Conversations with Coleman

Did any single man change the course of the 20th century? Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, says the biographies can’t answer that, but the data can. He walks us through Winston Churchill’s dayslong fight to keep Britain in the war, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, John F. Kennedy’s brinkmanship in Cuba, and Joseph Stalin’s response...

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, an...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 b...

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 week...

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, emotion...

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...

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 dominan...

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 comple...

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. H...

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 j...

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 van...

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 for...

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 al...

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 manife...

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...

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 marria...

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 th...

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 mor...

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 joi...

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...

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 conn...