EVERY SPOKEN WORD
135 min read · 27,316 words- 0:00 – 3:23
Intro
- CHColeman Hughes
His success is a finger pointed at mainstream media saying, "You guys are ******* up." Mainstream media doesn't want to admit that. They would much rather believe his success is an element of him being able to weaponize racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and feed red meat to a bigoted audience. That's the way that they can preserve their image of saying, "No, there's nothing wrong with us. We're doing an amazing job."
- CWChris Williamson
(wind blowing) Coleman Hughes, welcome to the show.
- CHColeman Hughes
Thanks so much for having me.
- CWChris Williamson
What has the response been like since you released your rap track? Because I know that you've been rapping for far longer than you've been writing.
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
But to a lot of people, this probably sounds like finding out that Sam Harris has released a diss track on someone-
- CHColeman Hughes
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... that it runs quite, quite counter to their perception of what you are and who you are.
- CHColeman Hughes
Right. Yeah, the reception has been awesome. I mean, I've gotten so much good feedback. I think people are receiving it the way that I meant for it to be received. And, um, it's, it's, it feels great to finally be able to converge my music identity and my public intellectual identity, because, you know, like you said, I've been doing both for a long time, uh, in my private life, but in my public life, I've, I've been doing the writing and podcasting way more than I've been doing music. So it's good to finally show people both of these sides of myself.
- CWChris Williamson
The track bangs as well. It slaps man. It's really good.
- CHColeman Hughes
Thank you.
- CWChris Williamson
Really, really good. And you went to Ukraine to shoot some music video in the freezing cold?
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah, that, that's where it was shot. It was, um, in like a s- what would normally have been a kind of circus, as in for animals, uh, in Ukraine, and it was not at all heated. It was in the dead of the Ukrainian winter, so it was basically like being outside in the middle of a Ukrainian winter for like 12 hours, two days in a row. It was brutal. But the result-
- CWChris Williamson
That's the sacrifices you gotta make, man. The sacrifices you gotta make.
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah, I mean, I ended up having a lot more respect for actors. I had no idea the actual toll it takes to act several days in a row in conditions that are tiring and exhausting. Like these people, like I have no idea what they went through to, to, to shoot that movie, The Revenant, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, but my God, the stamina it takes is far greater than you would assume from the outside.
- CWChris Williamson
I saw a behind the scenes of Game of Thrones' final season. Now, say what you want about narratively, the way that that show finished, but looking at the cast, sat down on seats, just waiting for their turn to go as the film crew finally get the lighting right, they finally get the camera angles right, and they've run through it and run through it and run through it. It's the patience game. I imagine that a lot of actors develop a, a serious amount of patience while they're doing that.
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah, and you have to snap into the emotion of the scene when it's like, it's a totally sterile environment where people are talking about lights and all this blah, blah, blah, yada yada, and then you have to snap into the-
- CWChris Williamson
Go.
- CHColeman Hughes
... emotion of the scene. And you've got to get it. You know, and it's like every minute costs $1,000, so don't fuck it up. Don't waste my time. It's, it's incredible.
- 3:23 – 20:46
Discussing the Joe Rogan Situation
- CHColeman Hughes
- CWChris Williamson
What's your thoughts on this Rogan situation?
- CHColeman Hughes
So I guess there are two f- there are two sort of waves of, of what's happened. The first wave was criticism in response to his having Robert Malone and, uh, Peter McCullough, who said a lot of untrue anti-vax misinformation, and because of that, people like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell wanted Spotify to take him off, off the platform. Um, and then it seems like basically a week later, somebody, you know, strung together examples of him saying the N-word and unearthed jokes that, uh, that make him look racist. Obviously, it's a, these are propaganda videos engineered to make him look as racist as possible by lifting something out of context. Still, they look bad. And basically, it's just, you know, people want his head. People want his head on a stick. And I'm very against cancel culture. I think the way to engage people is to criticize the misinformation that they've, uh, that, that, that they believe. I think Joe, Joe Rogan is an extraordinarily open-minded person. He has a relationship to correcting errors and apologizing that almost no one else in, at his level of media has. Right? He's a person that can say, "I got it wrong," and does this often in a way that is really credible and honest and, um, really admirable because he's such a genuine person. He has such a relationship to his audience where they know he means exactly what he says, which you can't say of any of the cable news people that are reaching, um, probably fewer people than he is. And because he has such a good relationship to the truth, even when he gets stuff wrong, I think, I mean, it, it's insane to people that pe- to me that people are holding him to a totally separate standard that they would hold, uh, you know, a cable news show, all of which have also spread misinformation to varying degrees throughout the, the pandemic, right? Tucker Carlson says some bullshit or Don Lemon says some bullshit, they don't have to worry that their show is going to be taken off the network, right? Whereas Joe Rogan, because he signed this deal with Spotify partly-... and because he's, frankly, a lot of people in the mainstream media I think are envious and competitive of h- the, the amount of people he reaches. And then, a lot of people that don't like the fact that he's not completely left-wing, obviously. Um, he gets hate from the mainstream media who don't really defend him as, like, a fellow ally, as someone we wanna protect because he's doing what we do, and then he gets hate, obviously, from the cancel culture left, um, because he's not left. And I think, I think it's, it's, it's really dangerous. I think we have to hold the line for people like Joe Rogan, um, or else we lose the norm of free speech. And I know the second you say free speech, people are gonna say it's not, this is not f- relevant to the First Amendment, the government isn't trying to censor him. Yes, but the reason the First Amendment makes sense is because of this wider point that free speech is a very good thing for society. Open discourse as a general cultural value is an important thing for society. And that means free speech for speech you don't always like, and I think that's very important.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think about some of the more right-wing commentators online that have been saying, "Don't back down. Don't apologize for anything. This is not the way to play the game"?
- CHColeman Hughes
So, they would be right for a lot of people. It, you know, these days, it does not make sense for a politician to apologize. No one believes it. Biden apologizes, no one believes it. Trump apologizes, well, he never apologizes.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- CHColeman Hughes
But if he did, no one would believe it because, you know, i- imagine Hillary Clinton apologizing. Does anyone in the world go, "Oh my god, that's amazing that she can see... that she's evolved so much as a person." No, it's, it's so clearly scripted, right? And frankly, I think any apology from normal media figures is gonna seem scripted. The difference with Joe Rogan is he, uh, this is the Joe Rogan effect, right? His apologies are real. You can, you can just hear it. You can see that he, he really thinks he should've had more people on from a pro-vax perspective. Um, he is doing his best and his apologies are, are... He's one of the only people at his level of media reach that can apologize in a way that does not seem scripted and seems credible. And as, as a human being, I think the ability to apologize is extremely important. And that holds for your friends, that holds for your relationships, and it should hold if you have a really honest relationship with your audience, with which Joe Rogan does to an exceptional degree. So I disagree with those. I think his apology came across, uh, extremely well.
- CWChris Williamson
I think the... There's definitely a, a different element to when Joe apologizes versus when other people do it. I think the concern from people on the right is that by apologizing, you lend credence or legitimacy to people that want to censor free speech, right? But Joe is doing his apology in a very different sort of way because of the level of intimacy that he has between himself and his audience and the amount of trust. The thing that I think that's interesting is usually, when the mainstream media try to attack somebody with, um, clips, whether that be from the, like, first phase of this, uh, campaign or the second phase of this campaign around COVID versus the, uh, clips of him saying the N-word, I think that the problem that they have... Most of the time, the press are trying to show you a small microcosm of someone that they claim is indicative of the remainder of their character, right? Here is the tip of the iceberg that shows that this person is the racist, homophobic, xenophobic, whatever that we always knew that he is, and here's the proof. This is the cracks showing in his persona, and this is the actual true Joe coming through, you just didn't happen to know about it. The problem that you have is that the vast majority of people, even people who are super-duper casual fans of Rogan have probably listened to at least 100, 200, 300 hours, and the normal fans of him, you're talking upwards of 1,000 hours easily that someone can have consumed Joe Rogan's content. They go, "Well, hang on a second. I, I can't take... This is the tip of the iceberg from you."
- CHColeman Hughes
I've already seen the whole iceberg. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Precisely. Precisely. I have such a depth of connection with this guy. There's-
- CHColeman Hughes
I've seen the tip and the base.
- CWChris Williamson
Correct.
- CHColeman Hughes
That, that sounded really weird.
- CWChris Williamson
Do not say that again.
- CHColeman Hughes
Pause. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) The tip and the base of Joe. Um, but yeah, that's it. That's what they're trying to do. They're trying to use this old media narrative of here is the m- small segment that represents the bigger version, uh, but they can't do that. They can't do that anymore.
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah, so it... You m- you raise a really interesting point, and I think it's true. What separates this cancellation from most other cancellations is that they're not unearthing anything. There's nothing... We all know exactly who Joe Rogan has been for years now because he has four-hour conversations every day that are completely unfiltered where he says exactly what he thinks, right? All the evidence of him being a bad person, if such evidence exists, it's already in the open, right? There's nothing to discover. If you hate him, you hate him based on who he actually is by now. But... So compare that to, like, a different kind of a cancellation, you know, generally, it's, it's like finding something no one knew about, right? It's like-We found this blog from 15 years ago where Joy Reid from MSNBC said that, you know, all gay men like underage boys. Right? That's a true, that's a true story that happened. People don't really talk about it because since Joy Reid is a darling of the left, she is somehow immune to the logic of cancellation. Even though if Joe Rogan had done the same thing, people would be foaming about- foaming at the mouth about it, which again, as a sidebar, shows you how these sort of cultural rules are used as, um, basically totally arbitrary rules to fuck over people you don't like, and you suddenly stop caring about them when it's something you like. That should tell you everything you need to know about these cancellations for things you said 20 years ago. I mean, someone unearthed something of Neil Young saying something like pretty, I think it was kind of pro-Nazi. I might have to fact check that, but he said something really cancelable in, like, the '80s or '90s, and then he walked it back. Um, but, you know, (laughs) the, that's usually how cancellations work. It's like this thing, oh, you didn't know Roald Dahl said, basically justified the Holocaust, right? And now you know, and it makes you think about Matilda differently. Okay? That's usually how it works. Even in those cases, if a person has disavowed their views, I'm really against canceling them because people change so much over the course of their lives. The difference with Joe is that that's not what's happening here. It's like they're just stitching together to, uh, uh, non-representative out of context bits from a long career and playing them back to back as if all he's been doing for the past 20 years is saying the N-word, right? That's probably-
- CWChris Williamson
Do you know where that, do you know where that super cut originally came from?
- CHColeman Hughes
Where? Uh, where?
- CWChris Williamson
Alex Jones made it.
- CHColeman Hughes
(laughs) No way.
- CWChris Williamson
Alex Jones made it.
- CHColeman Hughes
Why?
- CWChris Williamson
Do you remember when him and, him and Rogan had that beef?
- CHColeman Hughes
No.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, so him and Rogan had a fallout a little while ago. It was like semi-public. It was before Spotify, maybe I wanna say five or f- four or five years ago. Uh, and this was Alex throwing a little bit of shade around in an original version of this video. Now, I might be, I might have been sold a lie by the version of the video that I've seen, and if that's the case, then sorry, Alex. But, uh, it's, I've heard from a bunch of different sources that the original video was from Alex Jones, and if you actually look at the first, first, first version, it's got Info Wars graphics on it, and this was him-
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... throwing that around. So the interesting thing, I'd seen this video a bunch of times. It's been floating around Twitter for quite a while.
- CHColeman Hughes
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
And I've seen it, I've seen it do the rounds a, a fair bit, but there's equivalent versions of this for The Young Turks. There's a huge one of them floating around at the moment that's got one and a half million plays on it. They're just, same thing, out of context, N-word, N-word, N-word, N-word, N-word. There's, uh, Ethan Klein, when he tried to, uh, when he deleted some of Jordan Peterson's episodes with him a couple of weeks ago, he said both the N-word and the F-word back to back over and over again. "Da da, da da, da da, I really love saying da da, da da, da da." And you're like, (laughs) "Okay." But then the super cut of Joe, uh, for whatever reason, decides to really, really get a lot of momentum and gravitas now. One of the things that I definitely don't think is true that I've seen in a bunch of different group chats I'm in is that this is part of some overarching conspiracy. There's some company, the one that's behind Patriot Takes, which is the Twitter account that did it, they're in support of some other Super PAC organization that is linked with blah, blah, blah, and, uh, Stool Presidente, who's the guy that owns Barstool Sports. (sighs) Dude that owns Barstool Sports went on-
- 20:46 – 26:30
Are Black People Offended by the ‘N-word?’
- CHColeman Hughes
It's like, the notion of Black people taking offense at Rogan saying this word is, I think, being used cynically to take him down ... by white people.
- CWChris Williamson
Do you not think that any Black people have taken offense at it?
- CHColeman Hughes
Oh, sure. I, I, I definitely think some Black people have taken offense at it. Um, probably Black people that are less familiar with him, right? Like if, this is, this goes back to the iceberg question. If this is the tip of the iceberg that you're seeing Joe Rogan about, you're gonna think he's a racist. He made a jokes about, a joke about going to a Black neighborhood and, um, it seeming like Planet of the Apes, right? And then it's just like N-word, N-word, N-word. Um, so if, again, if that's the tip of the iceberg, you are rationally gonna think, "Wow, this guy has just been, like, foaming at the mouth with racism for years." And, and that, that, it makes sense, makes perfect sense to take offense to that as a Black person or as any person. If you're familiar with much more of the iceberg, a- as a lot of people probably are, and Joe Rogan has a lot of Black fans, I don't think they're taking offense because, uh, I mean, they just, they know his general character so well at this point, they're not getting new data about his character, right? They know he's a comedian that says, says every curse word, makes fun of every group. So, like, imagine, uh, this is, this is very interesting, imagine you had never seen the show South Park and it's gone what, over 20 seasons, right? S- similar to Joe Rogan in that they have a shit ton of material and you stitch together every joke at Black people's expense ever made on the show South Park and you have no other familiarity with it. You are gonna come away thinking, "How the fuck is this on TV? Is this show from the fucking Jim Crow South?" Like, my god. Now, of course, the rest of us that have watched a lot of South Park, we understand they make fun of everyone, they make fun of everyone, right? We've seen the whole iceberg. That's what's happening to Joe Rogan right now. So yeah, I, I assume a lot of Black people, to the extent they're seeing a small sliver of what he's done, are taking offense, but again, it is, it is propaganda. This is the definition of propaganda and I think that should be more widely understood.
- CWChris Williamson
Is there a difference in a white person saying it on a podcast versus a Black person?
- CHColeman Hughes
There is a difference in how it will be received most likely, um, I mean, I don't think you can... My, listen, my philosophy of communication is that I can, I'm never gonna ignore what a person is trying to say or, or what a person means by what they say, what they're trying to communicate.
- CWChris Williamson
Even if they communicate it clumsily?
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah. I mean, if you were, like, how would you approach talking to a friend, right? If they were communicating something clumsily, you would try to get to the core of what they're saying, right? That's, that's common sense and, you know-... I, I, I really, I, I understand that, you know, I think right now if there were a Martian scientist that came to Earth and came to America and saw that there was one and only one word, really, that you can't say, and only people that are one color can't say it, and then people that are a different color can say it, they would say, "Oh, okay, this is what people were talking about when they said the homo sapiens have these, uh, believe in magic," right? "The homo, the, they have a lot of superstition and magical thinking and taboos." And, you know, like, western anthropologists will go to places where, that have had no contact with modernity for, you know, hundreds of years, and they'll say, "Oh, isn't it amazing that the, the natives here, they think that if you dance like this, you'll bring the rain," right? And then they'll go back to the west and think, "Oh, well, we're super rational here. We don't, we don't think anything crazy. We don't have any superstitious beliefs, except if you utter this magic word, you, you, like, instantaneously do harm," right? But only if you're one color. If you're another color, you can say that word-
- CWChris Williamson
Unless-
- CHColeman Hughes
... especially if you change the suffix of it so, to, like, a soft A rather than a hard ER, then it's not as harmful, right? That, I'm sorry, that is magical thinking without the explicit magic. So-
- CWChris Williamson
Unless you're a rapper of any ethnicity.
- CHColeman Hughes
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
'Cause they get a pass for everything.
- CHColeman Hughes
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
Which is now, now it makes complete sense about why you wanted to be a rapper.
- CHColeman Hughes
(laughs) And, you know, like, frankly, I've heard a lo- a, a lot of groups of young people, like, teenagers that are not Black but are maybe Hispanic or Asian and are from certain neighborhoods, uh, say the N-word and use it colloquially, like, amongst themselves in mixed race groups of people. Like, it's a, America's a complicated place. There's over 300 million people here, and, um, everyone has a different story and comes from a different background, and I hate this, like, one size fits all, these one size fits all rules are so ridiculous to me.
- 26:30 – 36:37
Spotify’s Censorship Battle
- CWChris Williamson
Did you see the Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's, uh, email out to all staff? Have you seen this yet? It only came out this morning.
- CHColeman Hughes
No.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, so it's a big, big, big, long email, kind of, "I understand your plight. I, very sorry that you are going through this at this difficult time." Uh, and then on one of the screenshots, "If we believe in having an open platform as a core value of the company, then we must also believe in elevating all types of creators, including those from underrepresented communities and a diversity of backgrounds. We've been doing a great deal of work in this area already, but I think we can do even more, so I am committing to an incremental investment of $100 million for the licensing, development, and marketing of music, artists and songwriters, and audio content from historically marginalized groups. This will dramatically increase our efforts in these areas. While some may want us to pursue a different path, I believe that more speech on more issues can be highly effective in improving the status quo and enhancing the conversation altogether. I deeply regret that you are carrying so much of this burden. I also want to be transparent in setting the expectation that in order to achieve our goal of becoming the global audio platform, these kinds of disputes will be inevitable. For me, I come back to centering on our mission of unlocking the potential of human creativity and enabling more than a billion people to enjoy the work of what we think will be more than 50 million creators. That mission makes these clashes worth the effort." So that is $100 million, uh, to historically marginalized groups' audio, music and audio content.
- CHColeman Hughes
What does that actually mean? What does that mean, 100... They're investing $100 million to-
- CWChris Williamson
"Committing to an incremental investment of $100 million for the licensing, development, and marketing of music, artists and songwriters, and audio content from historically marginalized groups."
- CHColeman Hughes
Licensing, development, and marketing. Okay, that's interesting and vague, but, uh, I mean, big picture, they are standing up for intellectual diversity on their platform and open discourse and free speech, and I think that's, uh, they should be congratulated for that. They are, they are a huge... I mean, they're a huge player. They're the player in, in the audio space, and for them to just, to not buckle under this pressure is, uh, a really enormous achievement for those of us that care about free speech and, and open discourse. They, they should set a precedent for other corporations. You know, when Spotify survives this, which I'm, I'm quite certain they will, and people move on to the next controversy, um, they will be seen, I hope, as a precedent for how corporations can n- essentially not negotiate with, like, quote unquote terrorists, so to speak, right? Like, you don't, you, you, you shouldn't negotiate with people, um, based on these really ephemerable, eh, ephemeral kind of outbursts of outrage. You can't be beholden to that as a corporation and compromise your mission, um, and I think-
- CWChris Williamson
Presumably, pre- to push back, that presumably that could have been a thing that Joe could have said that would be so reprehensible that he would deserve being completely removed from the platform. He, there could be something that he could have said-
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... some absolutely awful call for violence, just like an-
- CHColeman Hughes
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... endless racial, homophobic, misogynist, whatever, barrage, and you go, "Okay, yeah, this, this, this is unrecoverable." I don't think-
- CHColeman Hughes
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... that it's a difference of kind. I just think it's a difference of degree, and-
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes, I, I would agree that Spotify hasn't caved as much as they could have done, but I've just checked JREmissing.com. 113 episodes are missing from Spotify, almost all of which were removed on February 4th. Uh, Alex Jones, Owen Benjamin, Theo Von, uh, two from my friend Michael Malice, Alex Jones's second one, Chris D'Elia, and the interesting thing is that in...... the statement from Daniel Elk's X, Daniel X, uh, Daniel Ek, um, he says that Joe was the one that selected the episodes.
- CHColeman Hughes
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
That really s- that really surprised me. First off, because, uh, the episodes got taken down before Joe did a response, or before I found, uh, out about this response, and I mentioned, I was like, "Look, just straight up think about the simplest solution to this." I can't remember what I said on a podcast two months ago. There's no way that Joe's gonna go, "Mmm, let me remember. Yeah, 845, 912." Like, he's not gonna be able to go back like some sort of Rain Man and be able to remember all of this stuff that's happened. So I presumed that at the very least, it was outsourced to a team and more likely outsourced to an algorithm that's maybe fed back up transcripts that could've then been searched through. But there's some of the episodes in there that have very, very little to do with anything, but are critical of the Saudis. And Spotify is now pushing into the Saudi market. There's some episodes in there with people like Chris D'Elia, who although m- may or may not, there may be other stuff in there, but Chris has had his own sort of cancel culture thing occur recently. So the concern here is that this is a, um, well-timed smokescreen in order to be able to take down a bunch of other content that they're not happy with. So I would agree with you when you say that Spotify hasn't caved as much as they could, but I also think that there is something going on here, whether that be at Joe's behest, or at Spotify, or a collaboration between the two. Or maybe the UFC has said, uh, "We have an incredibly fucking diverse fighter roster here."
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, there's, there's gonna be pressure from them too. Um, but there has been some concessions made, is my point.
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah, that's a good point, I revise my, my judgment there. I think, um... Yeah, it does, I mean, this is what some people warned about when Joe Rogan signed the Spotify deal, um-
- CWChris Williamson
Yep, all eggs in one basket.
- CHColeman Hughes
Totally. And, you know, I, I really, I don't... Uh, okay so I, I agree with your point that there is something that is so over the line that Spotify would be justified in taking it down. Um, I can't imagine Joe Rogan saying anything ever-
- CWChris Williamson
Agreed.
- CHColeman Hughes
... close to that line. Um, and, you know, this is the thing with free speech, I think, 'cause the question is, are we, are we debating over a principle or are we just, do we all agree that censorship is okay and just disagree about where the line is, right? So like, all of us, I don't know anyone who is into Holocaust denial or who is, who is super upset if, if a Holoc- a straight-up Holocaust denier's, um, you know, podcast-
- CWChris Williamson
Blog goes down, yeah.
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah, blog goes down. Or someone who is, you know, actively inciting, you know, e- even worse, someone who thinks the Holocaust didn't happen, but wants it to happen and is trying to get it to happen, right, like through their podcast, um, like a m- a modern day actual Hitler. No one i- is gonna be too upset when that person, uh, gets their podcast taken off Spotify. You know, after all, again, it is a private company. If, if it's part of its values is that it doesn't want to promote the Holocaust, which is pretty understandable, um, it can act on that. So is it like we're, we're all drawing the line somewhere between, like, Holocaust denial and, like, anti-vax information, and some of us are drawing it just, like, over here, and we're arguing about whether Joe Rogan is in the no-go zone? Or are we actually arguing over an actual principle, a principled disagreement about whether these platforms should allow a wide range of speech?
- CWChris Williamson
Well, let's not forget that by the sounds of things, Joe has taken down a, a chunk of these by his own choice, and it's his library, right? He gets to choose what he says and he gets to choose what you listen to-
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... by virtue of what he says and who he brings on.
- CHColeman Hughes
Right.
- 36:37 – 40:42
How Comedians Protect Themselves from Being Cancelled
- CWChris Williamson
like a, a comedian's trolley problem thing going on where those guys, th- their job is to try and push the limits. Their job is to, is to genuinely try and take you past the point at which you think, "I, I cannot believe that they've said this." And the problem is that when everything is captured and then kept on the internet for eternity, it's easier for an audience to take something out of context than it is to do it with a, a live standup set that probably isn't even recorded. I found out only a couple of weeks ago from a friend that's a comedian in the UK, that he records every single one of his sets for precisely this reason, that if somebody complains to the club and says, "This person was saying whatever phobic or ism it is that we want to throw at them," they have the recording. So that's the degree, uh, the Sword of Damocles thing, uh, the level of protection that comedians have now, or that they need to have in order to keep themselves safe.
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah, I mean, in, in the past two or three years, the big comedy clubs in New York have all begun requiring that you put your phone in a secured bag and turn it off or on silent, you know, Comedy Cellar and The Stand, um, before you go into the club because comedians can't work under surveillance. Comedy does not work under surveillance. I think another thing people don't understand about comedy is that comics don't know which one of their jokes are, which of their jokes are gonna be funny until they tell them to an audience for the first time. Um, they, they have some sense, but, you know, all of the, all of the Netflix specials you see from your favorite comics were pared down from far more jokes that these comics tested in front of live audience in, as an experiment in order to see which ones were the funniest and, and pare it down to those which eventually make it into the Netflix special, right? They don't know. (laughs) And, and the line between funny and offensive is, is, is super thin, right? And what's more, whatever, you know, something being taboo is an element of it potentially being funny, right? It's not just that funny things are often dealing with taboo topics. It's that if there is a taboo topic, it is by definition rife with humor potential, right? Like it's a, taboo is a constitutive element of humor in our species. That's just how our minds work. So in order for, uh, listen, we don't have to have standup comedy. Most places in the world don't have standup comedy, okay? America does have standup comedy, and I think that's amazing. I think that's one of, you know, that's one of the elements of our culture that I most love, but the only way that it works is if we allow people to approach taboo subjects, to find the line by crossing it, which is the only way to find it, and to test things out, right? We could become a country very easily that just doesn't have standup comedy, has no robust standup scene, um, because we, because our culture shifts. That is a very real possibility. There's no, there's no law that says your culture has to be compatible with having a robust standup comedy scene. I think that would be very sad if that happened. But we should, we should view, we should view the, uh, the cultural elements that allow for us to have good comedy in this country, those are fragile. Those are things that need to be defended. They're values that need to be defended, or else they'll, they'll go away. They're not something we should take for granted.
- 40:42 – 59:26
Is Mainstream Media Envious of Joe Rogan?
- CHColeman Hughes
- CWChris Williamson
How much of this is envy by the mainstream media at someone that shouldn't have risen up to the level of cultural influence and clout that they have?
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah, I think, I think a good amount of it is that. I mean, the existence of Joe Rogan as such a towering figure is, in some way, a condemnation of the failures of mainstream media. I'm not saying if mainstream media were better, Joe Rogan would be a nobody. That's not what I'm saying. He's funny. He, he would have a, a huge audience regardless, but h- he is as popular as he is, he has the insane degree of popularity that he does because he's willing to have conversations that the mainstream media rules out, okay? So like for instance, the idea that COVID, uh, C- SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the lab a couple miles away that was constantly tinkering with things extremely close to SARS-CoV-2, the closest viral ancestors to SARS-CoV-2 in the world, okay? Like on its face, plausible, not crazy, should be looked into, and when Fauci initially called the meeting in late January, early February to discuss this with the top virologists, many of them thought it probably came from the lab, right? Okay. The whole media basically decides this is conspiracy, this is misinformation, and many people, um, you know, uh, ha- had incentives to, to kind of, kind of take that line. Who is the person in society that's gonna really have that conversation?... in a way that isn't, um, merely finger-pointing and point-scoring against the left, but is truly open-minded to, to evidence. Joe Rogan, right? He is gonna fill that gap when CNN and MSNBC decide that lab leak is bunk. Um, Joe Rogan's gonna have that conversation and he's gonna have it in a long, exploratory way. Um, Tucker Carlson is go- i- is, is merely going to use it as a cudgel against Democrats and the left. And, you know, flash forward to two years later where you pretty much have the top scientists now saying, "You know, it's now like 50/50 between lab leak and natural emergence, and we're taking this seriously, and the World Health Organization t- takes it seriously." And Fauci says he can't rule it out now, has changed his position. Um, like, that gets vindicated as a legitimate hypothesis, and Rogan is the kind of person that would be systematically open to that when the mainstream said it was a false conspiracy theory. And that's why he has such a large audience, is because the mainstream media fails in those kinds of ways.
- CWChris Williamson
Rogan is playing in the vacuum that they have left, yeah. I would absolutely agree.
- CHColeman Hughes
That would be the, the short way to say what I just took a really long time to say.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- CHColeman Hughes
But the point is, his success is a finger pointed at mainstream media saying, "You guys are fucking up." Mainstream media doesn't want to admit that. They would much rather believe his success is an element of him being able to weaponize racism, misogyny and homophobia, and feed red meat to a bigoted audience. That's the way that they can preserve their image of saying, "No, there's nothing wrong with us. We're doing an amazing job. We are killing it." Joe Rogan is simply able to weaponize the worst in our culture and build a following as a result. That's a much more friendly narrative.
- CWChris Williamson
Here's the thing I think that people need to remember as well. For all that Joe is probably the single most powerful media personality on the planet, who commands, you know, nations' worth of plays on a weekly basis, he's just a guy. There are no rules for how you're supposed to do sense-making outside of the institutions. There is no, uh, operating procedure manual that me and you are supposed to adhere to.
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
The rules of what we do and don't say, the cadence of the conversation, the type of the conversation, everything that we do, whether we keep in touch afterwards, whether we don't, whether we prep before, whether we don't, whether we... All of that is pu- it purely exists through the evolution of people that have done this. There's no playbook that anybody follows. So, the same thing occurs for what happens if a video of you saying some things that you regret pops up. So, for someone to say that Joe should or shouldn't have done whatever, well, hang on a second, y- you weren't saying this about the way that he con- conducted himself on his show, or the way that he named his show, or his artwork, or his show notes, or the links that he puts out, or how he promotes it, or anything else. Joe is a guy who is leading the pack in forging a- an entire new world. He is failing in public and learning out loud, right? Every time that he has a conversation, it's the first time he's had that exact conversation with that exact guest at that particular time.
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
So, every single one of his errors is out there for people. And maybe he'll look back and think, "Do you know what it is? I'm really glad that I did those two apologies. Maybe at the time it, it looked a little bit to people like I was rolling over or like I was getting pressure from Spotify, but I know in my heart of hearts that it's because I felt X or Y or Z or whatever." Like, all of these editorial decisions that Joe gets to make, they're his. He can choose. And if you love him for the show then, as far as I'm concerned, you know, back him... Like, I'd, I back him for what it is that he does because of all of the, the insights and the, um, enjoyment and pleasure and, and curiosity and i- intellectual satisfaction that I've got from his show. I trust that Joe is doing the thing that he thinks is right for what it is that he's going to do.
- CHColeman Hughes
Right. No, I, I agree. Uh, I mean, I think I should just say, um, if I'm going to level any criticism of Joe Rogan's show, I think I, I strongly disagree with the perspectives expressed by his anti-vax doctors. I, I do think it's misinformation. I know people roll their eyes, I think, um, at, at that word now because it's, it's used so much. Um, but listen, the vaccines are safe and effective, right? And, um, I think he should, uh, do more prep when he has those kinds of controversial guests on, um, to be able to sort of challenge them on factual elements. Now, of course, if you're talking to someone who s- like, did early work on the concept of MR- mRNAs and is deep in the weeds, uh, it's very difficult to challenge them.
- CWChris Williamson
So, it's basically no amount of prep that you can do that's going to mean that you can battle back.
- CHColeman Hughes
Right. Um, still, you know, it's, it's, it makes sense to do as much prep as, as you can, um, and- and also to have people with the opposite perspective on. And listen, that's exactly basically what he said he's- he's gonna do in his apology. And, and so, you know, i- if I can level a- any criticism at the show, it, it'd be that. But that is a, a real far cry from, from the idea that, you know, it should be canceled-
- CWChris Williamson
Plus, it's-
- CHColeman Hughes
... or taken down.
- CWChris Williamson
... it's the thing that he's suggested that he's going to try and rectify. I think the best way to do that, the best solution that I could see around those sort of topics is to do what he did with Tim Pool and the- and Jack Dorsey.
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
You know, bring, bring, bring people on and mediate.... um, rather than having two different sorts of conversations.
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
You know, here's one, here's another, because the bottom line is that certain types of talking points are more limbically hijacking and more seductive to people than others. And some Harris talks about, uh, 9/11 truthers. That there's always a, um, degree of freedom on a conversation where someone says, "Well, what about the 10,000 ballots that were hidden in Virginia?" Or, "What about the fact that Steele only burned ... Did you know about this man from this particular principality of the fire system that said that he was in there five nights before?" Like, there's just, there's too many degrees of freedom in there and you really need a specialist. Um, and if you have somebody who is, uh, pushing the boundaries on either side, pushing the boundaries of, um, legitimacy or of truthfulness, they can hack people's desire to believe in one particular narrative or another. Uh, and if you have somebody else who is less prepared to play fast and loose with the truth, or their, uh, general overall narrative is less seductive, um, you really just need them in a room at the same time so that the person can push back. The specialist can go against the specialist. And I think you're right. I think that Joe said, "Look, I, I, I've not been in this position before. I, I, I didn't really know that this was an issue, but I, I've accepted that it is one. And moving forward, I'm going to try and do something different." I think, you know, f- from my side as a, a podcaster who tries to put out a lot of content and does it, you know, four or five hours a week, I think that that's the best that, like, Joe could have done.
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah. No. I, I agree. I think the apology was great. And I, I can't imagine thinking that, that, that apology came across as groveling or, or submitting to something he shouldn't have been submitting to. I r- I really couldn't disagree with that take more. Um, you know, I, I've been in the position where I, I've said things on my podcast or I've had a guest that I didn't push back on enough on-
- CWChris Williamson
Me too.
- CHColeman Hughes
... on certain points that I later found out to be that, that I really should have pushed back on. This, this kind of thing, it really is inevitable in the course of a long podcasting career, and that doesn't mean you shouldn't rectify it. You absolutely should rectify it if you wanna keep anything like a kind of trusting relationship with your audience. Um, but, you know, like, I, I can't help but come back to this point about the massive double standards that Joe Rogan is, is operating under as opposed to, you know, people in cable news. Like-
- CWChris Williamson
Well, you say that, but I think especially with the second issue that we're coming up against, if there was a super cut of, uh, someone from CNN or Fox News saying the N-word over and over and over and over again, I, I think that they would have similar or maybe even worse repercussions than Joe's going through.
- CHColeman Hughes
So, I mean, so but it's different because the super cut would have to be cut from their own show that we've all been watching for years, right?
- CWChris Williamson
The same is true with Joe though.
- CHColeman Hughes
Right. So, but, but, but it would have to not be a surprise. It would have to just be- it would have to be that they've been saying this and it was fine, that the network didn't care, until they saw it back to back to back.
- CWChris Williamson
The reason being-
- 59:26 – 1:12:46
Are We Past Being Woke?
- CHColeman Hughes
the truth.
- CWChris Williamson
Talking about officially permitted, uh, and, uh, strange incentive structures, something I've been thinking about for a while is whether or not the, um, high watermark of the Robin de Angelos and the Ibram X Kendis has sort of crested now. And then Scott Alexander put a post out, Why I Suck, he put this out the other day about how s- woke social justice issues just aren't very cool anymore. So he said, "While everyone else is freaking out about wokeness, I'm starting to feel like all my friends are anti-woke. Who's woke anymore? Are there really still woke people? Other than all corporations, every government agency and all media properties, I mean. Those don't count. Any real people? I guess I know one or two SJWs, but I also know one or two Catholics. It doesn't mean that they're not the intellectual equivalent of an out-of-place artifact." So the question is, like, uh, do you think that we're past peak woke or have we still got further to go?
- CHColeman Hughes
Uh, I do think we're past peak woke, um, but we may also still have further to go. I mean, peak woke was in 2020, um, so for example, at the height of the George Floyd protests and the riots, can you possibly imagine a com- company like Spotify, when pressured because one of their, their biggest podcast has a cutaway, you know, cut, cutup of the N-word, they would buckle under any racism-related pressure in June, July 2020.... that, you know, really remember what that was like. Um, the, the very fact that they haven't fully buckled is proof that we are past peak woke, that we are not as woke as we were in, in 2020. Um, of course, 2020 was like a massive spike in woke, so it's possible that it sort of goes like this and then comes down a little bit, but there's still a whole lot for a long time. So I, um, I really don't know. I, I don't tend to make predictions because it's very difficult to predict where the culture is going. But, you know, woke ideas definitely have staying powers in the universities, uh, at the very least, and that probably ensures that they will, they will be around for some time. But the influence they have on the rest of the culture is really... That is for us as a culture to sort of collectively decide, right? Like, how much influence do we want evangelical Christianity to have over the rest of us? That is very much up to we the people. How much influence do we want woke to have over the rest of us? Again, very much up to we the people and how we, how we talk, how we act, and, uh, you know, what content we allow o- on Spotify. These are all decisions that are a part of what the trend is going to become. So, if this is something you care about, a- and it, it's something I care about, I think it's bad when you have, you know, maybe f- at most, like, 3 or 4% of Americans are, are probably truly woke in the sense that people think (laughs) o- of that term. I think it's a problem when you have that, uh, kind of fringe philosophy like that, uh, you know, take over corporate America, or at the, at the very least, corporate America feels they have to pay homage to it. That's been the relationship o- of Christianity to, to a lot of... I mean, it, it... Woke has more influence than Christianity in, in, in corporate America, and, you know, probably still, what? 40% of Americans are, like, evangelical Christians, right? Whereas maybe 3 or 4% of Americans are really, really woke in the sense that they, you know, they, they refer to Hispanic people as, like, Latinx and stuff like that. Um, so groups can have power completely disproportionate to the, the, their actual numbers. Um, social and cultural power, I mean, and, uh, you know, it, it is very much up to the rest of us to defend whatever values we have so that small minorities with, with very muscular ideologies don't take over every institution that you care about.
- CWChris Williamson
There's a barber pole model of cool that's happening here as well, I think. So when your, uh, uncle on Facebook starts being anti-woke, that's when you know it's probably gotten too mainstream to be cool to do it anymore. And the same thing goes for your aunt if she's the one that's being woke, if she's the one that's-
- CHColeman Hughes
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... Tweeting about Ibram X. Kendi. So it's like, when stuff gets co-opted by the mainstream, the fact that this is an underground subservient movement, that falls away. And I think that people need to concede that a good amount of what was seductive from the woke side and from the anti-woke side was that this felt like some sort of grassroots movement. Like, I am at the absolute tip of the spear of what's happening with the culture, and that was what probably seduced a lot of people into being a part of it on both sides.
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I, I think that is true. At the same time, you know, I feel like woke has been... I don't know, you know, like, El- Elizabeth Warren was saying Latinx, and that was... I don't know. That's fairly mainstream, right? Like, I feel like it's been a while now is what I'm saying that woke has been not merely an underground counterrevolutionary, if you will, movement, but has been the language of many elites. And, um, and I'm not sure... You know, I, I, I do hope you're right. Uh, and I'm not really sure to what degree anti-woke i-... You know, your uncle is, your uncle is anti-woke. I think, um... I feel like your uncle is maybe a Trump supporter, and that overlaps with anti-woke, but it's... The dynamics are very tough to sort out, but one thing I, I hope is true and I think is true is that, you know, when your kindergarten teacher is woke, it's not gonna be cool, and that's already kind of happening. And I think there is this... There are basically, like, two very lazy assumptions that people on the far left make about the demography and direction of the country, which is like, we're getting browner and Blacker as a population and less white, and therefore, Democrats are gonna, like, win everything just based on demographics if we just, like, keep going this direction. We don't have to do anything. We don't have to persuade people. We don't have to win people over. We don't have to win swing voters. We're just gonna win based on demographics. A ridiculous notion, ridiculous idea. And it's also, by the way, equally ridiculous for people on the far right to fear that because the share of white America is shrinking, that, like...... uh, you know, like their ideas are gonna evaporate, right? Um, I would like their ideas to evaporate, by the way. But, um, it's not going to happen by demographics alone. And, and then this idea that, like, the younger generations will just definitely be woke, and even woker. I'm not sure how true that is. Because to the extent that woke- wokeness becomes more and more, has more and more influence at, at, the level of, like, S- K through 12, the more and more that your health teacher is woke, and, like, your gym teacher is woke, the less and less cool it will be to be woke, because you're not even anti the teachers, you're a teacher's pet. Um, so in the long run, I think a movement like this can't, it can't last forever, and it, it won't last forever. And it's, it's not inevitable, and people should feel, uh, people should push themselves to be as courageous as they can in, in voicing their own thoughts, even if those thoughts are potentially cancelable.
- CWChris Williamson
And as hopeful as they can as well.
- CHColeman Hughes
Sure.
- CWChris Williamson
Because there's a few fragilities, a few holes in the sphere that is wokeness. One of them being that as mainstream adoption increases, the coolness of being a part of some sort of revolutionary ideal starts to fade away. Another one is that ins- intersectionality is inherently self-defeating because it starts to slice itself into ever smaller and smaller slivers. The only way that you bind the in-group together is over mutual hatred of an out-group. And the purity spiral means that you need to continue to find more and more people to point the circular firing squad at and say, "Well, they're, they're no longer that pure person that they should've been anymore, so now we round, we shave a little bit off the side, we shave a little bit off the side," and it just gets more and more pure as it spirals all the way up. But I think if, if anything, for me, one of the main lessons I've learned around the response to wokeness is the power of comedians and ridicule. And this is interesting when we tie it back to comedians that are doing long form podcasts and stuff like that, and the danger that, uh, com- comedic trolley problem, that ridiculing something is one of the most powerful tools that you have to push back against it, because you make it so toxic and contaminated that nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to be anywhere near the thing which is socially completely toxic to be associated with. That's the best enforcement mechanism you could have. You could try and litigate it, you can bureaucracy, you can do whatever information campaign you can. But if some cool, funny people make jokes out of it, that's it. Cut off at the knees.
- CHColeman Hughes
Right, totally. And, um, I mean, I think woke, woke and far right have, have suffered a lot of ridicule. And, um, you know, that, that's part of how comedians participate in the healthy fight against extremism, is by (laughs) making fun of ridiculous people. And that's something Joe Rogan, uh, has done a lot. And we, I think we owe him a debt of gratitude as a culture for being, uh, one of the biggest comedians doing that. Yeah, as far as your other point about intersectionality, I, I read a article, I think, the other day, I think it was from The Root? And it said straight black men are the white men of black people.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- CHColeman Hughes
Like, this is intersectional logic, right? This is intersectional death spiral, is you just... The whole philosophy is white men are evil. And almost, it's almost like the opposite too, it's like the notion of evil only makes sense in the context of oppression. Like, there are no other kinds of evil that people really care about. It's like evil is whiteness and whiteness is evil. And so in order to describe something else evil, we have to almost talk about it in terms of white men. It's like-
- CWChris Williamson
That's the barometer now.
- CHColeman Hughes
... straight black men are the white men of black people. It's amazing. Um, it's a very, like it's, it's, it's one of these ideologies where it has a hammer and everything looks like a nail. And the only hammer it has is your identity. That's all it's about. And, um, there is so much more to being a human being in this world than as, as my friend Camille Foster would say, "The shape and shade of your genitals." Um, and so it's, that's why I think that, uh, you know, that's one reason why I don't think it, it has that much staying power in the, in the very long run. But, uh, it will probably always be around.
- CWChris Williamson
It does feel like the snake that eats its own tail. It's always felt like this. Even when I spoke to Douglas Murray on his Madness of Crowds thing, which is what? Two, two and a half years ago now? Something like that. It d- it felt like that at the time, that it's inherently fragile, and the thing that I thought back then, and the thing that I think now, because I'm big into existential risk, and I'm concerned about where we're going as a civilization
- 1:12:46 – 1:20:30
How Advanced Can Human Technology Become?
- CWChris Williamson
on a species wide level, you know, AGI, bioweapons, natural pandemics, those sort, like, genuine civilization ending things. Every single thought minute that is taken up by a, a capable, smart person, that is spent working out whether men are men and women are women or not-... is one that isn't spent working out how we get through the next 100 years without permanently curtailing our civilization's ability to reach its full genetic potential, like galaxy-colonizing, multi-planetary species with trillions and trillions and trillions of lives, living the type of happiness that no one has ever yet even got close to touching. And yet, we are getting t- caught up asking questions about whether men are men and women are women or not, or whether or not you're the white man of the rap game.
- CHColeman Hughes
(laughs) Yeah, I mean, I'm skeptical of the galaxy tech utopia-
- CWChris Williamson
Why is that?
- CHColeman Hughes
... thing. I, I think that there, I assume there are limits, practical limits to what we will be able to do with technology, um, that there are things we conceive that we will not be able to practically do. I don't know what that, what those things are, but I tend to think that that is true.
- CWChris Williamson
There is a guy at the moment who is working on, uh, well, uh, the book explains it. We could get to the nearest star system, the nearest, uh, planet of the nearest star system that looks like it might be able to be habitable for life within 500 years from now with the technology that we have currently. Now, the problem that we have is that genetically, we are really, really not built for space flight. We get all sorts of things that go wrong with us if we're up there, so that's what he's working on. He's working on trying to genetically modify humans so that we could better survive space flight radiation, uh, zero gravity, bone density. Giving... No one's given birth in space. Uh, I asked him whether or not he knew if, uh, Christopher Mason's the, the author. I asked him whether he knew if anyone had had sex in space, uh, and he just sort of gave me this look. I was like, "That looks a lot like a yes, Christopher."
- CHColeman Hughes
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, but yeah, I would, I would say the one, the one, uh, big hole in we can go and colonize the galaxy is if we can do it and we arrived relatively late during the universe's maturity, why aren't we seeing other galaxies that appear to be colonized by civilizations as well? So that is a good question, but we don't know how rare Earth is, and this gets into Fermi paradox territory. I think that we can all accept that even if we don't go multi-planetary across the galaxy, there are a lot of lives that should be still to come, whether we leave this planet or not, whether Elon even just gets us to Mars or not. And if that's the case, there are some challenges that we're going to face on an existential threat level, even just staying on Earth, let alone going elsewhere. Those are things that are really important, plus tons of other stuff-
- CHColeman Hughes
Oh, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... that are really important.
- CHColeman Hughes
Well, I, I agree with the existential threat point, that, that we don't spend enough time really thinking about how to prevent these things. I mean, but, but let, let me just come back to, like, the tech, tech utopia thing or the fixing all the biological problems with humans that don't allow us to survive long enough in space. Um, last year, I had a, I had a cough that was lasting for, for weeks, so I went to the doctor, and the doctor's very nice. He gave me a free X-ray. He gave me... He looked at me, blah, blah, blah, and he diagnosed me with a cough. And he said, "Would you, would you like me to give you any medicine?" And I was, I was trying to record songs. I was trying to record podcasts. I was desperate to get rid of this fucking cough, and I said, "Give me all the medicine." And he, and he basically gave it to me knowing it wouldn't work. I knew it wouldn't work. There's no cure. There's no cure for a simple cough. It's not bacterial necessari- like, simple bronchitis, um, you know, like over-the-counter cough medicine actually doesn't work in meta-analysis, li- like, Robitussin certainly doesn't work on me as an N-of-1. Um, you know, antibacterial, steroids for inflammation, nothing. I just drank tea for a month, and eventually it went away. My point is that there is no fucking cure for the common cough yet after thousands of years of human trying to do medicine and hundreds of years of us doing it scientifically. And the lesson in that is that certain problems are way harder than other problems, and we're not n- always good at predicting which problems are the hard ones. We put a man on the moon. We haven't cured the common cough. Um, cancer is another one that is turning out to be extremely hard. Um, where, where other things we just, you know... People can live their whole lives with HIV now. You know, what if the problem of, you know, immortality or really extending the human lifespan turns out to be a sort- a problem like the common cough, where it, it just is disse- Like, you can describe it as an engineering problem. You can describe it... You can understand the problem, and there seems to be a theoretical simple solution. "If we could only just do this, if we could only just do that," but then a thousand years from now, we're still, you know, we're at most living to, like, 110 or maybe 120. And it turns out to just be something that's actually too hard to solve all at one go, and we just make incremental progress kind of for a long time, but then maybe plateau. I don't know.
- CWChris Williamson
I think that you're right. We are not particularly good at working out which problems are the difficult ones, and it is surprising that we've achieved so, such things very easily and other ones are still there as these glaring problems. I think I'm more of a...... both a, a techno, uh, theorist and an optimist at the same time, that the potentials that we're going to get exponentially as we get better AI, as we have more powerful computers, as we have better programming and better understanding of everything, is going to open up opportunities that we can't foresee, and it's also going to create challenges that we also can't foresee. And it's balancing those two things together. But, uh, Toby Ord's The Precipice, which is my favorite book on existential risk, unbelievable. And there's this big fucking risk at the bottom that's called unknown unknowns, and that's the one that in pretty much everything, it's so many degrees of freedom away from where you are now or degrees of separation, that you just don't know what the problem is going to be. And for everything that you open up, there's a potential that you might decide to pick a ball out of the urn of potentials which is really big and black and scary. And if it's one of the black balls that you pick out, that, you've tried to fix a problem by creating something that causes a much worse problem, and that's something that all of these unknown unknowns, right, as we continue to roll forward. So I think that you're right. There are, there are challenges that open up, um, and challenges that are m- much more insurmountable than we think. Uh, however, I would... I feel, uh, hopeful at fixing problems. My concern is the creation of new ones.
- CHColeman Hughes
Mm. Well, yeah, I agree with you there.
- 1:20:30 – 1:21:23
Where to Find Coleman
- CHColeman Hughes
- CWChris Williamson
Colman Hughes, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with the music and the YouTube and the writing, what's best? Where should they go?
- CHColeman Hughes
Follow me at Coldxman with an X in the middle, C-O-L-D-X-M-A-N, on Twitter. Uh, same thing on Spotify. You can listen to my music, check out the song and the video on YouTube. It's called Blasphemy. And go to my website, ColmanHughes.org, where you can support my podcast, or you can just listen for free on wherever you listen to podcasts. It's called Conversations with Colman.
- CWChris Williamson
So, thanks, man. What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.
Episode duration: 1:21:23
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode E2zJ5jsdG-k
Get more out of YouTube videos.
High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.
Add to Chrome