Conversations with Coleman

Megan Phelps-Roper grew up as the public face of the Westboro Baptist Church, the hate group founded by her grandfather, known for picketing veterans’ funerals with signs condemning gay people and Jews. She left the church in 2012 after a series of Twitter conversations exposed cracks in its theology she could no longer ignore. Since then, she’s built a new career exploring faith, belief, and public discourse from multiple angles, including as host of The Free Press’s The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. Now, somewhat surprisingly, she’s launched a new podcast called Book Keeper, where she returns to Bible stories she grew up with and tries to figure out which parts of them still hold up, and which don’t. She joins Coleman Hughes to talk through the exact verse that unraveled her worldview, why she still reads Scripture to her kids despite not believing in God, and why she thinks a society that abandons fixed values is just as dangerous as one that enforces the wrong ones. Book Keeper is a Longview original…

Elliot Kaufman’s new book, In the War Room, is an inside account of how Israel actually fought the war that followed October 7, 2023. A Wall Street Journal editorial writer, Kaufman spent the last two years reporting on the conflict and drew on documents recovered from Hamas, along with behind-the-scenes access to Israel’s top political, military, and intelligence leaders, to reconstruct decisions most of the public never saw. Kaufman explains why Hamas sincerely believed it could destroy Israel, why Hezbollah never launched the full-scale invasion Israel feared most, and why the bitter, often personal rivalry between Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, and Benny Gantz shaped nearly every major decision of the war. He also walks through what he considers Israel’s biggest unforced error—the two-month aid stoppage that fueled a global famine narrative—and how the war ultimately reshaped Hezbollah, Iran’s nuclear program, and the future of the Abraham Accords. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit…

Delano Squires spent 15 years working in D.C. government, including a stint in the city’s office of gun violence prevention, where he noticed the same story on repeat: Young black men were both victims and perpetrators of some of the worst crimes in the city. In his new book, The Vanishing Black Family, he argues that family structure, not policing, incarceration, or education policy, is the most consequential and least discussed driver of racial inequality in America today. Squires makes the case that slavery deformed the black family but didn’t destroy it, and that the real collapse came later, driven by the expansion of the welfare state and the rise of second-wave feminism. He joins Coleman Hughes to talk through the data, the history, and why he thinks black institutions, from churches to civil rights organizations, have avoided the issue entirely. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roland Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard University, the youngest black academic ever to receive tenure there, and a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal for his research on racial inequality, education, and policing. His findings have often put him at odds with progressive orthodoxy, and he’s paid a real price for it over the years, including death threats and a shot-out window over a program that simply paid kids to do well in school. Fryer returns to the show to talk with Coleman Hughes about the Jason Arday scandal, which he sees as a symptom of the same institutional cowardice he’s trying to fix. That’s the thinking behind his and Bill Ackman’s new venture, the Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage, a $1 million prize designed to reward scholars willing to publish research academia is too afraid to touch. They also get into why elite universities avoid academic risk, what Fryer’s own research actually shows about race and intelligence, and how a stint doing stand-up comedy shaped the way…

Dara Horn is a novelist and essayist whose book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present examined how contemporary culture sentimentalizes Jewish suffering while ignoring the fullness of Jewish life. Her new book, provocatively titled The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, goes further, arguing that antisemitism isn’t an ordinary bigotry at all. It’s a lie, always the same lie in different disguises, that Jews are destroying whatever a given society values most. Recorded live onstage at the 92nd Street Y, New York City’s largest Jewish cultural center, she and Coleman Hughes cover why nobody, apparently including a sitting vice president, understands basic antisemitic terms like “blood libel,” and why she thinks curiosity, not debate, is the real antidote to losing a friend to conspiracy theories. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. For the first time in nearly a year, our Bari Weiss is returning to…

Daryl Davis is a blues musician who has spent over 40 years doing something few people would attempt: sitting down with members of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, one on one, to ask them why they hate him. He’s been threatened, physically attacked, and called a race traitor by people on both sides. He’s also convinced over 200 Klansmen to leave their hate groups entirely—not by arguing them out of their beliefs, but by befriending them long enough for their own convictions to fall apart. He joins Coleman Hughes to talk about how he stays calm in the face of open racism, what white supremacists actually fear, why he refuses to give up on anyone, and what he thinks parents should and shouldn’t teach their kids about race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank Siller’s youngest brother, Stephen, was orphaned at 10, grew up to become a New York City firefighter, and was driving home from a night shift on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he heard the World Trade Center had been hit. He turned his truck around, grabbed his gear, and ran through the closed Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and up the stairs of the South Tower. He never came out. Two weeks later, Siller and his siblings started a charity in Stephen’s name. Twenty-five years on, that foundation, Tunnel to Towers, has paid off mortgages for fallen first responders and Gold Star families, built mortgage-free smart homes for catastrophically wounded veterans and first responders, and worked to end veteran homelessness across the country. Siller writes about Stephen—on that morning and the 25 years since—in his new memoir, Let Us Do Good. He joins Coleman Hughes to talk about what it actually took to build one of the largest charities of its kind in America out of a single family’s grief. The Free Press…

Tim Naftali is a presidential historian who spent four years running the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. He’s listened to thousands of hours of secret Oval Office recordings from Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, and John F. Kennedy. Naftali joins Coleman to break down which president was actually the sharpest, walking through the different kinds of intelligence—tactical, strategic, emotional—that separated men like LBJ and Nixon from each other. They get into why presidents started taping themselves in the first place, and what those recordings actually reveal. Naftali also takes on the recent online rehabilitation of Nixon, the idea that he was a victim of the same deep state that took down Kennedy, and explains why that story falls apart once you look at what he was actually asking the CIA and FBI to do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nathan Cofnas is the academic researcher who broke the story alleging Jason Arday had fabricated his biography and plagiarized his PhD thesis, a scandal that led to Arday’s resignation from Cambridge University and, weeks later, his death. But Cofnas has his own history of controversy. He’s a self-described race realist who says that genetic differences between population groups explain average IQ gaps. His argument has gotten him attacks from both the right and left, the termination of his research post at Cambridge’s Emmanuel College, and a since-lifted suspension from Ghent University. He joins Coleman Hughes to walk through the Arday scandal in detail, then defends his research directly. They get into whether ideas about race and IQ should be discussed openly among elites, whether cultural explanations for racial disparities hold up, and whether mainstreaming these claims about IQ would tear society apart rather than heal it. Hughes argues that most people are incapable of separating a claim about group…

Robert Wright has spent decades writing about human nature, evolution, and the forces that shape history. In his latest book, The God Test, he argues AI is forcing a test humanity can’t afford to fail: whether we can finally get past the tribalism that’s defined most of our history. He joins Coleman Hughes to walk through a real scenario where competition between the U.S. and China over AI dominance escalates into an arms race, one that could end in nuclear war if either side believes falling behind means losing everything. The actual danger, in his telling, comes from human beings racing each other into a corner, not the technology itself. On Tuesday, September 8th, Coleman will be live at the 92Y in conversation with Dara Horn, author of the new book The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Tickets are going fast, and you can find them here:https://www.92ny.org/event/dara-horn-with-coleman-hughes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seth Dillon is the CEO of The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire site that’s been fact-checked and banned more times than most outlets twice its size. He joins Coleman Hughes to argue that comedy is one of the best weapons against ideas unable to survive scrutiny. He also warns that a new problem has arisen. While the culture has moved on from the joyless era of a few years ago, there is now a complete disregard for the truth, with social media platforms rewarding outlandish claims over boring, well-sourced versions of events. They get into how The Bee forced Snopes to change its fact-checking rules, why both President Donald Trump and Joe Biden pose unusual challenges for satire, and the one joke Dillon retracted that he now regrets. On Tuesday, August 18th, Coleman will be answering your questions in the Free Press Forum. Join the conversation here! https://www.thefp.com/forum/america-at-250/post/308869859 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley in Congress, and he’s spent the last few years building a case that the Democratic Party’s future runs through places like Johnstown and Erie–in his home state of Pennsylvania–not just tech wealth. He calls it progressive capitalism, and he thinks it’s the platform that beats both Donald Trump’s economic nationalism and the socialism of the party’s left flank. He joins Coleman Hughes to make his case, ahead of an expected decision on a 2028 presidential run. They start with why Khanna broke from his own party to defend the Hunter Biden laptop story, and whether he’d actually seek congressional approval for military action as president or repeat the pattern set by Democratic presidents before him. From there they get into his pitch for why Democrats should pick him over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and his case for targeted tariffs on steel and trucks instead of Trump’s blanket approach. They end on his shift from calling himself a pro-Israel progressive to arguing that…

Is there a meaningful difference between a commonsense Democrat and a center-right Republican? Matthew Yglesias thinks so. But he also thinks the Democrats have spent the last decade making it harder and harder to tell. He cofounded Vox and writes the essential Slow Boring Substack. He has been one of the most consistent voices calling for a Democratic politics that is practical and winnable. He joins Coleman Hughes to make that case. They start with the big picture: why people have started asking politics to give their lives meaning, what that has done to our culture, and whether the loss of monoculture has made us lonelier and more tribal. From there they get into the Democratic Socialists of America’s rise, why housing is the most important issue nobody campaigns on, and why Yglesias thinks public schools should go back to teaching straightforward patriotism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jillian Michaels is a fitness expert who has spent three decades helping people get healthy in a system that is actively working against them. She joins Coleman to make the case that America’s obesity crisis is not a failure of willpower but the predictable result of a food industry designed to addict and a pharmaceutical industry designed to profit. They get into Ozempic and why taking it for vanity reasons is a catastrophically bad idea, what MAHA has actually accomplished and where it has fallen short, the vaccine debate, and why the healthy-at-any-size movement is one of the more dangerous lies in recent memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review and author of the new book Blood & Progress, which makes the case that left-wing political violence has a long and largely forgotten history in America. He joins Coleman Hughes to argue that the commonly held belief that political violence is largely a right-wing phenomenon is not just inaccurate but actively dangerous. He believes America has forgotten a century’s worth of anarchist bombings, Marxist guerrilla movements, and ideologically motivated assassinations. And with the trials of Luigi Mangione and the alleged Charlie Kirk killer now underway, the pattern is repeating in real time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Hanania is a political scientist, writer, and author of the new book Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, which makes the sometimes uncomfortable case that antiestablishment politics, for all their appeal, tend to make countries worse. He joins Coleman to talk about who elites actually are and why they’re usually right, even when they’re sometimes spectacularly wrong. They also get into what explains the rise of antiestablishment politics across the West, and why communications technology may be more to blame than any actual failure of institutions. Hanania’s own journey from the alt-right informs all of it, and he closes with some unusually honest advice for young men who find themselves going down that road. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Cornel West is one of the most distinct voices in American public life. He’s a philosopher, theologian, and moral critic who has spent decades asking the toughest questions about America—what this country is and what it ought to be. He joins Coleman on the 250th anniversary of the founding to get into the state of America in 2026. They get into the founding contradictions, the ethics of manifest destiny, what American capitalism gets right and what it leaves out, the decline of religion and what has replaced it, and what he learned running for president. It ends, as all great philosophical conversations should, with his view of the Drake-versus-Kendrick beef. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Douglas Murray is back as a columnist at The Free Press, and Coleman wastes no time putting him to work. They get into the Iran deal and why Murray thinks it won’t hold. They also dig into the nature of a regime that has been openly stating its intentions for decades, and a West that keeps refusing to believe them. And they cover what the resignation of British prime minister Keir Starmer reveals about a country that voted for change and got very little of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caitlin Flanagan joins the show today, now an official columnist at The Free Press. Flanagan, one of the sharpest essayists working today, spent 35 years in Los Angeles before deciding she’d had enough, and tells Coleman why. The answer says a lot about what progressive governance has done to one of America’s great cities. From there they get into territory Flanagan knows well: the state of marriage, the dating crisis, and the case for having children in a culture that has talked itself out of wanting them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Beinart is a writer and author who has contributed to The New Republic, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He grew up a committed Zionist and has spent the last decade publicly refuting that position, arriving at the view that Israel cannot be reconciled with the principle of equality under the law. His most recent book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, caused shock waves in the Jewish world. In this conversation, Coleman and Peter debate the Palestinian right of return and whether it’s comparable to Israel’s Law of Return for diaspora Jews. They argue over whether a one-state solution would produce equality or civil war, and whether the idea of comparing Israel to South Africa holds up under scrutiny. They get into the role of jihadist ideology in the conflict, whether Iran constitutes an existential threat to Israel, and what it would actually mean for Israel to be a democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John McWhorter is back. This time, Coleman and John analyze where America stands on race in 2026, whether the woke moment is genuinely behind us, and what may have replaced it. They also get into why black men are increasingly voting Republican, how mass immigration has subtly shifted the conversation on race, and what the Supreme Court's recent Voting Rights Act decision actually means. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aman Verjee has had one of the more unusual careers in finance. He started on Wall Street at Lehman Brothers, joined PayPal in its earliest days and worked alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and eventually became a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Along the way he developed an obsession with the history of finance, which led to his upcoming book, A Brief History of Financial Bubbles. He joined Coleman to talk about what the biggest bubbles of the last 500 years have in common, what they reveal about the societies that produced them, and what actually caused the 2008 crisis. Then they look at the questions that everyone is asking: Is AI a bubble, and how will it end? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2016, Canada legalized assisted dying for the terminally ill. Since then, the law—medical assistance in dying, or MAID—has expanded dramatically—to people with chronic but non-terminal conditions, with disabilities, and potentially those with mental illness as the sole underlying condition. Rupa Subramanya, The Free Press’s Canada correspondent, has spent years reporting on this slippery slope, interviewing patients, doctors, and families along the way. She discusses with Coleman where the line should be, what some of the strangest assisted dying cases reveal about the system, and what Canada’s experience should tell the rest of the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Shellenberger is the author of San Fransickco and Apocalypse Never. He’s a former progressive activist, and one of the most prominent advocates for nuclear energy in the country. In this episode, he and Coleman dig into the Epstein story and why the evidence falls far short of the conspiracy theory most people believe; the savior complex he sees underlying progressive politics and its connection to recent left- wing violence; and what California and other blue states are finally starting to get right about homelessness after years of getting it catastrophically wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oren Kessler explains the origins of Palestinian nationalism, the myth that Jews started the conflict in Israel, and why peace in the region has been elusive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do Americans support Israel? The standard answers—D.C. lobbying, shared democratic values, strategic benefits—all miss something. Walter Russell Mead, one of America's foremost foreign policy scholars, traces the real answer back to 17th-century Calvinist theology, and argues that Christian Zionists were advocating for a Jewish homeland long before most Jews were. Mead joins the show to make the case that the famous Israel Lobby thesis is actually historically incoherent. To explain where antisemitism comes from and why it keeps coming back, he offers a nuanced defense of American global engagement against the America First movement’s more isolationist impulses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most researchers who study alcohol focus on what it does to your body. Edward Slingerland is more interested in what it does to your friendships. In his book Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, the University of British Columbia professor argues that alcohol has functioned for thousands of years as humanity's most important social lubricant, and that the modern war on drinking is costing us something we can't easily replace. He and Coleman dig into the anthropological origins of alcohol, why drinking has always been communal, and why giving it up isn't as simple as your doctor thinks. Slingerland argues the loneliness epidemic and the sobriety trend may not be a coincidence. They also touch on Slingerland's background in early Chinese philosophy, and the surprisingly direct path from ancient Daoist texts to a book about getting drunk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ashley Rindsberg has spent years investigating how ideological bias corrupts institutions that present themselves as neutral arbiters of truth. His book The Gray Lady Winked exposed how The New York Times got major stories wrong across decades of reporting. Now he turns his attention to Wikipedia, the internet’s default encyclopedia and one of the most influential sources of information in the world. Rindsberg finds that while Wikipedia remains a reliable resource for most topics, its most politically charged articles have been quietly captured by a small group of anonymous editors working to push a coherent ideological agenda. He and Coleman dig into how these editors operate, how a handful of people can dominate entire topic areas, and why almost nobody can stop them. They also get into the specific case of Wikipedia’s Israel-Palestine coverage, where a group of around 40 dedicated editors have made over a million edits across thousands of articles. And they discuss why all of this matters far beyond…

Click this link, make an account, and vote for Conversations with Coleman! ⁠https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2026/podcasts/individual-episode/interview-or-talk-show⁠ Hi guys, Coleman here, sharing some exciting news: Conversations with Coleman has been nominated for a Webby Award. This is the internet’s highest honor, and we need your help to get over the finish line! I am currently in second place in the “Best Interview or Talk Show” category, and voting ends Thursday, April16, at midnight ET. We’re up against some of the greats of mainstream media—I can’t believe I’m up against Oprah!—but we believe this show, this community, and our shared passion for independent, thoughtful, heterodox journalism can tip the scales in our favor. If you have 30 seconds to spare, we’d be honored if you’d show your support and vote for our show. We all know the importance of having these rigorous, challenging conversations out in the open. Thank you all so much for your support! Learn more about your ad choices.…

Shadi Hamid once marched against the Iraq War, read Noam Chomsky, and believed America was the root of the world's problems. He has since changed his mind—though not entirely. Now a Washington Post columnist and senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Muslim Christian Understanding, Hamid argues in his latest book, The Case for American Power, that American dominance, exercised morally, remains the world's best bet for stability and peace. He joins the show to make that case while refusing to pull his punches where America has fallen short. He and Coleman debate whether the Iraq War was worth it in the long run, why Joe Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal was a mistake, how the U.S. has failed to use its leverage over Israel, his fundamental mistrust of the Trump administration, and why a world where China balances American power is not the progressive fantasy some on the left imagine it to be. He and Coleman also get into the America First movement and the limits of the United Nations. Learn more…

Linda Chavez has called herself the “Forrest Gump of Washington politics,” and it’'s hard to argue. She bumped into a Watergate burglar coming out of a bathroom in 1972, became the highest-ranking woman in the Reagan White House, nearly became Secretary of Labor under George W. Bush, and lost that nomination after it emerged she had sheltered an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant in her home. Today, she joins the show to respond to a recent episode with Lionel Shriver, pushing back on some of the assumptions driving the current immigration debate. She makes the case for robust legal immigration and serious border enforcement — and explains why the Trump administration is managing to get both wrong. She also discusses why assimilation is working better than the culture war suggests, why affirmative action hurts the students it claims to help, and why birthright citizenship is more legally settled than its critics want to admit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Tyler Cowen joins the show. A true polymath, he answers everything on Coleman Hughes’s mind about our world and its future. In this rapid-fire exchange, Tyler weighs in on whether AI is a bubble, the minimum wage, Mexican wokeness, and the Donald Trump administration’s approach to foreign aid. He also touches on travel, new religions, the UN, and even his three favorite films. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Glenn Greenwald joins the show to debate a hotly contested topic: Does Israel influence U.S. policy? Coleman and Glenn examine competing claims about the power of the Israel lobby and whether it played a role in the path to war with Iran. They discuss Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the case for or against regime change, and how these questions shape American foreign policy in the Middle East. The conversation also turns to free speech on college campuses after October 7 and the boundaries between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Finally, Coleman presses Glenn on his alliance with Tucker Carlson and the responsibilities of independent media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Sam Harris joins Coleman Hughes for a sweeping conversation about the biggest risks facing humanity. They unpack the ethical and strategic dilemmas of a potential Iran conflict, the dangers of jihadist ideology paired with nuclear capability, and the persistent confusion around anti-Zionism and antisemitism. We also talk about the Epstein files, the conspiracies ruling the internet, Gavin Newsom, and the declining birth rate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Justin Marozzi is a historian and author of Captives and Companions, a sweeping history of slavery in the Islamic world. Marozzi and Coleman discuss the origins and scale of the Islamic slave trade, the role of religion and law in shaping it, and why this subject has long been a historical blind spot in the West. They also discuss the trans-Saharan slave trade, the Barbary corsairs, and why forms of slavery still exist in places like Mauritania and Mali. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Hankins is a Renaissance historian, longtime Harvard professor, and co-author of The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition. In this conversation with Coleman Hughes, he explains why he recently left Harvard, after nearly four decades, and why he believes the study of Western civilization has quietly disappeared from American education. Hankins argues that if students want to understand ideas like free speech, equality, and the rule of law, they need to know the long history story behind them—from ancient Greece and Rome through Christianity and the Enlightenment to the modern world. Along the way, he reflects on the controversy surrounding the Western canon, the debate over “dead white men,” and the question of whether a shared civilizational story is still possible in a pluralistic society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does conservatism mean in an age of populism, executive power, and institutional distrust? Yuval Levin is a political theorist, the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again. Today he argues that the deepest divide in American politics is no longer left versus right, but populism versus institutions. Levin traces the shift within the conservative movement from an emphasis on morality and constitutional limits to a more confrontational style of politics, and he explains why durable reform requires coalition building, legislation, and respect for procedure. He reflects on his time in the Bush administration, the limits of presidential governance, the fight over universities, the coming politics of AI, and why the Constitution was designed to hold a divided nation together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is our criminal justice system broken, and can it be fixed? Jennifer Doleac is an economist, the executive vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, and the host of the Probable Causation podcast. Today she discusses her new book, The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice. Doleac studies what actually deters crime and what merely feels tough, and she argues that the familiar divide between “root causes” and “lock them up” misses the point. She explains why longer prison sentences often fail to change behavior, why the certainty and swiftness of punishment matters more than the severity, and how economists think about incentives and unintended consequences. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and best-selling author of Utopia for Realists and Humankind: A Hopeful History. In 2019, he went viral for his takedown of billionaires at the World Economic Forum and for a heated exchange with Tucker Carlson. Today, he joins the show to discuss his latest book, Moral Ambition, which he defines as the desire to use your available talents and resources to make the world a better place rather than focus solely on individual wealth. He argues the real question is whether the work you’ve chosen is ambitious enough in moral terms—whether your day-to-day life tackles the big problems facing humankind. He explains why “follow your passion” is often bad advice; why moral breakthroughs tend to come from small, disciplined groups rather than mass appeal; and why moral progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Go to https://surfshark.com/colemandeal or use code COLEMANDEAL at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit…

Come join a live taping of this podcast with special guests Ambassador Andrew Young and acclaimed Martin Luther King Jr. biographer Jonathan Eig to discuss: ‘Nonviolence in a Violent Age’. WHEN: March 9 WHERE: Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—the church led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. WHO: Coleman will be joined by Andrew Young, a civil rights pioneer and former United Nations ambassador who marched alongside King, as well as Jonathan Eig, whose best-selling book, King: A Life, won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. --- Get your tickets here. More information here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Acclaimed novelist and cultural critic Lionel Shriver joins the show to discuss her provocative new book A Better Life. We talk about why immigration has become one of the most morally charged topics in public life; how good intentions collide with human nature; and why cultural change is treated as a legitimate concern for some groups but as taboo for others. We also explore the differing immigration challenges between America and Europe, the hypocrisy of open-border politics, and why fiction may be better suited than policy debates to expose the hard truths about border enforcement, assimilation, and today’s political orthodoxy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jamie Metzl is a former national security official, biotech futurist, and one of the earliest public voices to argue that Covid likely came from a lab accident. Today he talks about why that possibility became taboo; what gain-of-function research gets wrong; and how fear and politics distort scientific judgment. From there, we move into the future of gene editing, embryo selection, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and artificial intelligence (AI)—what’s actually coming, what people misunderstand, and why the hardest questions ahead of us aren’t likely technical, but moral. https://jamiemetzl.com/human-genetic-engineering-and-the-catholic-church/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest today is Rabbi David Wolpe. He’s spent decades debating atheists, leading one of the country’s largest synagogues, and thinking seriously about what holds a moral society together once traditional faith loosens its grip. Wolpe discusses how secular movements quietly take on the structure—and zeal—of religion. We get into Judaism as a form of peoplehood, the strange moral logic of modern campus activism, antisemitism as a conspiracy engine, and why slogans and ideology can harden into dogma. Wolpe also reflects on his time teaching at Harvard, the limits of academic tolerance, and what he learned about institutions under pressure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we hear from Arctic geopolitics expert Heather A. Conley, before President Trump made a speech at The World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday. Heather speaks about a place most of us barely think about—until it becomes the center of a global power struggle. Greenland has gone from frozen afterthought to geopolitical prize, and its story reveals a lot about American expansionism, NATO politics, and the race now unfolding in the Arctic. We trace Greenland’s strange political history with Denmark and the U.S., unpack why its location has always mattered militarily, and explore what happens as China and Russia push north. We also confront the uncomfortable truth behind Trump’s “buy Greenland” moment—and why the people who actually live there want neither Denmark nor America to own them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a world where AI can recreate our voices, half the internet thinks the moon landing was staged, and every group chat has a cousin who’s “just asking questions,” the perceived line between fact and fantasy has never been blurrier. On February 9 at the Comedy Cellar in NYC, Coleman Hughes will sit down with Michael Shermer—historian of science and author of Truth: What It Is, How to Find It & Why It Still Matters—for a live conversation. Together they’ll dig into why smart people believe strange things—from conspiracy theories and moral panics to post-truth politics—and how skepticism, evidence, and reason can still help us figure out what’s actually real. Is truth the only antidote to our world of cynicism and confusion? After the conversation, we’ll head to a nearby bar for an informal meetup with Michael, Coleman, and fellow Free Pressers for drinks, discussion, and the rare pleasure of arguing in good faith. (Location will be shared with ticket holders only.) This New York City event is intentionally…

This week we're joined by historian Niall Ferguson to help me make sense of Iran’s unprecedented wave of protests. We talk about why this moment feels different to previous uprisings, the regime’s growing crisis of legitimacy, the limits of sanctions, and how the long shadow of 1953 still shapes everything in Iran. We also look at what Trump’s “maximum pressure” could mean, and the risks posed by any form of U.S. intervention. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thor Halvorssen is a Venezuelan-born human rights campaigner and the founder of the Human Rights Foundation. His life as an activist began after his mother was shot and wounded by pro-regime forces for trying to expose election fraud under Hugo Chávez, an event that turned his work from theory into something painfully concrete. In this episode we talk about how Venezuela’s dictatorship operated more like a cartel than a state, why the regime survived despite losing elections, and how oil, narcotics, and foreign alliances sustained one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the hemisphere. We also discuss why Venezuela is not another Iraq, how major Western media outlets repeatedly misread the regime, and what a realistic political transition might look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gelet Martínez Fragela is a Cuban activist and journalist and a close watcher of Venezuela who’s tracked how authoritarianism hollowed out a once prosperous country. Gelet talks about the warning signs, the lies that sustained the regime, and why President Maduro’s trial in the United States matters far beyond Venezuelan borders. Gelet also answers the question: Why were Cubans responsible for guarding President Maduro? And how will the country function in the wake of the U.S.’s shock intervention? For Gelet’s personal story, listen to our episode from October: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inside-cubas-police-state-from-ration-cards-to-black/id1716338488?i=1000733663296 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Anna Machin is a British evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Oxford who studies the neuroscience and psychology of love. Anna and I talk through what science actually says about attraction, attachment, and long-term relationships, and why so much modern dating advice gets human nature wrong. We get into dating apps and how they shape behavior, whether love at first sight is real, what attachment styles do and don’t explain, and what science says about polyamory. We also discuss common myths about pheromones, love languages, and whether having kids really makes people happier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My producer Poppy Damon and I are back for another Ask Me Anything. In this bonus episode, I answer your questions on President Donald Trump and the attention economy, declining birth rates, psychedelics and mental health, AI and the future of work, social media and kids, religion, meritocracy, and more. As 2025 wraps up, it felt like a good moment to step back, take stock, and talk through the questions many of you have been thinking about. Thanks for listening this year—and here’s to more Conversations like this one in the year ahead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices