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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Wikipedia itself, as the encyclopedia’s biases are absorbed by Google, fed into AI systems, and baked into the information infrastructure and AI systems that will increasingly decide what counts as true.

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

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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