Talk Cocktail

The Internet Is Killing Democracy Facebook Is the Shiny Object, but the Danger Is Much Larger

Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg understood how to maximize social media to achieve the highest in democratic ends. The Russians and Cambridge Analytica used that same social media to undermine democracy, to spread lies, and to manipulate facts.

Recently we’ve seen Mark Zuckerberg and members of Congress musing about the business model of Facebook and the holy grail of hyper-directed advertising. All of this, good and bad, misses the larger point.

In a world that is totally interconnected, when every aspect of  Internet culture feeds steroids to the human tribal instinct, when information moves at the speed of light, and when there is more of it than we have the evolutionary ability to process, is this technology simply antithetical to traditional ideas of democracy? Particularly to the system that our founders passed down to us.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that as the Internet grows, so to do authoritarian regimes. As tech companies get bigger, democratic institutions become smaller. What is the nexus to all of this and if it’s true, do we have to change tech or change the very idea of democracy?

All of this is at the core of work by Jamie Bartlett in his book The People Vs Tech: How the internet is killing democracy (and how we save it)

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Jamie Bartlett:

Neuroscience is The New Moneyball

I think it was Howard Cosell who first referred to sports at the “toy department of life.” Oftentimes player performance has been put down as people say that “it’s not rocket science.”

The fact is however, that we now know it is neuroscience, computer science, medical science, AI, and a whole lot more.

We often talk about the game of golf as being so much inside the heads of players. But now, new research show us that this is just as true for football, basketball, and especially baseball.

The metrics that drove Moneyball, have now been amplified to include new arenas of scientific data. This data may be the handicapping tools and tip sheets for the future of sports. Zach Schonbrun takes us inside this new science in The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius.

My conversation with Zach Schonbrun:

Why Tech May Usher in The Universal Basic Income, and Why It's Really Pro Business

In the movie Jurassic Park, perhaps the most famous line is that “nature will find a way.” It might just as accurately be said today, that technology will find a way.

Think about where we are. Fear of Facebook, the attacks on Amazon, the opioid crisis, and the kind of mini “techlash” we’re going through and the anger of a great many voters in former manufacturing hubs like Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. It all stems from the degree to which technology is displacing almost every aspect of society. And if this is where we are now, just wait until it really kicks in.

Then, maybe the idea of a Universal Basic Income, may finally come into its own. Not as a form of welfare, but as a pro growth, pro business policy.

To help understand this, Andrew Yang spells it all out in The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future.

My conversation with Andrew Yang:

From The Crusades To The Holocaust: Why History and Love Stories Matter

Religion, violence, anti-semitism, and the fate of the Catholic Church. All subject as contemporary as today’s headlines. To often we see these headlines and think about these issues in the moment, in the now. Yet to really understand any of these issues, begs for a deeper understanding of history.

And what better way to get that history, then in the storytelling of a great novel. That’s what James Carroll has been helping us with for years. Teaching us, while he entertains us.

James Carroll is a distinguished scholar in residence at Suffolk University and a columnist for The Boston Globe. He is the author of ten novels and seven works of nonfiction. He is a winner of the National Book Award, the best selling author of Constantine’s Sword and his latest work is The Cloister

My conversation with James Carroll:

Tribes May Be Killing Our Politics, But They May Be The Cure for Depression

Spend any time watching television and you’ll see the apotheosis of western medicine. There is a drug for everything. We live in a pharmaceutical culture where every pain, ache, and known and unknown disease has its own pill.

The areas of mental health, depression and anxiety have become a kind of hedge fund for the drug companies. And while we see the occasional pushback to this western model of drug care, we don’t see it enough in the world of mental health and depression.

Distinguished journalist Johann Hari thinks there is a better way to treat depression and it’s one that takes into account the reality of the world we live in. He sets out to prove it in is new book Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions

My conversation with Johann Hari:

What Maxed Out Political Corruption Looks Like

Lately, there have been countless articles about the rise of authoritarian regimes. One aspect of all of these regimes is, even as we’re seeing here in America, the dramatic extremes in corruption. Often fueled by power, money laundering, drugs, and simply all manner of crimes upon the public.

Perhaps nowhere in contemporary times was this worse than in Columbia in the 1990s and 2000s. Amidst a complicated, murky civil war, drug cartels, corruption and unrestrained violence, the country came apart.

What exactly happened, where is it today and what we can learn from it, is the subject a new and powerful book by Peruvian-American activist/writer Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno entitled  There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia.

My conversation with Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno:

Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It...Or Why Is Everything So Damn Complex?

I don’t think there is anyone that would argue that the world is a far more complex place today. All of the machines and technology that are supposed to make our lives easier have, at times, made it more complicated, more frustrating, and more subject to things going wrong.

Anyone who’s tried to operate the GPS or radio in a new BMW, or even to operate their television knows exactly what I mean.

This is not just about technology and algorithms. It’s also about the systems and organizations that make our world work. We have embraced complexity as an operating system, but we have yet to build into that complexity the fail safe systems that prevent all of it from spiraling out of control.

We seem to be at a critical juncture. We have designed so much that can go wrong, and have yet to design the internal systems that can prevent it. For complexity, it’s both the best and worst of times. Until we figure it all out, a Meltdown is around every corner. That's the title of a new book co-authored by Chris Clearfield.

My conversation with Chris Clearfield:

The Israel of 1948 is Over: A conversation with Avraham Burg

Back in the 1960s, Richard Nixon would talk and write a lot about the Middle East in general, and about the Israeli situation specifically, and he talked about how it easily could become the flash point of the next world war.

Certainly almost 60 years and many crises later, this is still true. Today, as a second and third generation still hears about settlements and a one and two-state solution, and peace plans are reconstituted over and over again, one wonders, do we even remember how this all got started?

Does the original sin grow out of the post-World War I agreements of 1916, or did something happen after Israel’s success in the Six-Day War, in 1967? Did Israel, to paraphrase our current President, get “tired of winning”?

So one more time, we’re going to go back and look at the past, the present, and the future of the Israeli enterprise. This time, with Avraham Burg.  One time Speaker of the Israeli Knesset. He’s a past leader of the World Zionist Federation and the Jewish Agency for Israel. He served in the Israeli Labor Government of Shimon Peres, and back in 2004, he retired from active involvement in politics and is the author of In Days to Come: A New Hope for Israel.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Avraham Burg:

 

 

The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

Every so often the media picks up the meme that books and readers are on the decline. That our short attention span, along with our Twitter and Facebook driven culture, has supplanted long form narrative. And it seems that every time those stories circulate, something happens to change or debunk the narrative. Even the national obsession with a book like Fire and Fury, proves something.

Joan Didion said that we tell each other stories in order to live. It’s also those stories, in literature, in popular fiction, or even nonfiction, that still, after all these centuries, shape how the world continues to unfold. That’s the journey that Martin Puchner takes us on in The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization.

My conversation with Martin Puchner:

Why Economic Inequality Can Take Down Our Republic

What is the nexus between our political system and our economic system? Certainly during the Cold War we fought to defend our political system against the economic threat of communism. So, does it work the other way around? Do we now have to defined our republic and our democracy against the threat of a new gilded age, of oligarchs and of deep income inequality? Is the fight for civility and justice, also a fight for economic justice.

In a system designed to be class blind, can the widening economic divide actually bring down the system?

The way in which these political and economic ideas are related, is the basis of Ganesh Sitaraman's new book The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic.

My conversation with Ganesh Sitaraman:

Growing Up Muslim: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys.

Everyday we are reminded how difficult it is growing up, and being a teenger. The work of Jean Twenge and others has shown the impact of technology and social media on our culture. Add to this, the reality of what it’s like growing up black or hispanic in America and the pressure becomes even more intense..

Even tougher, imagine what it must be like growing up in America as a Muslim teenager.. particularly one who cares about their religious practices and so must walk that fine line between wanting to fit in and still trying to maintain their Muslim identity.

John O’Brien, went directly into the heart of a Muslim community to understand what all of this translates to in the everyday lives of these Muslim teenage boys. He shares that journey in Keeping It Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys.

My conversation with John O'Brien:

Can The Behavior of School Shooters Be Profiled and Shootings Averted?

There is no question that the easy availability of guns, especially assault weapons, has contributed in some way to the rash of school shootings. However, we would be naïve to think that this is the totality of the problem. Beyond guns, the broader questions always should be how these shootings can be averted. How can we understand and interpret the data from so many past events in ways that help us to prevent the next? In a world where big data is becoming the holy grail, can this data be used to keep our students safe?

Jeff Daniels is a Professor of Counseling at West Virginia University and his work in research on averting school shootings is groundbreaking. His recent article in the academic journal The Conversation is entitled “If You Want To Know How To Stop School Shootings, Ask The Secret Service.”

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Professor Jeff Daniels

Timothy Leary and Richard Nixon, Together Again

Every day the news gets darker. Polarization is increasing, constitutional norms are being overthrown, the social fabric is tearing and as Yeats said, “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Still, as bad as it appears on cable news each night, it’s nothing compared to what was happening in the 60’s and 70’s. Cities were burning, violence was loose upon the land. Nixon was drinking himself to sleep each night, and new villains had to be created to take the heat off Watergate and Vietnam. For Nixon, one of those villains became Timothy Leary.

The story of Leary, the enemy that Nixon created to embody all that he thought wrong with the country, is story that is a little bit Wag the Dog, Keystone Cops and All The President's Men.

The story is that Steven L. Davis and Bill Minutaglio tell in The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD.

My conversation with Steven L. Davis:

They Once Made America Great...But What Did Factories Really Represent? : A conversation with Joshua Freeman

We often hear that we live in a post industrial world. Yet all of those consumer goods we and the rest of the world love so much, are made in factories. Factories that, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, did not always represent the best of working conditions. Today, out of nostalgia, we romanticize them and long for the “big shoulders” of the industrial heartland.

Today things are still produced in factories. However, they are increasingly either located offshore, or are more and more manned by robots. Auto workers from the 50s and 60s would be shocked walking through the factory that turns out Teslas.

Yet in the minds of many, these factories represented something more than just places to make things. They were a symbol of another time and place. But one that we can still learn from, even in the digital age.

Few know more about his, than my guest Joshua Freeman the author of Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World.

My conversation with Joshua Freeman:

#MeToo in China

We hear over and over again that the future belongs to China. Looking at what the Chinese are accomplishing in both infrastructure and technology, it’s easy to believe it. But what about in human relations and the issues of the gender wars?

As the #MeToo movement reshapes or recalibrates the nature of sex, work and gender relationships in America, it’s worthwhile to look and see how and if these same issues are playing out in China.

In China, an entire cadre of well educated and financially successful woman are taking their place. The result is that the deep, deep traditions of Chinese society are having to change in ways that are even more difficult and upending than all than all the physical changes China has endured.

Taking us through this journey is Economist correspondent Roseann Lake in Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World's Next Superpower.

My conversation with Roseann Lake:

Maybe You Are Doing Everything Wrong At Work

A couple of weeks ago, The N.Y. Times ran a story about “global nomads.” People whose work allows them to plug-in anywhere in the world. This may not be for everybody. But it’s a reminder that the fundamentals of work are changing.

How do we work today in an always on, 24/7 world. In a world where intellectual capital is increasingly the coin of the realm, we are essentially at work. whenever we are awake. and maybe even as we sleep.

All of this change arguably creates the need for a rebalancing of our relationship to work. Even redefining what the word “work,” really means. Always changing is how we determine priorities, how generational dynamics impact work, and and is the cliche of work/life balance even a thing anymore.

There is no better person to talk to about all of this than author, professor and management guru Morten Hansen.  His latest is Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More.

My conversation with Morten Hansen:

Political Tribes: A Conversation with Amy Chua

In the debate about immigration we are reminded of the original notion of America as a melting pot. As a nation that could absorb different cultures, different identities and different ethnic groups.

The trade off was the embrace of an American identity. A kind of super nationalism that would subsume these subgroups and, at its best, world supersede ethnic and religious tribalism, and replace it all with the American brand.

Over the years we’ve seen fissures in this idea. Usually it happens when dramatic change or pressure comes to America. The onset of the industrial revolution and the Cold War against communism are some examples. We’ve always done better when we’ve had common external enemies.

But today, the pressures may be just too great. Globalization and the decline of nation states, greater economic inequality, a 24/7 always connected culture, and the rush of change, both social and technological, and at a dizzying pace, have all stoked fear, uncertainty and insecurity. The result is that it feeds a new kind of tribalism that Americans may never have experienced before.

To help us understand this, as well as the very idea of tribalism I’m joined by best selling author and Yale law professor, Amy Chua to talk about Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.

My conversation with Amy Chua:

Who Was Edward Lansdale, and Why It Matters: A Conversation with Max Boot

There was a saying during the Vietnam era, the attribution of which is a bit fuzzy, that said “if you grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

I suppose this was not inconsistent with another quote of that era that said, “come let us reason together...or we’ll burn down your village.”

Vietnam, like so many counterinsurgency efforts, before and since, was or should have been, about winning those hearts and minds. Unfortunately, the political, foreign policy and military establishment never seemed to get it right.

However, during the Vietnam era, one man did. He was Maj. General Edward Lansdale. He was military and CIA, and in retrospect he maybe the only true wise man of the time.

Now, foreign policy scholar Max Boot gives us The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.  The fist full look at Lansdale and why this obscure figure from the period, should be a household,

My conversation with Max Boot:

Who Owns Your Thoughts?

Years ago, the great Dorothy Parker said that the movie business was the only business where the assets went home at night….Well that may have had a ring a truth then, but today in a world where intellectual property and human capital are what makes our economy tick, it seems that the assets always go home at night.

And what they do, what they think about, and what they conceive of when they are home, opens a minefield of issues that are legal, cultural and human. Add to these issues the global world where work is 24/7, where nomadic work patterns are the subject of a NY Times Magazine cover story, and where a single idea can be worth billions and can change the world, the consequences of these issues are enormous.

Distinguished law professor Orly Lobel in You Don't Own Me: How Mattel v. MGA Entertainment Exposed Barbie's Dark Side, tells a story of the toy business that is both compelling in its own right and emblematic of the future of law and work.

My conversation with Orly Lobel:

TRUTH DECAY: The Diminishing Role of Facts in Public Life

Amidst the cacophony of 24/7 news and information that pours in at us every day, we seem to have lost sight of what constitutes truth, facts and actual information. The signal to noise ratio has shifted overwhelming towards noise.

Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that we got our information from local papers and three television networks. The original Cronkite nightly news was only 15 minutes long. It was a big and controversial deal when it was expanded to a full half hour.

In many ways it feels like we are in a chicken and egg cycle. Technology has helped provide us with endless sources of “information,” and we are also more polarized than ever. Is it the abundance of options that creates the polarization, or is it the polarization that cause us to see or hear only information to support our cognitive bias? All of this is part of what a recent report by the RAND calls Truth Decay

RAND recently released a 300+ page report on the diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life. I recently spoke with one of the authors of that report Jennifer Kavanaugh.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Jennifer Kavanaugh:

Because Capitalism Works: A Conversation with William Rempel

Think about what we value today. What we give rewards for as a society? Now imagine, if you can, a business tycoon who is modest and filled with generosity. Who could gamble a million dollars on one roll of the dice, but whose story is a true Horatio Alger, rags to riches story. A man whose word is his bond. Who eschews self promotion, yet operated in Las Vegas and Hollywood. A man who saw the importance ot the larger world, and helping others in it, while still appreciating all that is American. A man who knew how to fly, but never flew too close to the sun

This is, in part, the story of Kirk Kerkorian. It's a story told by William Rempel, in The Gambler: How Penniless Dropout Kirk Kerkorian Became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History.

My conversation with William Rempel:

The Internet Needs To Grow Up: A Conversation with Andrew Keen

At the time of the invention of writing, Socrates worried that it would destroy memory, and undermine the oral tradition. The invention of the printing press worried many. For those old enough you remember, the fear of television was once pervasive. It was the “boob tube,” “the vast wasteland.” We fragmented over other great changes, including the great migration and the move from a rural agrarian culture to an urban industrial revolution.

All of these changes came with great promise and predictive as well as unintended consequences. Why should we think that the Internet, that the digital revolution, would be any different? As someone once said, “history may repeat itself exactly, but it certainly rhymes.”

Andrew Keen has, with an objective eye, been following this history since the dawn of the information age. He wrote about the democratization of information in his book THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR, and he warned us how social media would, rather than brings us together, fragment us and feed into our narcissism.

Now in HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE, he pulls together all of the consequences of tech. He shows us what Joan Didion once said of Southern California, is true of tech, that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.

My WhoWhatWhy Conversation with Andrew Keen

Deutsche Bank: Where The Dots Of Russiagate Connect

If you’re following or trying to follow the Trump-Russia story, no doubt your head is filled with dozens of threads: the Trump Tower meetings; the dossier; the names of countless Russians, mobsters, and oligarchs, and bankers; banks in Germany, in Moscow, Cyprus, and Moldavia; money laundering; real estate deals; hedge funds; indictments; bankruptcies; and a cast of characters orbiting Trump that feels more like the bar scene in the original Star Wars.

How is it possible then to understand it all? Especially if, as Steve Bannon told Michael Wolff, it’s all about following the money. We could all imagine some kind of huge whiteboard or bulletin board in Mueller’s office with arrows, and pictures, and bank logos, and lines, and threads connecting them all together.

WhoWhatWhy.org has published a multi-part series entitled Deutsche Bank: A Global Bank for Oligarchs — Americans and Russians by Martin Sheil, a retired branch chief of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division.  His WhoWhatWhy series could easily be seen as part of a preamble or executive summary to the report that Mueller may ultimately deliver to Congress.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Martin Sheil:

A Model For The Power of Local Agriculture

It’s ironic that at a time when our air, water and food are under siege, more people than ever seem to care about the protection of all three. Organic grocery sales have never been higher and local agriculture is undergoing a kind of millennial renaissance.

Nonetheless, for best practices, we have to turn our gaze to a small town in the Italian alps. It is the first place on earth to fully ban pesticides via referendum, and it represents what may very well be the future of local agriculture everywhere.

Philip Ackerman-Leist tells this story in A Precautionary Tale: How One Small Town Banned Pesticides, Preserved Its Food Heritage, and Inspired a Movement.

My conversation with Philip Ackerman-Leist:

A President Who Really Got Things Done: A conversation with Joshua Zeitz

Elections do have consequences and leaders really do matter. Grassroots voices and organizing can bring attention to a problem, but it’s the job of government, of our constitutional process, to put those policies in place.

As modern history tells us, it’s no easy task. This week we watched a State of the Union speech devoid of ideas, or programs or lofty goals to lift people up, or in the parlance of our times, to solve problems.

It was a far cry from Bill Clinton’s laundry list of small ball in his ‘95 SOTU and even further from the goals once set out by Lyndon Johnson.

So much of the legislative battle today is not about, as some commentators have said, undoing the New Deal, but undoing the remarkable achievements of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. It’s a remarkable list that includes medicare, medicai

d, public radio, public television, the voting right act, federal aid to education, consumer protections, creating the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the great 1964 Civil Rights Act. All done in five years, while struggling with the disaster that was Vietnam.

Johnson did it all not through executive orders, but through the simple Article One powers of the Constitution. That’s the story that Joshua Zeitz tells in Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson's White House

My conversation with Joshua Zeitz:

Why Art and Artists Matter...Now More Than Ever: A Conversation with Jonathan Santlofer

In the US. or anywhere else around the world, when freedom is threatened, when liberty is under siege, it is often the artist that comes to the rescue. Not necessarily in the realm of changing politics, but in reminding us why that freedom is important, inspiring us to remember what matters, amidst the fear and noise of repression.

In a new book entitled It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, Jonathan Santlofer, has brought together some of the most profound artists and writers of our time, to do exactly that.

My conversation with Jonathan Santlofer:

The Network vs. The Despot: A Conversation with Niall Ferguson

Those that study history know that not only is it not static, but that it tends to go though seemingly recurring periods. We’ve seen times where freedom flourishes, times when despots seem to be the flavor du jour, times where great bursts of innovation happen and where darkness and stagnation cast a pall.

Even in our modern day we see the tension between, “I alone can fix it,” and the power of grassroots and social networks to try and bring people together in a common cause.

This idea, the individual vs. the network is, according to esteemed historical Niall Ferguson, one of the most recurring tensions throughout history. He takes us through this remarkable journey in his book The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook.

My conversation with Niall Ferguson:

 

Timing is Everything! A conversation with Daniel Pink

Playing Clue, writing, quizzing our kids or friends, or analyzing data to make decisions, we are all familiar with those key question of who, what and why. And yet the question that goes to the heart of what we actually do and how it will turn out, is often WHEN.

We make dozens of when decisions everyday. Sometimes we jump into something to quickly, sometimes we procrastinate. We schedule the hard stuff in the morning when we are fresh, or some schedule the easy stuff in the morning, to get it out of the way.

We think that most of these decisions derive from habit or intuition. But in fact, modern science and research in psychology, biology, economics and even anthropology, all provide road maps for making our when decisions.

Now bestselling and influential author Daniel Pink takes us into the essence of those when decision in When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

My conversation with Daniel Pink:

 

Does Political Organizing Still Matter? A talk with Gordon Whitman

For those that are politically engaged, and are horrified by the current policy decisions being made and enacted by the current administration, it sometimes seems as if the challenge is overwhelming. Can any amount of the traditional forms of protest, and organizing make a dent. Or has technology, the speed of communications and our ever shortening attention spans put us in a post organizing environment?

In a world in which facts are suspect, life is lived online, only with people that we agree with, and the no ones mind ever seems to change, does protest even matter? Longtime activist and organizer Gordon Whitman  thinks it does.  His new book is Stand Up!: How to Get Involved, Speak Out, and Win in a World on Fire.

My conversation with Gordon Whitman:

 

Lawyers, Guns and Money: Understanding the Panama Papers

 

In the current debate over taxes we here a lot about offshore funds, the repatriation of corporate dollars, and how lowering marginal tax rates will stimulate the economy and bring all this money pouring back into America. Unlikely!  Particularly because what we don’t hear about is the almost hundred trillion dollars that is hidden from view, in a complex web of offshore accounts, tax havens, laundered money, corrupt banks and nations that have created a kind of alternative world financial system.

Back in April of 2016 the leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm, that became known as the Panama Papers, began to shed light on this universal flow of this tainted money. More recently the

Paradise Papers, brought this corruption to the doorstep of the White House.

Covering every step of this, has been distinguished journalist and two time Pulitzer winner Jake Bernstein. He details it all, and a lot more in Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite. 

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Jake Bernstein:

Not Your Father's Non-Profit: A conversation with Kathleen Kelly Janus

Poll after poll tell us that people have lost faith in government and in big institutions to solve the nation’s or even the world's problems. As that disconnect grows, and it will likely continue to, we are looking more and more to local centric, often non-profit institutions to do the heavy lifting.

But what will those non profits look like? As donors today want rapid and measurable results, metrics, and an entrepreneurial spirit and business approach, that will certainly not resemble your father's non-profit.

To help us understand this transition and what may very well be the future of non-profits, as a growing instrument of public policy, I’m joined by Kathleen Kelly Janus, the author of Social Startup Success: How the Best Nonprofits Launch, Scale Up, and Make a Difference.

My conversation with Kathleen Kelly Janus:

"Things Won't Work Out By Themselves" A Conversation with Richard Haass

In today’s world it’s not just technology that changes quickly. Just twenty-five years ago, some thought we had reached the end of history. That the end of the Cold War would bring about protracted peace, that the ending of the great power struggle between the US and the Soviet Union would mark a new era. In many ways it did, but not necessarily the one that was anticipated.

Just as we’ve seen deconstruction in almost every area of society, so too in foreign policy. The gravitational pull of great powers that held the world together, just as that same force held major industries together, fragmented. Independence, democratization, real time instant communications and commerce, let loose global and destabilizing forces that we are trying hard to sort through. While in business it might mean the end of a company or an industry, in foreign affairs this disarray just might mean the end of the world.

Dr. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations has served in several administrations and is also the author or editor of twelve books on foreign policy and international relations. His latest is A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order.

My conversation with Richard Haass:

The Daniel Ellsberg Story You Won't See In THE POST

Somebody asked me recently if I thought that this time that we are living through will be as significant and as profoundly influential as the ‘60’s. I don't’ know the answer to that. What I do know is that there are recurring themes from that period that we seem to be relitigating and reliving.

Race is certainly one. Renewed discussion about Vietnam, press freedom and the threat of nuclear war, are some of the others.

Daniel Ellsberg, was once at the center of these issues and he is still here to provide his wisdom and insights into the way that history maybe repeating itself.

The Ken Burns documentary about Vietnam, which conspicuously did not include a conversation with Ellsberg, and the Steven Spielberg film, The Post, have once again catapulted Ellsberg to the front of our national dialogue.

Most of us know Daniel Ellsberg for the Pentagon Paper which he copied and leaked in 1971. What we don’t know is that Ellsberg was a war planner and nuclear strategist at RAND, and one of the leading thinkers about the role and actual use of nuclear weapons.

Now, after all of these years, he’s written about it in The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Daniel Ellsberg: 

 

 

Trump/Russia from 30,000 Feet

There is an old expression that’s long been part of the training of medical students. It says that if you hear hooves, look for horses, not zebras. The idea is simple. Look first in the most obvious places. Often times the solution is in pain sight and doesn't require some deep, expensive digging.

The same might very well be said of Donald Trump and Russia. Sure we all hear about the complex web, but really there is a kind of elemental simplicity to the story.

Trump came to the attention of Russians as far back as 1987. The Russians, seeking contacts or assets in the US, dangled in front of Trump the prospect of doing business in Russia. They paraded before him oligarchs who he admired, and who he was jealous of.

They keep their eyes on on him for years. He even married two wives from the former soviet bloc. Two wives who grew up behind the Iron Curtain.

He went back to Russia in 2013, by which time planet Trump was surrounded by people like Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, the Agalaroffs, Paul Manafort and dozens and duzens of Russians that had bought property in Trump Tower, or one of his other real estate interests.

When he fell on financial hard times, Russians and particularly Deutsche Bank in Moscow, were there to help with laundered money

In 2016, when he finally ran for president, something he’d been talking about for decades, we know the Russians intervened to help. Paul Manafort, with deep Russian and Ukrainian ties, would, for a time, manage the campaign.

When he won, so many that were circling the mothership Trump would lie about their contacts with Russia. His cabinet would be filled with people like Wilbur Russ, Rex Tillerson and the sister of Eric Prince, all with deep ties to Russia.

All the while he would continue to praise Vladimir Putin.  This is the story that Luke Harding brings forth in Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Luke Harding:

 

This Man Could Have Prevented 9/11

Bill Binney was an NSA analyst whose work was so effective it was shut down. It threatened to derail the gravy train fueled by the kinds of problems he might have solved — including preventing potential terrorist attacks. The contractors and executives riding that train had a motto: “keep the problem going, so the money keep flowing.”

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Bill Binney:

 

Espionage 101: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities

Once upon a time, at the apogee of the cold war, the CIA recruited the best and the brightest from our most elite universities. The likes of George HW Bush, James Jesus Angleton, William Bundy, Porter Goss, and Cord Meyer, all owed their allegiance to God Country and Yale. And Harvard also had its share. These universities were, as someone once referred them, “a nursery of spooks.”

Today, like everything else, espionage has gone through its own creative destruction. Colleges and universities are still at the epicenter of espionage, but it’s all been impacted by globalization, technology, the free flow of international students and professors and information, and yes, 9/11. It’s as if the military industrial-complex that Eisenhower warned us about, is now the military, industrial, intelligence and university complex.

Bringing this all into bold relief is Pulitzer Prize winning author Daniel Golden, in his book Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities.

My conversation with Dan Golden:

Where Is Your Money Sleeping?

As the new year begins, we often think about what to do with our money. In a world in which we are more socially and politically divided than ever, in which change is happening at an exponential pace, in which technology may lead us to a worse or a better place, how we invest, how we spend money, and where that money goes, takes on more urgency than ever.

Both spending and investing is now more than just part of our economic dialogue. It is a part of our social fabric. How it comes together, and what it accomplishes has profound consequences.

Morgan Simon is a leader in impact investment who builds bridges between finance and social justice. Over the past seventeen years, she has influenced over $150 billion in capital and she recently authored Real Impact: The New Economics of Social Change.

My conversation with Morgan Simon:

A Look At What A Real President Was Like

I’m not sure when politics became a dirty word. But there was a time when it was a noble profession. When the best the the brightest sought to serve, and when differences of opinion were about how to better the lives of all people, not just those at the top, or those at the margins, or those in power.

To successfully engage in politics tooks a very special skill set, that was about understanding people and what they wanted, and forming coalitions to compromise and get things done. How far we have fallen from that ideal.

It was Bismarck who said that “politics was the art of the possible.” Few understood this better than the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt. Presidential historian Robert Dallek takes a deep dive into the political Roosevelt, in  Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life

My conversation with Robert Dallek:

Our Collective Search for Meaning And What Happens If We Can't Find It

From the time we first enter the world, to the moment we read or listen to the morning news, we are trying to make sense of the world. We are trying to discern patterns, to create a narrative, to fit the puzzle pieces together in ways that make sense. All the while creating the minimum amount of cognitive dissonance, so that we can move forward each day without having a complete nervous breakdown.

And so it is that societies and cultures do exactly the same things as part of a kind of collective effort to finding meaning. Be it in art, as we try to find metaphorical meaning in the equivalent of a grain of sand, or in the worship of religion, money, success or hierarchical achievement. The problem often comes when these patterns we internalize, run headlong into reality.

That’s a part of what I explore with Jeremy Lent as we look at The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning.

My conversation with Jeremy Lent:

 

Is the Keyboard The New F15?

You may remember that during the cold war, particularly during the Vietnam conflict, we were told that the battle was for the “hearts and minds” of the enemy. We understood that in conflict, propaganda, particularly as told through narrative, was an important tool of warfare.

Narrative, if successful, was there to reinforce the battle. The ultimate expression of this was the phrase, sometimes attributed to both John Wayne and Chuck Colson, that “if you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

Today, in our 24/7 always on, social media saturated world, the objective has changed. Now, the battle through social media and television, for the proverbial hearts and minds, is sometime the goal, in and of itself.

As we’ve seen with Russia in both the Ukraine, and in it’s new cold war with the US, sometimes control of the Twitter and Facebook narrative is enough to create disruption, to change the terms of the conflict itself and ultimately to win. Suddenly, in cold war 2.0, a keyboard has as much power as an F15. That's the reality that David Patrikarakos lays bear in War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with David Patrikarakos: