Conversations with Coleman

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 the familiar divide between “root causes” and “lock them up” misses the point. She explains why longer prison sentences often fail to change behavior, why the certainty and swiftness of punishment matters more than the severity, and how economists think about incentives and unintended consequences.

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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 the world a better place rather than focus solely on individual wealth. He argues the real question is whether the work you’ve chosen is ambitious enough in moral terms—whether your day-to-day life tackles the big problems facing humankind. He explains why “follow your passion” is often bad advice; why moral breakthroughs tend to come from small, disciplined groups rather than mass appeal; and why moral progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.

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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 marched alongside King, as well as Jonathan Eig, whose best-selling book, King: A Life, won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize.

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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 immigration challenges between America and Europe, the hypocrisy of open-border politics, and why fiction may be better suited than policy debates to expose the hard truths about border enforcement, assimilation, and today’s political orthodoxy.
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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 modified organisms (GMOs), and artificial intelligence (AI)—what’s actually coming, what people misunderstand, and why the hardest questions ahead of us aren’t likely technical, but moral.

https://jamiemetzl.com/human-genetic-engineering-and-the-catholic-church/
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