that, does the unpopular thing that is nevertheless right from a strategic or an ethical point of view. So you had examples of this. I think Netflix and Coinbase are two of the most often cited examples at the height of Woke-Madness in the aftermath of George Floyd.

You had basically Netflix, which said to its employees like “Look, if you want to like protest and do social justice and prevent – and blackmail us into not showing certain TV shows or certain movies that don’t align with your values, then I’m sorry to tell you, Netflix may not be the right place for you.”

Fred: That’s it. Principled take based on, you know, delivering value to customers and so forth.

Hughes: To customers all around the world of different backgrounds that will have different values. You know, Netflix is not Netflix for Israel or Netflix for Palestine, it’s Netflix. It’s gonna’ show, it’s going to serve a worldwide customer base, which means it’s gonna’ show movies that piss you off whatever culture you’re from, by definition.

If you’re not with that. Go start your own streaming service just for your own culture. See how that goes for you. Or go work for someone. Go work for one of these other companies and see if those values win the day. Coinbase is another good example of this. Essentially, you know, sat down his employees and said, it’s a free country. You’re free to have any political beliefs you want, no matter how extreme. Really it’s none of my business. I just care if you’re here to build Coinbase, if you’re here to build the best possible exchange for these new, you know, cryptocurrencies andmnew financial instruments and blah, blah, blah. If you want to hijack company time to start doing other missions, you’re gone. I’m sorry. That’s it. There’s zero tolerance for that.

So that was – it’s easy for me to say that on a podcast when I don’t run a company, much harder for a CEO to say that at the height of, uh, moral panic. But it definitely separated the wheat from the chaff in terms of leadership.

Fred: Yeah. And I feel like one of the things you’re doing is really exposing that line, right? That sort of – you have to decide what kind of organization you’re gonna be. Are you gonna be a political activist kind of organization where you’ve got all these preconditions, these ideological preconditions to how you do business?

Or are you a purpose-based, values-based organization that’s built around a value proposition to a customer base? And then, you know, what I find interesting is that a lot of times in these organizations, I think practically all of the time, some kind of racial diversity will ensue naturally, right?

If you follow, values and if you follow, delivering sort of a clear value proposition to customers, it turns out that you will be able to get those contributions from people from all kinds of different races and genders and so forth. In my own company, I run a law firm here, I would say it’s interesting as meritocratic as I am, my law firm is almost like a poster child of diversity, but not by design. Just, because I think that naturally ensues from, you know, having clear standards, having, clear values that we operate by, you know. Honesty, high standards of – and it turns out that people from all kinds of different races do measure up to those values. And so diversity ensues. But it’s not something that you try to design where, for instance, in the NBA, just because, blacks are 13% of America that, you know, the NBA has to be only 13% black. So it’s not gonna be representative at tiny sample sizes in an exact way that sort of represents the diversity of society as a whole.

So it’s almost like these different visions of where diversity plays a part and how – and I’ve always found it, and I’m interesting to know what you think about that – I’ve always found it an extremely racist, assumption that if we get rid of affirmative action, if we get rid of DEI and if we only pursue merit, that our organizations are only gonna be white.

I’ve always felt that the ultimate racist assumption and I also feel completely inaccurate and untrue.

Hughes: Yeah, I think that’s true, but I mean, to be fair to the other side of that argument, you know, when Harvard does studies looking at what would happen if it did get rid of affirmative action. The student – the black student body drops from, you know, 13% to single – low single digit percentage.

So it’s not that there would be no black kids at Harvard, but there would be far fewer. And that makes people uncomfortable for understandable reasons. So I agree with you, getting rid of this stuff, it doesn’t mean that there’s gonna be no black people, no Hispanics, no people of color in positions of leadership, in positions of – ’cause there’s so much talent out there and there’s even untapped talent, given how so many kids grow up in poverty and chaos who may otherwise be extremely talented if they had a stable and nourishing upbringing.

But at the same time, there are, you know, not every industry, not every sector, not every, you know, not every city is blessed with the ability to kind of get, like – if you live in a city that’s, you know, one of these cities like Albuquerque or Denver or whatever, it’s like you’ve got like a 1% black population at most already. You’re trying to hire meritocratic and just getting no black applicants that are, are qualified. Partly because of the demographics of your city, right? So in that case, a person wouldn’t be able to have their cake and eat it too, like you are, which is awesome that you are, but that’s not the case for everyone everywhere all the time.

And then you do have to make the tougher choice, which is, is this organization about merit or is this organization exercise in the creation of, of racial diversity? My point of view is that I would, you know, as a podcaster myself, as, you know, someone that’s. You know, I wouldn’t say I’ve had to hire people, but I’ve definitely had to vet people to work with.

I do not – I absolutely do not care what race you are. I want the best person for the job, not only in terms of the skills, but in terms of the degree to which I’m able to work with them, personality, flexibility, maturity. And I don’t, because I would never sacrifice quality in my own life for the sake of racial diversity, I don’t feel comfortable demanding that of anyone else.

Fred: You make a distinction and I’ve grappled with this because that’s also my natural inclination and I’ve always had friends from all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of different ethnicities, and I’ve got super close friends with people from literally all over the world. But at the same time, this idea of representative diversity – I’ve made this distinction between, a technical task like heart surgeon or pilot for example, where I think the argument would be that you would want an absolute meritocracy. I mean, even people of different backgrounds would benefit from having the best heart surgeon operating the operation versus a more representative body, for example, like a school board or like a municipal politics, right? Where it’s like, okay, like you do want to maybe have a place there – to represent the, let’s call it “the concerns”, of a particular community. And I think there is a case to be made there for some representative politics there. Because, you know, if the goal of the body is to represent an underlying population, then you do – you would want to have some people there that represent those perspectives.

Hughes: So in the book, I call this the fireman versus policeman problem. And take the analogy with a grain of salt because fireman actually do a lot of different things. But the cartoon version of a fireman is like you want the person that’s the best at the job of putting out fires and saving lives. That’s it. It’s very straightforward. You do not care whether the person who shows up at your door is a black man or a Mexican man or whomever. You care that they know how to use a hose and put out a fire quickly so that they can save your kitty, right?

But with the police, you’re talking about a different story, right? If for some reason, or you know, as was the case in many cities, you’ve got a population that’s 40% black, 30% Hispanic, 30% white, yet the police force is a hundred percent white. That could create a big problem in terms of public trust because people are gonna say: “Okay, how come there are, there’s no one in the police from my community? How can I expect you guys to treat us fairly if you won’t even accept us into your ranks?” And if you have, essentially, a culture of like an outside – people, policing a community that they’re fully not a part of, it erodes the trust between the police and the community. And in principle, could, can be a huge problem.

So you could see – could totally see a rationale for having a diversity policy in a police force, even at the sake of sacrificing some merit.

But, you know, I think most jobs are more like firefighting than, than being a policeman in that respect. And you know, democracy is a natural – creates natural diversity because people do have a tendency to vote for representatives that look like them.

Um, and so, you know, there’s no – I mean, I remember one person once asked me, “How do we address diversity in, in Congress?” And I was like “Have you seen Congress?” I mean, it’s incredibly diverse simply from the natural fact that a community, you know, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, that’s 90% black has probably had 20 black Congress people in a row, in the average case. And you’ve got cities like Atlanta and Detroit going on their sixth and seventh black mayor in a row, right? So that’s not something that needs to be created artificially, but there are, I agree, sectors where diversity is critical to them doing their jobs efficiently and productively. And if you’re – now a lot of people will claim to be in a sector like that when they’re actually not. Yeah, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate sectors where that is the case.

 

Chapter 5: The Victimhood Trap

Fred: Yeah, it’s very true. And as you, as you’re giving those examples, I kind of realized maybe for the first time why I am such a partisan for the sort of meritocracy component is that I come from a cultural community – I’m Jewish, but I’m Sephardi Jewish. So Moroccan Jewish. And we are such a tiny community that we are never represented anywhere, and in fact, we’re so small that we don’t even have the expectation that one day we might be represented in any kind of representative body. And so, the only thing we have left is just please at least don’t discriminate and just give us access to opportunity. That’s it. That’s the only thing we can legitimately ask for. Is a meritocracy. And then if I fail by those universal standards, then I’m fine with that. Right? But then at least no overt discrimination. And then once that’s acquired, let me rise or fall on my own merits. That’s why a lot of us feel very very strongly connected to Dr. King’s message. Let us be judged by the contents of our character, good or bad. Right? And then that’s maybe the only fair crack that we get at it.

And there’s this kind of question of victimhood that’s kind of tied up to all of this. And you’ve written about this very eloquently in the book. You know, the standard view is that these neo racist policies are good for blacks and bad for whites. There’s a really powerful paragraph where you argue that they’re also bad for blacks in a sort of a deeper sense of tying them up to a sort of victim identity. And this is something that I feel also applies to other minorities and, you know, the Jewish community in my case. So this is what you write – You write:

“When I look at the current racial landscape of America, I feel sick at heart. I dread the possibility of black identity becoming tied to a rehearsed sense of victimhood and of people of color, never allowing themselves to participate fully in the privilege of freedom.

I worry that we’ll never accept that we’ve won the battle for civil rights, that we’ll become so wedded to the idea that we’re victims, that we’ll consider ourselves incapable of embarking on the project of flourishing. That we’ll be so limited in our conception of who we are that we’ll prevent ourselves from enjoying the fruits of victory.”

So it’s very powerful paragraph. This idea of transcending a sense of victimhood, it’s very difficult, right? Because a lot of times the sense of victimhood is born in real trauma. And I think a lot of people on the other side of it, let’s say on behalf of – let’s call it progressive whites – get caught up in the effort to show empathy for those past injuries that were caused to different groups. But then there’s this deeper sense in which, the group gets kind of encased in this victim identity. Scott Barry Kaufman just wrote a book about this, Rise Above, on how to rise above a sense of victimhood and kind of live in a more empowered way. How would you approach kind of snapping out of this kind of limiting victim identity?

Hughes: Yeah, I mean, it’s a very tough thing if you’re caught in the pattern of a victimhood to break out of it because it’s rewarded. You know, this is the problem with how white progressives have thought about race is, you know, it’s if – it’s this problem of basically you essentially, you only like me, when I’m suffering conspicuously, right?

It’s like, if I show you my suffering and I show you how I’ve been treated, that switches the white progressive on to give me attention and to give me sympathy. So that –  what is that training me as a black person? That’s training me, that my value is in my victimhood, my value is in my ability to talk about how I’ve been hurt as opposed to your value being into what do you bring to the table?

And so my view is that – and maybe some would think this cynical, I just think it realistic – is that at the end of the day, nobody is coming to save you. Right? The cavalry isn’t coming. It’s, you know, no one is coming to save us as a society, as black people. No one is coming to save us. And as an individual no one is coming to save you.

So, the idea that our power as people of color comes from our ability to convey how we’ve been hurt and basically ask white people to fix it or ask the government to fix it and to pull on – our power comes from our ability to tug on the heartstrings of the white liberal. To me, that is a very cheap and ephemeral kind of power because when push comes to shove, that’s gonna’ be nowhere to be found. That is gonna’ be nowhere to be found. And it only goes so far. And at the end of the day, true power comes from – as an individual, as a group, your ability to help yourself. So you know – it’s the kind of message that gets called conservative, but it’s, it’s also the kind of message that just basically every well-adjusted person agrees with in the case of themself and the people immediately around them.

Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help people. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel sympathy or empathy. It just means that you shouldn’t train your identity to – you shouldn’t pattern your behavior around this idea of “I’m worth it precisely to the degree that I can make you feel bad for me.” And that is actually how we are raising – that’s how, for instance, the people of color conference that I went to as a teenager, that is the patterning that it was giving kids of color.

Here’s the way to achieve status. Here’s the way to achieve power. Is tell your story to white people and make them cry. That’s what makes you powerful. And that’s just a – it’s extremely shortsighted and cheap and it sells short the full potential of kids of color.

 

Chapter 6: Rationalizing Religion

Fred: And it’s tied to what psychologists call an external locus of control as opposed to an internal locus of control and a strong sense of personal agency, which is empowering, and which is associated with all kinds of positive mental health outcomes as well.

So when we kind of engage in this victimhood game, it’s a very dangerous game that we’re teaching people to play. And I love how you’ve just expressed it.

To switch gears a little bit, and this is really, curiosity, because when I listen to a lot of your work, you strike me as a person that sort of delves deep into the patterns of reality. And when you mentioned that you don’t believe in God – I don’t know, for some reason it was a little bit surprising to me. You’ve also said some interesting things about religion, namely that if it produces positive outcomes in somebody’s life and it doesn’t harm others, then it could be a force for good.

I wonder exactly where you stand in religious matters between, let’s call it the hardcore Darwinian materialistic side on one side that sees the universe as kind of an accidental collision of atoms followed by natural selection. And on the other hand, this sort of new wave of religious sentiment where even people who don’t think that scripture is, you know, pure revelation from a perfect being, believe that there’s a lot of wisdom in religion in the form of stories and myths and moral principles. But that these reveal a kind of a deep meaningful order in the cosmos that human beings can somehow some way develop a relationship with. You had this great conversation with – I think it was Philip Goff. Is that it? On – yeah –the finely tuned universe. So you said at the beginning that the world is increasingly senseless and you’re trying to make sense of it. Do you see the world and the universe as a place where authentic meaning can be found by the individual where these deep patterns are kind of connected to our own experience in a very profound, authentic way? Or are you more on the materialist side of things?

Hughes: I, in some way it’s a false dichotomy. It’s false choice because I am on the materialist Darwinian naturalist side of things. If you ask me, you know, where do I think human beings come from? What, what do I think is the best, most defensible theory? I’m gonna sound like Richard Dawkins. But if you ask me, is it better to completely get rid of religion or to have a lot of people in a society, a critical mass of people believing in a kind of benign religion? I would probably say it’s probably the latter. Because, first of all, not every religion is the same. Not every religion teaches the same thing. Not every branch of every religion teaches the same thing. So the specific details totally matter. There are some religions that essentially teach you should be kind to everyone. You should, you shouldn’t lie, you shouldn’t steal, you shouldn’t cheat, you should treat your family members well, and God wants you to be a good person in ways that most – on a checklist, most wise people would agree with. And those are very helpful because if you were to just strip it away and see what people create on their own, it’s likely to be a lot stupider than that.

But there are other religions and other branches of other religions that teach, you know, you have to kill the infidel and that’s your prime mission on earth is to kill the nonbeliever. Right? Or anything else equally toxic. And that is horrible.

So the specific religion matters. But as for why I can’t completely go with the atheist in just saying the world would totally be better off without religion in every case. Well, there’s a few ways to push back against that.

One is just to notice that the data is very clear on who is happier in our own society. Religious people are happier. Now, you could say that’s because of the religion, that’s because of God. I don’t think that’s why. It could be simply because they have a structure. They have a community, they have rituals, they have, you know, they have all this stuff that in theory, atheists could build but haven’t.

So, you know, there’s a lot of talk about creating parallel secular institutions that replace the rituals of birth and death and marriage and gratitude rituals and holidays and all this stuff. But it doesn’t actually happen, right? Because any – and anytime it does happen, it turns into a sex cult within a few months.

So, on the multiple choice board here for –

Fred: Why is that, you think? Is that because there isn’t a belief in something greater or there isn’t like a sort of a moral principle that would justify sacrificing your self-interest. Why is it that these secular religions tend to sort of fall apart and kind of turn into like different forms that no longer allow you to have those positive characteristics of religion?

Hughes: Short answer is, I don’t know. I do know it’s difficult to start new traditions in general because it’s not respected until it’s a tradition and, you know, in the early years, you’re just a cult, right? If you start a new thing, you’re just a cult essentially. But if you – if I converted to Christianity right now, no one would accuse me of being an a cult, no matter how seriously I took my worship, right?

Because it’s a venerable religion with thousands of years of history. So it just is difficult to start new things. And, you know, and especially if you’re trying to reject the classic tenets of religion. I guess it is just pretty easy for things to evolve into sex cults because that’s kind of where – that’s where human nature takes things kind of, on unrestrained by strict moral rules.

So short answer is, I don’t know. But the point is, religious people are definitely happier and the sort of replacements for the good part of religions that many secular people wanna’ see haven’t been created. Not saying they won’t be, but if you’re someone that wants ritual and community in your lifetime, religion is the only game in town and it’s better than not having it. So that’s what I would say.

Fred: So the practices of religion can be good even if some of the stories in religion are not true.

Hughes: That’s exactly right.

Fred: To close up, I saw that your podcast is now produced by the Free Press. I wonder what that move is all about and if it ties into any big future projects on your behalf.

Hughes: Well, I won’t say anything about future projects yet, but, I’m a big fan of the Free Press. I’ve been writing for them ever since they launched a few years ago. I think it’s – I’ve been complaining about mainstream media for years, and it’s susceptibility to echo chambers of left and right; Its inability to reflect multiple perspectives from across a political spectrum. And the Free press is doing an amazing job of that. And that has a lot to do with Barry’s leadership.

So I’m very excited to bring my podcast on board with them, though I feel I’ve practically been on board with them since the launch because I’ve written for them so much.

Fred: Amazing. And I love the whole approach of disagreeing and bringing in different perspectives, but without all this acrimony and without this demonization and as part of a very healthy common discourse in a democracy, I think that it’s a beautiful angle, that we know as readers that we’re gonna’ get from the free press. So it’s amazing.

Hughes: Alright. Thank you.

Fred: Thank you so much Coleman. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Hughes: Yeah, my pleasure.