Conversations with Coleman

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 t...

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...

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 wor...

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 s...

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...

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...

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 mo...

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 conve...

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 interne...

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...

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 unde...

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...

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...

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...

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 m...

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 immigra...

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 mo...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 mo...

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 gua...

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,...