Conversations with Coleman

My guest today is Thomas Chatterton Williams. Thomas is a great writer whose books include "Losing My Cool" and "Self-Portrait in Black and White", both of which I highly recommend. Thomas and I talk about a host of subjects here, but we pay special attention to the legacy of the Black Lives Matter movement, and 2020 in particular. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Learn more ab...

My guest today is Keyu Jin. Keyu Jin is a Chinese economist currently teaching at the London School of Economics, and she just published a book called "The New China Playbook". Keyu gave a TED Talk about a month ago, the same week that I did, and that's how I became aware of her. ​​​​​​​So Keyu has an unorthodox stance on China, at least to a Western audience. It's now a bipartisan consensus that...

My guest today is Razib Khan. Razib is a population geneticist, writer, and entrepreneur. He is a prominent voice in the realm of genetic genealogy, where he illuminates the interplay of genes, history, and culture. His writing has been featured in the New York Times, India Today, the National Review, and his scholarly work is cited in many scientific journals. Razib also has a very interesting Su...

This episode is actually my appearance on the Goodfellows podcast, which is run by the Hoover Institution. They asked me about the reparations proposal that was recently put forward in California. They also asked me about the legacy of Black Lives Matter. We talk about the 1619 Project. We talk about color blindness and a post-racial society. Finally, they went on to ask me what advice I would giv...

My guest today is Jerry Coyne. Jerry is an evolutionary biologist and geneticist. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1978, after which he served as a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution for over two decades. His seminal work is on the speciation of fruit flies. Jerry is also the author of two books, including "Why Evolution Is True", which is also the...

My guest today is Dr. Jonathan Metzl. Jonathan is a psychiatrist and author and a professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University. He's written several books including "The Protest Psychosis", "Prozac on the Couch",  "Against Health" and the topic of today's conversation, "Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland", which received the Robert F. Kenned...

My guest today is Paul Bloom. Paul Bloom is a renowned psychologist, professor and author currently teaching at Yale University and University of Toronto. He's published many books including "Descartes' Baby", "How Pleasure Works", "Just Babies", "Against Empathy", "The Sweet Spot", and the topic of today's conversation, "Psych: The Story of the Human Mind". In this episode, we'll be discussing a...

My guest today is David Deutsch. David is a renowned physicist and philosopher, best known for his work on quantum computation and his contributions to the field of quantum mechanics. He's a fellow of the Royal Society and a visiting professor of physics at the University of Oxford. David has written two books called "The Fabric of Reality" and "The Beginning of Infinity" In this episode, we talk...

My guest today is Vincent Lloyd. Vincent is a professor at Villanova University where he directed the Black Studies Program, leads workshops on anti-racism and transformative justice, and has published books on anti-black racism, including "Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination". Now, Vincent is one of those rare guests with whom I have profound disagreements on the topic of race, but who...

My guest today is Robert Wright. Robert is an author and journalist whose work has spanned a variety of topics from evolutionary psychology and game theory to the nature of consciousness and the role of mindfulness meditation in society. He's the author of many best-selling books, including "The Moral Animal", ''Nonzero'', and ''Why Buddhism is True''.  In today's conversation, we explore the inte...

My guest today is Andrew Doyle. Andrew is a British comedian, writer, and political commentator. He's best known for creating and writing the satirical character Titania McGrath, a fictional social justice warrior who parodies extreme progressive activism.  Doyle is also a frequent contributor to The Spectator, Spiked, and many other publications, where he writes on topics related to free speech,...

My guests today are Sarah Hader and Meghan Daum, who co-host the podcast called "A Special Place in Hell". Sarah, Meghan, and I talk about the difficulty of dating in New York City when you have heterodox politics. I talk about how the death of my mother influenced my attitude toward science and alternative medicine. We talk about social contagion and gender dysphoria. We talk about Sarah Hader's...

On the 21st of March, I participated in an Intelligence Squared debate against Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and Congressman Jamaal Bowman. The motion of the debate was: "Has the Democratic Party gone too far left?" So the Political scientist Ruy Teixeira and I argued in the affirmative while Alicia and Jamal argued the negative. Now this debate was frustrating for me at times and I t...

My guest today needs no introduction, but I'll give him one anyway. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Neil is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Centre for Earth and Space in New York City. He's also hosted and co-hosted numerous science-related TV and radio programs, including Nova Science Now, and Cosmos: A SpaceTime Ody...

My guest today is Batya Ungar-Sargon. Batya is a deputy opinion news editor at Newsweek and a columnist at Compact magazine. Before that, she was the opinion editor of The Forward. In this episode, we talk about tribalism and individualism. We talk about how journalism and media became woke. We talk about the shift from journalism being a working-class profession to a profession for elites and the...

My guest today is Nita Farahany. Nita is a professor of Law and Philosophy at Duke Law School. She is the founding director of the Duke Science and Society. She is the faculty chair of the Duke MA in Bioethics and Science Policy and Principal Investigator at slap lab. In 2010, she was appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues where she served un...

My guest today is Africa Brooke. Africa is a London-based consultant, writer, and life coach. She is the host of the "Beyond the Self" podcast.  In this episode, we talk about her background growing up in Zimbabwe and her experience as an immigrant to the UK. We talk about her journey from alcoholism to sobriety. We talk about her essay, "Why I'm leaving the cult of wokeness?" We also talk about t...

My guest today is Marc Andreessen. Marc is an entrepreneur, venture capital investor, and software engineer. Marc co-founded Mosaic, which was the first widely used Internet browser, as well as Netscape. He also co-founded Opsware and Ning. He is on the board of Meta, and his most important achievement is that he's the first billionaire to ever appear on this podcast.  Marc and I talk about ventur...

Today's conversation is a roundtable with several guests instead of my usual one on one. My guests today are Kmele Foster (Co-Founder of Free Think and Host of The Fifth Column Podcast), Chloé Valdary (Founder of Theory of Enchantment and Host of The Heart Speaks Podcast), and David Bernstein (Author of the recent book "Woke Antisemitism"). We discuss Ron DeSantis' and Chris Rufo's war on wokeness...

My guest today is Kathleen Stock. Kathleen is a philosopher and a writer, and she was a philosophy professor at the University of Sussex for many years, until she was stampeded out of her job by a mob of angry students. As you'll hear in this episode, Kathleen's main offense was her views on trans issues, which are broadly aligned with people like JK Rowling and Helen Joyce. Due to these critiques...

The topic of today's episode is the Israel-Palestine conflict. I've avoided discussing Israel on this podcast for two reasons. First, because I didn't know enough to feel qualified to weigh in on it. Second, because it may literally be the most radioactive topic on planet Earth. A tiny mistake or misplace word can cause a level of backlash that I just don't want to deal with. However, two things h...

My guest today is Inaya Folarin Iman. Inaya is the founder of The Equiano Project, a British organization dedicated to promoting free speech, common humanity, and universalism. She recently organized a conference called "Towards the Common Good" hosted at Cambridge, where John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and yours truly, spoke along with a host of British thinkers who are f...

This is a recording of a live event that I did in London with Freddie Sayers. Freddie is the former editor-in-chief of YouGov, the founder of Politics Home, and the executive editor of UnHerd, which is a great publication you should all be reading. So Freddie ran this conversation, and we covered lots of ground. We talk about American race politics. We discuss the legacy of Black Lives Matter. We...

My guest today is Andrew Gold. Andrew Gold is an ex-BBC journalist and documentary filmmaker, who now has an excellent podcast called "On The Edge". Andrew focuses on weird and controversial people, for instance, psychopaths, former cult members, exorcists, and so forth. In this episode, we discuss Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's decision to leave the UK and the accusation of racism they leveled...

Welcome to the first Conversations with Coleman of 2023. We're starting things off right with a great guest, Meg Smaker. If you've heard of Meg, it's probably because of the controversy surrounding her new documentary, originally called "Jihad Rehab", but later changed to "The Unredacted". Now, before I describe the controversy to you, I want to first say that this is one of the best documentaries...