Coleman Hughes Answers Your End-of-Year Questions

0:28If you love epic stories of myth and legend, listen up. brings myth to life with serious production value, full-scale battles, and a sweeping original orchestral score. At its core, this is a return to classic epic storytelling, where faith, prophecy, and sacrifice truly matter. Stream the Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin, only on Daily Wire+. Coleman Hughes, welcome back to an Ask Me Anything. Good to be back with you, Poppy. It's almost Christmas, and so this is a real end-of-year roundup. I was looking back at some of the top stories, Ukraine-Russia talks, Iran attacks, Doge. Is there one news story that you think defines 2025?

1:10Wow. Well, I don't know if there's one story, but we are back in the Trump news cycle to some degree. Donald Trump's ability to absolutely dominate people's attention is maybe more than anything what makes him different from most politicians. He was able to do that in 2015 when he got so much free publicity from the mainstream right-wing media because he knows how to say the exact thing that will get the headlines, that will drive the story. And so if anything defines the news this year, it's simply the Trump factor, simply the fact that everyone I know and their mother is sort of constantly thinking about Donald Trump and the Trump administration in a way that most people with any other president would not be thinking about politics.

2:06And that's obviously by design. I think Trump likes it that way. I think he's good at that. I think it's the same thing that made him good on The Apprentice. I also think it's probably bad for our culture to be thinking about politics as much. What do you mean by that when you say it's bad for our culture? What does that mean? Well, for the most part, normal people can't do very much about national politics. And so paying more attention to the news, it doesn't actually do very much for you doesn't actually do very much for the country. What it does do is make your day to day mood a lot lower, a lot more fearful, a lot more extreme.

2:46theme the nature of the news is that bad news is news right there's like millions of things going on every day that are good none of those things are news for the most part whereas whatever goes wrong is by definition news if it bleeds it leads right that's the newspaper journalism saying so insofar as we're all paying more and more attention to politics because we have a president that is a master controller of the media, essentially, or controller of our attention, to be more specific. I think it makes everyone's affect and mood more stressful, more fearful, without there being much by way of positive good that comes as a result of paying more attention.

3:32Yeah, it's a really good point. But it's a sort of weird dichotomy, because we want an engaged society where people know what's going on, but on the other hand, maybe makes us miserable. Yeah, like anything, there's a happy medium where a certain level of engagement keeps government accountable. Beyond that, it just makes us all miserable. Let's go to your question. So this one I put right at the top. I'd seen someone write in and I'd never heard you talk about this issue. So someone said, what's your thoughts on the birth rate decline almost everywhere around the globe? We've seen a lot of stories this year about encouraging people to have lots of babies.

4:08What do you make of all of it? Yeah, the birth rate decline all around the world, it is one of the most important trends of our lifetime. I've had Eric Kaufman on the podcast twice, I think. He was one of the very first people to talk about this. He wrote a whole book on this subject in something like 2010, like long before it was really on most people's radar. And, well, it brings up a few things. First, you could talk about the causes of it. What's going on? Why is nobody having kids? There's lots of theories. Some people say it's because having kids is too expensive, which really doesn't make sense because if you think about it, it's actually the wealthy that are having fewer kids.

4:55The poor actually have higher birth rates, first of all. Second of all, every single government in the world that has tried an economic innovation, Whether it's, we're going to give parents tax breaks for every extra kid. We're literally just going to hand you a check if you have more kids. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. None of it's worked.

5:18And so clearly, when you're looking at a problem, you have to think like a scientist, right? So this birth rate decline is happening in every single Western capitalist country in the world. That's America, Canada, every single country in Western Europe, Japan, Korea. What does this tell you? It tells you whatever's causing it, it's not the policy of any specific country. It's not because we zigged and Japan zagged on economic policy. It must have to do with something, a cause that is affecting the entire world. So in my view, what it is, is it turns out that as GDP per capita goes up, the experience of being a single person in a middle class lifestyle gets better and better and better and better.

6:15We have more and more opportunities, right? But the experience of being a parent to small children is essentially the same as it was, you know, 50 years ago, right? All this innovation we've had, we have endless entertainment now. There's so much you can do in the world that our grandparents couldn't do. But if you're going to have three kids, your life is basically going to be carrying your two-year-old, playing with your other two-year-old with a little truck. It's going to be the same as it was 50 years ago. And all this technological innovation is not really going to save you that much time and effort with your kids.

6:48And so just the attraction of having kids and having a family has gone down in comparative terms all around the world. And there's very little that can be done about that. I mean, the one country that is a peer country of America where this hasn't happened is Israel. The reason is because Israel has this super intense culture of we have to have lots of kids. Why? Because they tried to kill us in the Holocaust. They tried to kill us in the pogroms. we're not going to diminish ourselves just by being, because we want to be lazy and not have a lot of kids. So they have an unusually intense culture that fights back against this trend.

7:30America doesn't, and I don't think we're about to develop one. I do think it's a problem. I'm pro-natalist in that sense. I do think we should make it easier to have children. It's going to present problems for society if, you know, our whole welfare state is a pyramid scheme that only works insofar as the next generation has enough workers in order to provide tax revenue to take care of grandma. And now that pyramid scheme is inverting. It's going to cause, you know, social security is not going to be funded in very short order. and the problem is only going to get worse because it's like an exponential problem in reverse.

8:12And so, yeah, I don't know what to do about it because the problem is so deep and fundamental and it's just a side effect of economic growth, which is itself a good thing. But yeah, I think we need to be thinking about it more. It's interesting with the Israel comparison as well because there's also a social aspect because when you have a culture that kind of embraces kids, people can continue to have their social life because you can mix with other people with kids. I think probably both of us, most of our friends don't have kids. And so to do that would be the anomaly. And then you're kind of excluded from all the social interactions potentially.

8:46And I think that's really tough. You know, you have to be a bit of a unusual 20s or 30s person to suddenly pop out a bunch of kids in the kind of middle-class groups that we probably hang out in. That's exactly right. And so it makes it that much harder. Whereas when everyone is doing it, you know, there's economies of scale is another way of putting it to having kids where if everyone you know is doing it, well, you can all send them to play with each other together. You can bring your kids to dinner knowing that you're not going to be imposing on anyone because there's already kids running around everywhere.

9:18Adding a few extra kids doesn't change the vibe as much as adding the first two kids. Exactly. Yeah. So maybe there just has to be some kind of social change, but how does that, has that ever been successful in history, trying to change social norms from the top down? Probably not. You know, I think, yeah, I've heard of an example. I think it was either in Mongolia or in Georgia, the country Georgia, where it was like something like the highest religious official in the land, like almost the pope equivalent or like the state bishop, would personally give like a medal and meet any woman that had like four kids or more.

9:58And so it became this, they were basically trying to use social status as a way of incentivizing people to have more kids. And according to some, it had some measurable effect, which is interesting and says it's more about status than about money. I don't see how any of that really works in American culture, but I am, in general, very for people strongly encouraging their friends to have more kids and framing it as a cool thing instead of as, you know, the end of your life, like you're never going to have fun again. Yeah. I think kids are awesome. I plan to have three at least. We'll see what, you know, it's not entirely up to me as a man.

10:45I can't split like an amoeba. Three plus. Okay. I'm excited to have more Coleman Hughes's in the world. So there's another question, which is on a kind of different, I guess, issue of our time. It says, given the mental health crisis, should psychedelics be treated with the same approval speed as Operation Warp Speed with accelerated FDA approval? Yeah, so my understanding was that MDMA in particular actually was on track to have some kind of fast track FDA approval and then suffered a setback recently. My view, I would be a little more cautious. I mean, I'm a big booster of MDMA. I've used it myself.

11:31I think it's helped my mental health. I think it gets misused as a rave drug. People take MDMA, they go to the music festival and just have the most indescribably incredible time of their life, but then they don't actually take much from that other than a really bad hangover. And to me, I've never used MDMA in that way. though I'm sure it would be awesome. Whereas I think way more useful is it allows you to, whatever it is you have in your life, whatever baggage or history or trauma or blockage that prevents you from a certain openness to new experiences, those things are incredibly difficult to talk about.

12:21The proverbial example is the guy who goes to war, loses his best friend in war, and then can never talk about the war, right? Like, why does granddad never talk about the war? There are reasons, right? MDMA is a kind of drug where you can take a dose of MDMA, talk about things you've never talked about before in a very healthy and healing way, and reframe them so that they feel differently to you in the future. And that's a very powerful, I mean, it's extremely powerful. I mean, it's what people do therapies for years in order to get to and often don't get to because just the routine of therapy for some people can't really lead to breakthroughs.

13:07And so I'm a big fan of MDMA for that reason. I hope it gets approved and used safely. when it comes to the other psychedelics, LSD and mushrooms, I think the experience there is a lot more double-edged. There are people that have a similar experience to what I just described on MDMA. But on the other hand, there are people for whom LSD or mushrooms opens the door to psychosis that would not have been opened if they hadn't taken those drugs. And and everything that comes along with that, like psychosis potentially even leading to suicide, right? I think that's, you know, I think it's a rare case, obviously, but I think it's just dishonest to say that it doesn't happen.

13:55So I would be wary of sort of fast-tracking that as if it's a slam dunk as opposed to going through all of the necessary checks and processes. But you're not someone who believes we should legalize all drugs, for example? I would be wary to do that. I mean, I would, let me put it this way. I'm highly open to persuasion on that. So, but that doesn't mean I want America to be the guinea pig. In other words, I would love for another country to try it. And then we could look at the consequences for 10 years and make an informed decision here. I'm not really sure that I want to legalize all drugs and be the guinea pig for that change.

14:40Okay, I'm hitting all the big hitters first. So the next one is about, do you view AI as something that will replace or exist alongside the homo sapien in the long run? I think it will exist alongside homo sapiens. I know many people are afraid that AI will take away all human jobs, right? I honestly think that that is just a misunderstanding of economics and, in a way, human desire, right? Because one of the insights of economics is that demand is limitless. What does that mean? It means there's actually no bottom to what people want. The amount and type of goods and services that people want, there's no such thing as satiation.

15:32You might be, you get full after one meal, but the truth is, in general, human desire is limitless. It's a bottomless pit. So even if artificial general intelligence replaces many jobs that currently exist, which is going to happen,

15:54the space of things that humans want is going to shift and change such that there is still going to be something for human beings to provide, right? That AI can't. Just by virtue not of being better than AI, but of being different. Humans are always going to have some kind of comparative advantage relative to AI, even if AI becomes smarter than us. Because smarts is not the only thing that the market demands. And the market demand is limitless, ever-changing, ever-morphing, ever-expanding. it expands to fit the size almost of what can be provided. So people will figure out how to make themselves useful to others, even if AI becomes smarter than us.

16:42So I'm not really worried about that. It's always worth remembering that 99 % of our ancestors were farmers, and almost all of those jobs have been taken by machines, and yet so many kinds of jobs that our ancestors literally could not have imagined. came into being as a result, again, because demand is not something fixed in the present. It's something that literally will evolve as the world evolves. Is that all to say it's not one of those issues that you find yourself waking up in a cold sweat about? Or you're now a professor at a college and then you must be hearing from kids who are saying, what's the point?

17:23What's the job market for me? You know, all of that anxiety. Do you find that easy to kind of step away from and say, it's overblown? So I would say the doomsday scenario of AI replaces humanity and we all have nothing to do all day. That's what I'm rejecting. I don't spend any time worried about that. However, if I were an 18 year old right now, I would have anxiety about what I should do. Why? Not because we're going to a doomsday scenario where human beings will be replaced, but because the world is changing so fast that I would be afraid of making a wrong bet right now. In other words, when I was a teenager, everyone was saying, coding, coding, coding, coding.

18:11You know, if you can code, you're going to be in the future. And we've got to get women coding, girls who code, all the... Well, I mean, that was all in retrospect. If you could take a time machine 10 years ago, you would probably say not to do that. Because it turns out what AI is sort of best at is just that rote coding. Now, that's not to say coders are all currently out of a job. The ones that are doing the best right now are the ones that are learning how to use AI to do the grunt work and then spend their mindshare on higher level coding, managing tasks in a way, creative stuff. So I would have anxiety just because the pace of change is both fast right now and also somewhat unpredictable.

18:59Well, staying on a similar theme, we had a couple of questions around social media. Australia is obviously trying to ban social media for children under 16, I believe. It says, you know, there's endless discussions about people being unhealthy, people being disconnected, and whether we should limit children's use of it and the dangers of trolls. How do you kind of conceive of those types of policy measures? And is the use of social media something you think people should worry about? Yeah, I do think it is something people should worry about, especially when it comes to children. Social media is designed to be as addictive as it possibly can be.

19:38I think we all know what it's like to have Twitter fingers or TikTok fingers or Instagram fingers as adults. I mean, these products, they've just been working on them like they're the cure to cancer. And there's billions of dollars and tons of IQ behind getting us to spend more time on this stuff. Those are just the incentives. I'm not saying they're evil. That's literally how it's going to be. Just like candy has gotten better and food has gotten better, social media has gotten better. Children are not equipped. I mean, adults are barely equipped to handle this level of addiction in our pockets all the time.

20:18Children are literally neurologically not as equipped as we are to resist the temptation of this stuff. So I think to me, it's obvious that you should restrict your kids' usage of social media. That doesn't mean they can't use it at all. That's a judgment call. But they should be time restricted. They should not be able to scroll all day. That seems obvious to me. Because what happens there is, especially for girls, they're just, obviously they're going to be driven towards content that is sexualizing. And then they're going to be comparing themselves to what they're seeing Kim Kardashian do. And, okay, some of that's unavoidable in life, no doubt.

21:05But that doesn't mean that just because you can't avoid your kid having a cup of coffee that they should be, therefore, given free access to cocaine 24-7, right? Yeah. So I think more than a law restricting things, that stuff tends to be heavy-handed. I'm not saying there's no place for it. There has to be a culture of no phones in the classroom. Why does any kid need a phone in the classroom? We all survived without it. And in fact, we all survived without cell phones at all. No kid I know got kidnapped. No kid I know, God forbid, sometimes you have to wait 30 minutes for your parents to show up.

21:46But I don't see why there shouldn't be a widespread norm that kids can have like old style flip phones until a certain age. And then they'll be in the same boat as us trying to resist wasting all their time scrolling. Well, there's always this ridiculous reason given that it's a learning aid. But the thing is, you have to have all the steps of doing your own research for it to even be an aid. and like that shouldn't, if it's just look it up and Google it, then what are they even doing in that classroom? It doesn't make any sense to me. Oh yeah, no. For the classroom learning aid stuff, that doesn't make any sense to me.

22:18I mean, although, you know, if I had a 10-year-old kid that was super curious and wanted to ask chat GPT questions all day, I would encourage that. And so the question becomes, it becomes a keyhole solution question. How do we give kids access to the parts of the internet that will help their curiosity and restrict or limit their access to just absolute slop, which is most of the internet. Absolutely. Okay, pivoting then. Someone's asked here why you're an atheist, and they said, what's the strongest evidence in your mind that there is no God? The first thing I would say is that the question is framed backwards.

23:06the onus is on religious people to prove that there is a God, right? And I know, you know, every, any analogy is bound to offend here, but if you're the one proposing, like just as Richard Dawkins might say, forget God. Let's say I were trying to prove the existence of Zeus or Athena. Would you accept an argument that said, well, hold on, what's your evidence that there isn't an Athena or that there isn't a Persephone or a Zeus, right? That question wouldn't even make sense because it would be so obvious to you. The onus is on me claiming that there is such a creature, such creatures to prove that there is.

23:53So that's my starting point is I never was raised with religion to begin with. And so I start from the assumption that unless there's evidence that there is something out there, I'm basically, I have no opinion about it, right? Or I'm not going to, and agnosticism isn't really, there's a misunderstanding about agnosticism because I'm kind of agnostic about all gods. I'm agnostic about Zeus, Athena, and Zoroastrianism. I'm agnostic about all of it. But that doesn't mean I actually am 50-50 with respect to whether they're out there. I see no evidence. but I also won't sit here and pretend that I know how the universe was created.

24:41I know why human beings are conscious. I know why the miracle of the atoms arranged in this kind of a pattern yields an identity, but atoms arranged as my table yield no identity. Science has no good answer to that question currently. Religion has an answer to that question, a very confident one for which there is no evidence. So I think it's more intellectually honest to say that it's a question mark than to say that any of us have a confident answer. Does that mean sometimes when you see the famous atheists in the world, the Dawkins, that you find them a little bit too dogmatic in their certainty around atheism as well?

25:25Not in like the metaphysical sense. So what I agree 100 % with Dawkins and Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens and Dan Dennett in saying that the burden is completely on the religious to prove that there is a God. If it were any other issue, we would start from the assumption that there is nothing unless you can prove to me that there's something, right? What's the evidence for this? so I don't think they're too strident there I do sometimes think they are too dogmatic about the idea that religion is always and in every case bad for human societies yeah that I think is a lot less clear yeah and in fact a lot of the happiness evidence as we've talked about in the show points that it you know religious people are happier and yeah that shouldn't be discounted as nothing.

26:19That's right. You have to incorporate that evidence into your worldview somehow, right? And also, just because I don't believe that God exists, to me, it's just a totally separate question whether the idea of God or any particular religion would be a force for good. It might seem like one follows directly from the other, but it's actually not true. We might live in a reality where stories, whether or not they're true, can be useful to believe and to bind communities together. One listener asked, what's your current most liberal belief and your most conservative belief? That's a good question. I tend to be fairly liberal on gun control issues.

27:11And this came out a little bit in my podcast with Ben Shapiro. And even that's not quite the right way to describe it. It seems to me that the Second Amendment is not nearly as important or as sacred as the First Amendment or many of the other amendments, and that it might even have been a mistake in retrospect, just our inability to control guns better. I mean, I don't see all these other countries suffering for their lack of a Second Amendment. However, it's very easy to see how the UK is currently suffering from its lack of a First Amendment because the police are knocking on grandma's door for an anti-Muslim Facebook post and taking her to jail, which is insane.

28:04so that that's i don't that might be one of my more more left-wing instincts let's say even though i do agree with a lot of the points that pro-gun people make and a lot of some of the ignorance about guns they point out on the cultural left yeah but all to say if there was a kind of you know let's get rid of semi-automatic weapons for example any kind of limits you would broadly likely support? Likely. I mean, if they actually made sense from a gun perspective, like sometimes liberals just don't even make sense because they don't know guns. And so they restrict the wrong ones that aren't dangerous and fall for branding about guns that aren't dangerous and stuff like that.

28:44So assuming it actually made sense and it restricted the deadliest kind of guns, yeah. By instinct, I'm pro-gun reform. My most right-wing opinion Would it be economics? I mean, where are you? Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it's hard to say that that's a conservative position anymore, but I'm very much pro-free market. I think that, I mean, you know, I was just thinking today,