hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm here with Coleman Hughes Coleman has a great new book out the end of race politics Arguments for a colorblind America but Coleman is more than just a book author he is a well-known blogger he has a very famous podcast conversations with Coleman he has been a star in rap music he plays jazz music trombone professionally in New York City
nightclubs and he's all around a public intellectual and famous person Coleman welcome thank you so much and I have to apologize for stealing the name of your podcast um for mine but I I figured I have literation so I I have extra reason to do it if your name was Tyler it would be bad but in fact it's totally fine now before we get to your book I have just some random questions for you what have
you learned from JJ Johnson H what's most interesting about JJ Johnson is that he was an extreme perfectionist uh what people don't realize about JJ at least people that aren't deep kind of conures is that most of his solos on his records were prepared and uh to an extent that is not true of his other contemporaries like Charlie Parker uh Dizzy Gillespie Etc most of their solos were truly
improvised like if you go to the alternate takes on those records it's a different solo if you go to JJ's alternate takes it's almost the same solo and uh I think that rather than be a bug that was a feature of his success because if you consider the challenges required to make the trombone into a bbop instrument which nobody thought was possible before JJ Johnson did it um
it's kind of a catch22 because the the level of perfectionism you would have had to have in order to be the first successful bbop trombone player would also preclude you from being a truly improvisatory uh musician which is generally characteristic of jazz musicians are most of your trombone solos prepared no but in a way I benefit um this is why you can't compare modern players to players of the past I
benefit enormously from having studied and learned all of many of JJ Johnson's solos so there were things he had to invent that are now second nature to most trombonist which make it easier to improvise in that style than it would have been for him physically what's the hardest thing about playing the trombone it's actually not the slide the slide in my view uh that's what attracted me to the trombone the fact
that you push and pull rather than pressing buttons or Valves and that's what makes it distinct but the the the slide motion is not actually the the trickiest thing about it the trickiest thing about it is the same thing that's tricky about every other brass instrument which is the ambore that's what separates Great trumpet players from poor trumpet players it's it's like in in my view the the finger technique
is not nearly the hardest part it's always the the uh small muscles of the mouth and coordinating those to play the instrument effectively and how was it you ended up playing trombone in Charles Mingus big band so I was um I participated in the Charles Mingus high school jazz festival which they still do every year it was new at the time they invite bands from all around to
audition and they identify a handful of good soloists and let them sit in for one night with the band and I sat in with the band and the band leader knew that I lived close by in New Jersey and so essentially invited me to start playing with the band on Monday nights and I was probably 16 or 17 at this point so I would take the NJ Transit into New York City on a Monday night play two sets with the Mingus band
sitting next to people that had been my idols and were now kind of my mentors people like uh Kumba Frank Lacy who who was a fantastic trombone player played with art Blakey and D'Angelo and so forth and then I would go home at midnight and go to school on Tuesday morning and why is the music of Charles Mingus special in jazz because it is to me but how would you articulate what it
is for you I would wholeheartedly agree that it's special even within Jazz the way I would describe it is there are certain Jazz musicians that seem to have created their own autonomous Island within the landscape of jazz whereas most of the great jazz musicians sort of resided in the same country certain people were like off in Taiwan on like a on their own Island I would put Mingus
in that category I would put someone like monk in that category um ornette Coleman people like that Mingus is music is my favorite of all of those because it's it sounds like Duke Ellington if Duke Ellington had had had had an acid trip and composed things that were broadly in his idiom but just everything was changed a bit and so um that's how I would describe Mingus and where should a podcast listener start if
they don't know Mingus I think you should start with Mingus a um because it's the album that would most broadly appeal to some to to someone who didn't know and you know any Mingus um I would also very much recommend watching his interviews as his personality is part of the experience of listening to him and then my favorite Mingus is probably black saint and the cner lady is is I think a masterpiece and um the
very the Lesser known Mingus piece that is a beauty and was part of his multi- uh his several hourong composition called epit half uh which I think he never finished but it's a it's a song called pinky don't come back from the Moon looking for love man and uh it's a beautiful 10minute or so just gorgeous piece and he had a penchant for these uh giving really long names and funny names
so he has another one for instance called um uh I think it's called it's a contrafact of the song all the things you are and contrafact meaning same different Melody and he called it all the things you could be if Sigman Freud's wife was your mother so he had these very funny titles uh and um I'm I'm I'm a lifelong Mingus fan and and blessed to play in the band if I want to
be Charmed by Puerto Rican music where should I start oh you should definitely start with Hector Lavo I would say um Hector lao's music is uh it's incredible it's incredible to dance to it's it it it stands the test of time a lot of it is thematically dark actually um many of his most famous songs uh are I mean so so for instance um is extremely sad song about how his mother died and then his father died and
he had a tragic life but you would never know that because it sounds so damn happy and it makes you want to dance uh and it's also probably the best example of how trombones can be used because most of that music was performed with Willie cologne who's arguably the greatest Latin trombone player and they would essentially you know they could sustain the whole Harmony of the band if they
wanted to without a piano or guitar simply by having two trombones playing triple Forte uh and and that's another thing I I I really love about that music is Billy Joel at all any good that's a good question you know you know I I I love piano man I think it's um an incredible song I can't really speak to that much Billy Joel being great outside of the few hits but piano man I think is a correctly rated
song I've been thinking about him a lot lately because he has immense talent but I don't like most of it and that raises interesting questions but when I hear it on the radio I don't dislike I want to dislike it more than I actually do so which aspect bothers you is it in what sense does it matter that he's not talented if you like it most of the time it feels dumbed down uh I grew up in New Jersey as you
did it appeals to a particular culture that I feel I ought to be rejecting a bit more than perhaps I do I don't know if I'm allowed to say this given the topic of your book but in some ways it's too white for me rhythmically it can be flaccid but like if I hear moving out and you know heart attack I enjoy that am I wrong so is it that it was so influential that it's it's become banal through people yeah I
heard it all the time growing up probably in a way you how did it strike you when you when you were growing up the exact same way oh interesting yeah yeah so I I mean I was wondering if if it's just that it was so influential it influenced everything else and now sounds Bal in retrospect but it sounded Bal at the time and I think purposely so but it's interesting when I listen to
satellite radio sometimes Billy jolis on as a disc jockey he's an A+ quality teacher about music how he explains things and I have great respect for that yep I don't think there's much correlation between being able to explain it well and being able to do it well is one thing I've noticed of of of musicians now you were a philosophy major at Columbia that now a while back but what is it you liked most about
Continental philosophy the truth is I didn't resonate with much much of any Continental philosophy uh it it struck me as um as as not respecting what I value in writing which is brevity and Clarity and uh and so I might like to read someone who really gets n explain what n was was trying to say but reading n itself was not a very fun experience for me and so I gravitated strongly
towards analytic philosophy the expositors are often worse right you think oh they're going to clarify n but you get something longer and more convoluted please give me back n right the ones that are hyper obsessed tend to be very unclear what would you change in American high schools if you had a magic wand that's a good question um I mean so there is research suggesting that longer school days are
are a good thing I mean you know Roland Friar's experiments in Texas where he randomly selects schools and extends the school day among other things gets good results on the other hand there just are a lot of kids that don't resonate with the structure and skill set of high school or public school schooling in general and um and their their talents lie elsewhere I mean I I I know countless musicians
that may have even been diagnosed as quote unquote ADHD in school but the reality is they had no trouble focusing in general and certainly had no TR trouble focusing on practicing their instrument for five hours at a time but had no interest in school uh as it was structured um so you know I'd be curious what what can be done to make school more tolerable for those kinds of
kids we'll get back to miscellaneous questions but now let's get to your book again the end of race politics Arguments for a colorblind America uh how would you give us your bottom line message in the book I don't usually do this but how would you explain it yeah I would basically explain it by saying the idea of colorblindness by which I mean trying to treat people without regard to race
and having colorblind uh race neutral public policy that's become a dirty word and a dirty Concept in particular on the left in the past couple decades and really in the past decade so this book is an attempt to rescue colorblindness um from from the jaws of disdain and argue that it is the best overall Philosophy by which to view the the idea of race um that we want to raise our children even if it's a watered down
version of MLK we ought to raise our children on that message um and we ought to get race out of public policy and wherever possible wherever plausible use socioeconomics where we want to um deal with issues of disadvantage if I understand you correctly you're also suggesting in our private lives we should be colorblind yes broadly yeah or we should try to be we should try to
be now this is where I might not agree with you so I find if I look at media I look at social media I see a dispute I think a 100% of the time I agree with colan pretty much on these race related matters uh in private lives I'm less sure so let me ask you a question sure could jazz music have been created in a colorblind America could it have been created in a color blind America in what sense do you mean that
question it seems there's a lot of cultural creativity I mean one issue is it may have required some hardship but that's not my point it requires some sense of a cultural identity to motivate it that the people making it want to express something about their lives their history their communities and to them it's not colorblind interesting so my my counterargument to that would be in so
far as I understand the early history of jazz it was heavily more racially integrated than American society was at that time in the sense that the culture of jazz music as it existed in say New Orleans and New York City was many many decades ahead of the curb in in terms of um its attitudes towards uh how people should live racially uh interracial friendship interracial relationship Etc so yeah I'd
argue that ethos of jazz was more colorblind in my sense than the American average at the time but maybe there's some portfolio effect here so yes Benny Goodman hires Teddy Wilson to play for him Teddy Wilson was black as I'm sure you know and that works marvelously well and it's just good for the world that Benny Goodman does this but can it still not be the case that Teddy Wilson is
pulling from something deep in his being and his soul about his racial experience is upbringing the people he's known and that that's where a lot of the expression in the music comes from and that is most decidedly not colorblind even though we would all endorse the fact that Benny Goodman was willing to hire Teddy Wilson yeah and maybe I'd argue it may not be culture blind though it probably
is colorblind in the sense that black Americans don't just represent a race that that's what a you know a black American would have in common that's what I would have in common with someone from Ethiopia is that we're broadly of the same quote unquote race we are not at all of the same culture and so to the extent that there there is something called African American culture which I believe that there
is uh which is had many wonderful products including Jazz and hipop yeah then I'm I I'm I'm I'm perfectly willing to concede that that's a cultural product product in the same way that say country music is like a a product of broad Southern Culture but then here's my worry a bit you're going to have people privately putting out cultural Visions in the public sphere through Music Television
novels a thousand ways and those will inevitably be somewhat political once there are cultural Visions so these other Visions will be out there and a lot of them you're going to disagree with so it might be fine to say it would be better if we were all much more color blind but given these other nonc colorblind Visions are out there do you not have to in some sense counter them
by not being so colorblind yourself and say well here's a better way to think about the black or African-American or Ethiopian or whatever identity yeah I think they're I think that's right I think they're compatible in the sense that you can sort of push for the soft version of something and the harder version of something if not at literally the same time than than by turns um what I've sort of been arguing
for is a kind of firewall between the cultural versions you're talking about and the political aspects but I think you're right that in in practice they may bleed into each other they might correlate uh very highly right maybe I Coleman Hughes have no problem separating the fact that I grew up with black and Puerto Rican music and have a special attachment to it also have a special attachment to Puerto Rican food
for instance I have no problem separating that aspect of me from a demand that the state treat me and my racial group differently but uh or or a political program based on race broadly but it might be the case that for many people those are just kind of one and the same or they draw on the same impulse now I'm Irish American and sometimes I go to Ireland and other times I go to Scotland and I enjoy them
both I don't really think intrinsically one is better or worse than the other but I would admit that I honestly feel somewhat better about being in Ireland for some weird arbitrary reason I think I'm Irish American this to me is just a bit more interesting and it's probably me fooling myself but some parts of it even feel a little bit more familiar than Scotland would and I fully admit that my placebo
or my own self- delusion should I feel bad about thinking that way no I don't think you should feel bad about thinking that way and I think that I know much more about Puerto Rico than I would if I weren't one half Puerto Rican I know much more about it than I know about the Dominican Republic say um however I would ask I would ask you a question I would turn it around I
would ask you if you were to write an MR post about some issue in Irish or Scottish politics do you think you would analyze them differently or do you think you would put that little feeling to the side I think I would know more about Ireland it would be different I don't think I would consciously be biased but I don't think I could quite do it neutrally either and I'm pretty distant
from Ireland like no relatives there I've only been a few times I'm not like an Irish American you know sending money to the IRA and drink drinking in a stereo typical Irish American Pub there's not really much in my life that would you're not drinking period yeah but this is what worries me a bit so if I went to say Ireland and Africa and then when I'm in Ireland I feel a bit better there because oh I'm in Ireland
that's a place with white people I definitely would feel bad if I had that opinion and I don't in fact I actually if anything I'm to kind of prefer to embrace that which is in some way distant from me along those margins uh but it would be wrong right if I said oh well I'm in Ireland you know I'm white that's the white people's place I can feel a little better about that than being in
Ethiopia yeah then there again I would underscore the distinction between race and culture I don't think anyone should feel bad about the inevitable fact that we have more cultural attachments to the things that we know and the places we're from and the foods we grew up with and the music we grew up with that's all inevitable and I even I I I even don't uh begrudge someone saying look uh you
know I'm Jewish uh I would frankly prefer to live in a Jewish Community I would prefer to marry a Jewish person and so forth all of those kinds of feelings I would argue are inevitable and uh and you shouldn't fight within yourself however I think there should be a strong firewall between saying all of those things and saying you know the state ought to treat my group special because of this that or or another
reason and like I said that might be a too hard a distinction for some people to draw it's not a hard one for me to draw and so maybe I falsely assume it's a hard it's a it's realistic to Advocate other people draw it but that seems to me a sensible place to draw the line given we have to draw it somewhere between everyone's irrational individ ual with no attachments whatsoever and
any and all expressions of racial and group Pride are okay I agree fully when it comes to the state but in terms of separating race and culture they seem quite intertwined to me and a lot of people's cultures talk about their race it can be in quite unpleasant ways in in many cases as we both know so is there really that firewall there I would argue so like I would argue race and culture are fairly
distinct the fact that in America right now arguably the most bitter kind of difference is between two different white cultures right I think was it David French who wrote the piece about the great white culture War something like that a few few years back where you have sort of white Americans of of a of a of a blue culture and white white Americans of a red culture some who grew up with 50
guns thinking it's normal and some who literally couldn't tell you the difference between two OB between a shotgun and a rifle looking at each other and feeling really all of the sociological um kind of kind of feelings of tribal hatred towards one another but are totally of of the same race I think that kind of UND underscores the difference between race and culture let me try another
pathetical on you you might ask well should we be race blind but should we be autism blind so if I meet a person who is Autistic or I think they're autistic I'll make a point of speaking to that person more directly you could say I would treat them differently I think it's efficient I think it's welcome it leads to better outcomes but I wouldn't say I'm autism blind now autism isn't culture it's not
race but it is mostly genetic right it's a thing you were born with uh should we be autism blind or ADHD blind or whatever else blind no I don't think we should be autism blind I think in so far as you know someone has a totally different communication style you know that they don't read facial expressions well it makes sense to take that into account in in in all of your uh interactions and
Communications with them but I don't think that and and for instance I don't argue that we should be gender blind because at least not in the same sense we should be we should try to be race blind because there really just are important differences between men and women that shouldn't be ignored right you shouldn't treat anyone worse but I also wouldn't necessarily treat my brother and my sister and my mother and
my father the same in every possible conversation or scenario right so it's not about a hierarchy of treatment it's simply uh nonidentical treatment right and I and I but my my point about race I think is that race really is uh whatever you think about its constructed nature it's much more socially constructed than all of these other categories right autism is just it's there's no if we have
autistic people in a thousand years they're going to have the same symptoms that they did a thousand years ago um you know the diff the the the classic differences between men and women today are quite similar to to to what they were 50 years ago and there will be you know differences between men and women in a hundred years but race is not really like that it's it's what we think of as a racial
difference uh is is heavily influenced by culture and in that sense they're intertwined but I think so I think it's much more fertile uh ground for Progress to Advocate that people treat those of different races without regard to their race than to treat people with say different personality conditions or genders or or so forth things that are frankly less malleable to begin with but in the in its most fundamental
terms if you had to present the micro Foundation for why does race get so much blindness in your view so culture is extremely contingent and yet there you don't want us to be culture blind and then autism say is mostly genetic and you don't want us to be autism blind so the extreme contingent and the extreme non-contingent you don't want blindness but there's some point in the Middle
where blindness makes sense or how does the whole model operate so I guess the model operates in in the in the following way if if I meet two people of a different culture I'm not going to treat them differently in other words let's say to to disect out the variables I've got an Ethiopian and a black American same race totally different cultures and they're both applying to
work at my podcast I'm neither going to consider their race nor their culture in their um if they're you know they they're they're editing my podcast say right I really only care about their competence there the sense in which you might not be culture blind is I wouldn't fault the Ethiopian guy for saying look I want an Ethiopian wife and I like inira better than I like uh barbecue in that sense I allow him his
non-culture blindness uh and I don't make him feel guilty in the sense that I don't make you feel guilty when you feel a a bit more uh bit a bit of something for for Ireland but I would I would still insist on not treating them differently right not treating them differently where the different treatment might amount to some kind of Injustice I wouldn't insist on being deliberately obtuse about the
differences between people with different mental competencies like autism or depression or God forbid schizophrenia right schizophrenia blindness is just being uh um obtuse right it's the problem is that schizophrenia is actually a perfect proxy for having a different mind that that's definitionally that's that's what it is whereas a person's race is not uh a very good proxy for having a different
mind uh at all and and it's certainly not a good proxy the moment you have more information about them right the only situations where it might be a good proxy if you picture a quadrant with like stakes and information so if you're in the quadrant quadrant that's high stakes and low information right like you know that there's a bomb in Time Square and you've only got two seconds
and you have to decide between the guy that looks like a terrorist and looks like the race of most terrorists you know okay well I'm not going to fault you for paying attention to race in that particular Corner case in most of our life situations we're in the other three quadrants of situations that are either uh low stakes High information low stakes low information or low stakes low
information or did I get all three I might have messed that up but you get the point we're we're meeting friends at coffee shops we're introducing each other and so forth in in scenarios where we can learn about each other and the moment we have that race Falls away as a as a very useful proxy as you probably know a disproportionate share of American CEOs are quite tall how do you feel about
lookism yeah lookism is another one where um I would feel it's not that I don't think it's an injustice of some kind um it's that I would feel silly spending very much time trying to budge that particular variable because I don't think it's that budge not saying it's not movable at all um but I would argue that for instance in my view attitudes towards racism have changed pretty dramatically in the past
50 years in the past hundreds certainly I don't know that attitudes towards lookism have and that leads me to believe that lookism might be something more like closer to a constant where as attitudes towards race are fairly influenceable by let's say those of us who are in the marketplace of ideas I don't want to exaggerate our influence as a whole profession um but I would feel somewhat
silly trying to budge variables that might not be very budge I worry sometimes that blacks in America face more lookism even from people who would not typically be considered racist but when they meet a black person they really pay more attention to the looks and I you know Obama once said when he was president when I'm on TV the one thing I can't do too much is to get angry and you look very friendly you are
very friendly I know you how would things have gone for you if you looked more Savage I mean do you think blacks in America face more lookism yeah I mean I I think probably yes um it's it's interesting uh our friend Noom who was also on this podcast said the same thing he said if I looked if I had a look that was more threatening for lack of a better word that I might have a different black experience than the
one that I have and that it's not you know we we often reduce things to race that aren't all racial right like whether I can say there's only one time I've ever been accused of stealing something from a store that I didn't not in fact steel which is often talked about as a ubiquitous experience for black men black people in general it's only happened once I've been living in New
York for 10 years and I buy a lot of stuff from Deli and I've lived in Harlem and I've lived in um above Harlem and Hamilton Heights and the kinds of neighborhoods where a black teen might be accused of this kind of thing or and so forth and is that partly because I have a certain look even if I dress shabby I I have kind of a certain non vaguely non-threatening look um although for
some reason it's enough to make employees at Ted feel unsafe but not Delhi owners in Harlem I think there's something to that absolutely do you think being half Puerto Rican has given you additional or different insight into racism and if so what it's a good question uh I think there may something to the idea that kids who are products of interracial unions are more drawn towards the idea that race
isn't all that important because if you grow up in a scenario especially if you grow up with two happy loving parents as I did um who are who are clearly of different races and different cultures and so forth uh my mother grew up speaking Spanish and my dad was as as American as as as you could get it becomes it becomes difficult to believe that there are deep dividing lines between groups of people because your
immediate context says otherwise the two people that are most important your parents have formed the deepest Union any two people can form and so it belies the notion it belies the the the people that would want to tell you that there are important divisions between the races so in so far as that's part of my experience I think it's possibly influenced me the white conservatives
who are your fans what do you think they're most likely to get wrong about race that's a good question that's a very good question and then I'll ask you about the Libertarians and whether the conservatives and Libertarians get the same things wrong that's a stumper but is there some way in which you feel uncomfortable by their Embrace of you that they don't quite they haven't quite earned the opinion in a
way you might feel you have or that doesn't enter into it no I feel that sometimes I feel a kind of uh undeveloped discomfort and uh inarticulable discomfort with some of the people that like me uh I couldn't exactly say why but yes it does come from some sense that the opinion is unearned or that what is a what is an opinion I've come to with great emotional weight and frankly
psychological wrestling is an opinion that they've come to reflexively and that that doesn't sit well with me in in some sense I would prefer it it it makes me um it makes me feel feel better about my message if I feel people who wouldn't otherwise come to the view views that I have are coming to it not reluctantly but knowing the counterarguments against it and taking
them seriously taking for instance just the the the fact and kind of sanctity of the legacy of racism in Black Culture as a meme um taking all of that ser seriously and nevertheless coming to the opinion that basically the dominant narrative on race is importantly wrong sits better for me than someone that takes it reflexively and without uh fully appreciating the counterargument so to the extent that
white conservatives over index on that way of engaging with me it does make me uncomfortable however if I had stopped doing things that made me uncomfortable I just never would have I never would have gotten to where I am right now and uh I think think that is one of the the biggest things uh stopping many black people and people of color in general from agreeing me agreeing with
me publicly is not that they disagree with me uh privately it's that they they don't want to tolerate those same feelings of discomfort from the white conservatives who will agree with them and so I've made the choice that I'm willing to tolerate that discomfort uh and I think that's the right decision how do agism and racism interact so it's a common racist Trope to take a young black male and call him boy
historically I've noticed sometimes when people talk about you maybe it's me that's off but they say pretty often that you're young or very young you're not actually that young anymore I mean do you feel people see you as Too Young in part because of racial issues or is there some underlying condescension when people refer to you as young or you just don't notice or don't think any of that's
there I don't think that it's a a racial issue so for example you know I when I started playing with the Mingus b band which is on most nights a majority black band um it certainly was in those days I would always be introduced as young even up to the point when I was like 24 and I guess it was a relative thing because most guys in the band were older but there is just this General phenomenon of of of Youth wor ship that
I do dislike about I don't know if it's American culture or or if this is the same everywhere I don't really like that we put 17-year-old activists on TV if their school was shot up I think it's a disservice to them um and to that extent I don't I don't really like being praised because I'm young because there's a there's a there's a part of me that worries that people are kind of correcting G giving me a
mulligan on certain things because I'm younger um and I don't like I don't like even the intimation of false praise um so there's that however I don't think it's a racial issue in fact I I would probably it's the opposite in the sense I hear many more people complaining that black children are viewed as older than they in fact are like the case of Tamir rice who is 12 um
and but actually did come across as much older than 12 so in other words you know teen teers being seen as adults is probably the bigger issue or you game for a round of overrated versus underrated of course these are easy ones of course you maybe no very easy the West Village overrated or underrated underrated um based on how much uh how much time I spend there though a lot of that time is admittedly
spent at the comedy seller it's an amazing uh culturally vibrant place there's still great music there great comedy uh and there is a a really beautiful cacophony uh that that goes on there uh that um yeah I I wouldn't trade that for anything it's beautiful the Beasty Boys overrated to me they're just a bunch of winers I'm very glad to hear you say that I think that they have they
even made really a mark in the history of Hip Hop I think they came around at a time when people were looking for white rappers and Eminem wasn't on the scene yet that's right however Eminem made a very important Mark in the sense that I don't think you could find a single great rapper from the past 20 years that doesn't cite Eminem as an influence especially early Eminem all of the great
black rappers would absolutely give him his due in the lineage whereas almost no one would would cite the Beasty Boys Kareem Abdul Jabar overrated or underrated uh I would say overrated as a commentator perhaps it's because he's often writing about things that were are within my pet purview and because we have may have disagreements that are kind of small in the big picture but seem large
to me he's much more likely to um to jump to racism as an explanation for phenomena in the in the media um and I do think in the same way that some people have probably given me some false praise for being young or have sort of you know that's added to their opinion of me I think the fact that he's Kareem Abdul Jabar and a former basketball player who happens to have this other skill might lead people
to rate his output in that other domain somewhat more highly gershwin's Rap City in blue I will go overrated only because I think it's been played to death on airplanes and um I think in some way the worst thing that could have happened to it is it is for it to become the the uh anthem of of of whichever Airline it's the anthem for Trans fenan I would say overrated in the sense that
I I really don't like his idea I remember almost being offended at the idea of the colonized mind the idea that um you know a colonized people that the colonization sort of infects the mind in a way that a colonized person must constantly interrogate whether they are parting the words of the colonizer or whether they're actually holding their beliefs in good faith I remember rejecting that in a in a very knee-jerk
way because it it is so easily used as a way of shutting down a person like myself um and I knew from introspection that my own views were not coming from a kind of like love of of of whiteness or white supremacy or something you know I in fact I remember as a kid I remember there's this meme of the self-hating black person I recall as a kid looking in the mirror and being very
happy at what I saw being very happy that I was black and thinking that you know had I been white that it just it would look wrong you know so I remember having frankly High racial self-esteem as a kid and I knew that's not where my opinions were coming from what have you learned from gnome dwan who's also been a guest on conversations with Tyler I've learned a lot from Noom dworman um one thing I've learned is
that if you have warmth and humor and charisma you can get away with being a lot more quote unquote disagreeable in the psychological in the psychologist sense uh than otherwise and I've also learned that there's such a thing as a detector and some people have it in Spades and others don't and Nom does you're saying Nom has the best detector that I know the highest batting average of knee-jerk
responses to emerging story is being correct say both in personal life and in the media you know knowing when people are lying without without strong evidence what's your favorite movie um my favorite movie of all time or my favorite recent movie all well both all time start with that okay I will say probably my two favorites I'll give you two one would be Interstellar and one would be Little
Miss Sunshine and why are those two special uh Interstellar I think is is Nolan's Masterpiece I'm a big fan of Nolan many of his movies are the same but I think he perfected his uh calling it a shtick is not the right thing but he perfected his thing with Interstellar it was just a marvelous movie in its marriage of uh emotionality and and uh the humanity of Matthew mcc's character and the kind of
abstract playing with time um thing that Nolan likes to do so for example his his early movie momento I think kind of over indexes on the fun of the playing with time without enough real raw human emotion and I think Interstellar strikes the perfect balance Little Miss Sunshine I would say is a perfect film in my view um it's it's hard to say why but it makes me cry almost every time I watch
it it's a a story of a lot of kind of shitty people I guess that's that's one thing that's interesting about it basically everyone except for the young girl in the movie is kind of a shitty person uh the mom is constantly angry for no reason the husband's like a a fraud and a bit of a car salesman and a fake success the son is an uh who only cares about himself the uh Steve Carell's character
is modeling and depressed they all have character traits that you should 100% avoid but by the end of the movie they have to come together around this thing that it should be totally meaningless and then it erupts in like a totally inappropriate kind of dance at the end it's just a perfect film I have a few questions about politics why are more blacks voting Republican these days and
is that mainly a trump thing or a more permanent shift well it's this is a very tricky issue I'm not actually sure what the trend is so one thing is that it predates 2020 Trump got more of the black vote in 2020 than he did in 2016 uh so something was going on in the first term that started the trend it could have just been the economy was great um it could have also been a trump effect in
that uh people on the left talk about Trump's racism as one big phenomenon but really his problem was always with immigrants and uh his denigrating comments at least the ones that are confirmed and on the record almost all of them were directed at immigrants not black Americans and black Americans are roughly as broadly as anti-immigration as as white Americans and so the apparent Paradox is
that you know Trump is this quote unquote racist but black people seem to be going towards him in greater and greater numbers well his racism to the extent You' agree it's racism has always been directed at Immigrant not at black people uh by and large he passed lots of policies in his first term that on their face seem very sort of pro black right the first step Act was very Progressive
Criminal Justice Reform making funding for historically black colleges automatic these are things that had Obama done them he'd have been lampooned by the right as playing identity politics and in a way that's why Trump was able to do them and and Obama wasn't so there's all of that and then there's just the fact that Biden is a is a uniquely especially weak candidate um there's and then there's
this theory of course that the indictments um have led to a kind of rallying around Trump from within the black community because he seems to be unfairly persecuted and being unfairly persecuted by the criminal justice system may be something that resonates with black people I don't actually know that that's true but you put it all together and you you can see how such a trend might ensue do you think there are
any common patterns of political views amongst black Jazz musicians obviously a lot of diversity but on average what do You observe um on average black Jazz musicians that I know are frankly probably like more in the conservative Democrat domain than many people would assume so for you know that this is not always widely talked about but black Americans in general are the most
conservative wing of the democratic base in the sense that almost all black people vote Democrat uh but there's quite a high degree of kind of social conservatism um conservative viewpoints on things like immigra immigration and so forth and if you're white and you have those views you go to the Republican party if you're black and you have those views you probably don't go to the Republican party you probably
just vote Democrat with a basically a conservative ideology and that's like a third of black Americans I would say that um there's a lot of black m Jazz musicians that fall into that category quiet as it's kept in black Hip Hop there seems to be a lot of gender conflict and gender divides is that reflecting something real or it's just an aesthetic in the art or what do you me what do you mean
by that men talking about women in a way that many women would find very objectionable I think it's higher in black Hip Hop and white hip hop but feel free to contradict me oh I think yeah I would agree it's hire in black Hip Hop I I I was always amused when I was in college that uh you know there was a a very intense variety of feminism around but some of those same women would go to
like say a Trippy Red concert or an XXX tentasion concert and here like some of the most brutally misogynous lyrics that have ever been written in any song without any contradiction and there was this sense I guess this unspoken sense that if you're a black man it's okay to say those things um or that it's not really meant or that who cares whereas if a white artist had said the same thing it would
be you know it would there would be a bevy of Articles the next day um yeah I I'm not exactly sure what is behind that Trend but I have to think that the success of someone like Drake is partly because he bucks that Trend like women love Drake and Drake is the most popular rapper to ever exist and I think one thing that makes him popular is the very fact that he was squarely within the tradition and school
being a disciple of Lil Wayne the school that said the worst possible things the most dismissive dismissive misogynist possible things and he was accepted and loved that school but the route he went was to say things to make music for women to say things that were sweet to women um not to say that that's all he says but he really bucked a trend and in that sense was vulnerable to the
critique that he was kind of soft and and and feminine and uh which is the greatest possible sin you would think in the rap world but actually led to the greatest possible success in the 19th century it seems that Beethoven and also Queen Victoria were especially popular with a lot of black communities in the United States should we think that strange or you find that intuitive well I I've heard it said among
the kind of conspiracies in the hotep world that Beethoven quote is black that's something that some people believe that's not I'm not putting my name to that um yeah I have no I have no nothing else to say about that that's interesting though here's a reader question and I quote for other men who share your political views what's your advice on dating women it's hard to find ones who are not woke and not socially
ignorant crazy conspiracy theorists at the same time my advice would be do not talk about politics on the first date in fact I would say don't raise it at all it will inevitably come up but delay the time that it comes up as long as possible you're not there to discuss politics you're there to meet a woman that might potentially be a life partner right so in so far as you go on a first
date and a second date and you begin to like each other's nonpolitical attributes once politics comes up and there are differences between you two you may be surprised in her ability to tolerate those political differences once she's realized that she likes a lot of your non-political attributes and in fact she may surprise herself in her ability to tolerate different opinions and you may surprise
yourself let me now turn to the Coleman Hughes production function uh I hope you don't feel this is unmerited praise but what makes you so good at so many things what's your simplest theory of that um I guess I've I've always had a monomaniacal focus on the things I do like so I'm I'm bad at a lot of things that I just never do but you think you're good at learning curves for the
things you do yes however it's it's not really that's a that's a false way to frame it the way to frame it is that I've invested heavily in the things where my learning curve was naturally the best so for instance I I tried to switch to trumpet when I was 17 but I was no good at it um when I started playing trombone I got good fairly quickly and so I invested and tripled down in the areas where I
was learning fastest I used to be very into languages I was good not great I ditched it completely when I was 12 so I guess I've tripled down on the areas where I have the highest natural genetic Advantage as an individual and this extreme willingness to specialize where do you think it comes from you were born with it you developed it your parents taught you no born with it 100% I mean I I've I've
always had um just intense natural desire to focus on whatever I want to get good at to the exclusion of almost everything else do you think your jazz education and background has helped you when you have to improvise when you're podcasting giving a public talk or otherwise in the public Arena not at all hasn't helped me in the speaking domain one bit what it did do I think is
that growing up so deeply in the Jazz World which is very diverse multi-racial multi-national um advertised the possibility of true deep interracial friendship and interracial you know working with people of different cultures and not seeing anything weird about that uh towards a common goal and and towards a common passion and I think not everyone has that what is your most unusual successful work
habit most unusual successful work habit um I don't know if I have any unusual successful work work habits you they're they're successful but they're not unusual or they're unusual but they're not successful I mean I I guess I like I said I can be very monom maniacally focused on things so it's possible for for instance for me to go to to accidentally skip meals because I'm working and I don't get hungry and
um it's it's it used to be very hard for me to stop or get interrupted I've gotten a little bit better at that and become a more balanced person but I would say yeah like working for long stretches of time with no break at all as opposed to what might be more common advice which is you know every hour take a 20- minute break what do you think you optimize for when I work no in life oh I'd like
to think that I optimize for for happiness broadly construed not just pleasure or Joy but a balanced amount of that mixed with meaning um I'm definitely of the school that though I work a lot I don't think that work is life I would like to have a family and and do all of that and so I try to optimized for being a balanced um and happy human being and I think that's a good thing because to get
to into the world I'm in with politics and debate and so forth can be um taxing and toxic without balance what do you think is the fundamental reason why that world can be so toxic I guess where where other things in life value or incentivize kind of relaxed open-minded and loving attitude things such as music what the incentives in the domain of public conversation about politics
are towards nastiness in a way towards dissatisfaction you're supposed to point out the thing you're pissed about um whereas in in other domains in life you know such as at church or or with your family you are supposed to think about the thing you are grateful for so it's a kind of precise turning on its head of the wise lessons about how you should spend your time and attention for your own happiness inverted to to to
maximize the kind kind of the toxic things could you imagine a world where you just say goodbye to politics do something else and you're simply happier I think the truth is if I wanted to do that I would have done it and vice versa if I wanted to not do music at all and just go fully into it I think I would have done that too I think the truth is when I was a full-time musician gigging
trombone every night I had an itch to scratch that was not getting scratched like for instance when I was at juliard I would go to the music library and try to pull out books about philosophy and you know when I was at Columbia I was always itching to get off campus and go play some music so they're just two sides of me that both need to be fed before the final question let me
just repeat Coleman Hughes the end of race politics Arguments for a colorblind America which I enjoyed very much very last question Coleman what will you do next uh what will I do next well I'm going to keep doing my podcast I'll probably write another book and uh I will continue to play music perhaps take up a new instrument and uh continue optimizing for happiness Colman Hughes thank you very much thank you Tyler