Conversations with Coleman

Mark Manson is the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and a former dating coach whose argument cuts against most of the self-help genre: Happiness is the wrong thing to chase. In conversation with Coleman Hughes, he explains why people should aim for purpose and meaning instead, and why he thinks affirmations and manifesting tend to most benefit those who already feel good about themselves. They get into Søren Kierkegaard, how pickup artistry gave way to the manosphere, and when to bring up politics on a first date. Manson also talks about the two-and-a-half years he spent helping Will Smith write his memoir.

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Saritha Komatireddy is the Republican challenger seeking to unseat Democratic incumbent Letitia James as New York Attorney General. She is the Brooklyn-born daughter of Indian immigrants, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, a former federal prosecutor, and the former chief of staff at the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Komatireddy’s campaign has gained unexpected momentum following her viral debate performance, where she pressed AG James hard on public safety, violent crime against women, rising homelessness, rampant and unprosecuted fraud, and selective enforcement of civil rights law.

Certain of their exchanges—including one where James visibly struggled to name a single past attorney general she admired—reached millions of views online. As New York and the country prepare for elections next week in which Democrats are expected to win big, Saritha makes her case for your vote.

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France is burning, and Konstantin Kisin thinks the violence roiling the country is just the tip of the iceberg. Kisin, co-host of the Triggernometry podcast and author of An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, argues the current unrest is the predictable outcome of decades of mass immigration, without any systemic process for integration. Leaders’ dogged embrace of multiculturalism—even as their own citizens increasingly questioned it—ultimately cost the nation its shared identity, the very thing that holds a society together. And when tensions spill over into neighboring countries, as they inevitably will, it may well prove the continent’s undoing.

Kisin also shares his thoughts on the chaos wrought by Europe’s welfare system, the folly of its climate policy, and the eventual outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

This episode featured audience questions from The Free Press Forum, a platform for subscribers to connect with other Free Pressers. Head to http://thefp.com/forum to join the conversation.

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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 to Adolf Hitler’s invasion. Then he explains why basketball coaches are the best laboratory we have for measuring what a leader really changes.

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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 series. Listen at longview.report/bookkeeper

For the Bart Ehrman lecture that Coleman mentioned in the show, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CU1EZv-pFo

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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.

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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.

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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 he thinks about persuasion.

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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 the stage for a rare sit-down discussion with renowned historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. The event is happening on October 1st in New York City. Limited tickets are on sale now at

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bari-weiss-and-simon-sebag-montefiore-live-tickets-1999718620224?aff=oddtdtcreator

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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.

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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 earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

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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.

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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 averages from how they judge individuals, and that this is exactly why the conversation is so dangerous to bring into the mainstream.

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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

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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

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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 Israel’s war in Gaza amounted to genocide.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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