Talk Cocktail

The Power of Grit

We are a nation that believes deeply in the Horatio Alger story of hard work and pulling oneself up by their bootstraps.  In political terms this has translated into an ethos of individualism, which arguably has been corrosive to our body politic.

In part, it grew in response to the culture of monarchy and inheritance that America was founded in opposition to.  It is certainly far more egalitarian to believe that we are the masters of our fate.  In economic terms, the Right has taken this to the extremes.  But what does it mean in terms of learning, education and personal success.

In this context, we see how the classic argument about nature and nurture has been extrapolated to talent vs. perseverance. Or, in the words of MacArthur Fellow and Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Duckworth, into Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

My conversation with Angela Duckworth: 

What Really Helps Children Succeed?

We know that children living in poverty generally tend to do worse academically than middle class kids.  We also know that even some kids from wealthy backgrounds fail or breakdown. We’ve come to learn, in part through the writing of my guest Paul Tough, that it’s more than IQ or temperament. There is something else. Something that has to do with innate character, perseverance or just plain old fashioned grit.

But are these traits preordained? Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why.

Are children merely geographically and genetically predisposed to succeed or fail, or are these attributes of success something that can be multiplied, embedded and programmed into children in ways that increase the likelihood of success in school and in life?  This is part of what Paul Tough now writes about in

My conversation with Paul Tough: 

The Tribal Bonds of Soldiers

“We hear of of war and the rumor of war.”  We thank our soldiers for their service and we think that we are welcoming them back into society.  But what are actually welcoming back into? They return often with an experience we cannot really comprehend. An experience that often bonds them together into their own tribe.  One that makes them different from us.  

In fact as many of us work hard to breakdown the tribal bonds that divide us as a society, as globalization continues to homogenize us,  both domestically and internationally, the experience of war often forms new, personal and deeper such bonds among the soldiers. In so doing, it makes it so much harder for them to be among us. 

Sebastian Junger the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, A Death in Belmont and Fire takes a look at this phenomenon in Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

My conversation with Sebastian Junger:

The end of humans

If anything represents the new new thing in our technological age, it's the arena of artificial intelligence.  From the factory floor to the glittering glass office of law firms, smart machine are doing job, after job, after job.

The conversation about jobs going offshore is so yesterday.  Today it’s robots and algorithms that are the threats.

Manufacturing is only the beginning.  Service sector jobs, clerical jobs, accounting, paralegal, are all starting to be done by machines.  Drones will soon do deliveries and driving,  perhaps the largest bastion of blue collar jobs, will, within 10 years, be replaced by the autonomous vehicles.

So what’s left for humans?  As machines start to program themselves, as we’ve seen with autonomous cars, as more and more higher level functions are done by machines, what’s a human to do?

That the subject of Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, a new book by Julia Kirby.

My conversation with Julia Kirby: 

How to deal with conflict all around us

Look around us. Conflict is everywhere. In our culture, certainly in our politics, in the broader world and in our interactions with institutions.  Sometimes, to try and seek shelter from that sea of conflict, we look into our own personal relationships for solace.  When we do, we place even more pressure on those relationships and often the seeds of more conflict are sown.  

So with all of this conflict how do we negotiate our way out of it?  How do we break the habits of pervasive conflict, prevent or dampen conflict with those we care about, and are those skills applicable to the large framework of conflict.

These are some of the issues that Daniel Shapiro, the founder of Harvard’s International Negotiation Program takes up in Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts.

My conversation with Daniel Shapiro:

Finance vs. American Business

Recently I had a conversation with a Professor at UC Berkeley about the subject of Power.  In the course of the conversation he referred to what he saw as key centers of power. People who he saw as  exercising real power. He referred to great generals, political leaders and Wall Street.

Wall Street was once a reflection of America's business. It was there to serve business. Today Wall Street and the business of finance is it’s own power center. It’s often greater than and in control of the whole of American and even global business.

Wall Street has become THE symbol of corporate greed.  Railed against by politicians, analyzed 24/7 on several cable channels, the focus of it’s own newspapers and it’s stars, people like Stephen Schwarzman and Lloyd Blankfein, gracing the covers of magazines.

So how did this happen?  How did Wall Street and the business of money become bigger, more powerful and more important than the business it was originally there to serve.  

Rana Foroohar, the Assistant Managing Editor in charge of Economics and Business for Time magazine takes us through the history and future in Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

My conversation with Rana Foroohar:

Power...it’s not what it used to be.

Whether we want to believe it or not, every relationship we have...with a friend, a spouse, a child or co-workers, has a power dynamic as a part of it.  Power may shift and morph, but it’s a part of every relationship and often a force for good. 

In understanding power at this most intimate level, we can better understand how it plays out, or should play out, on a more macro scale. It’s not something that comes from the barrel of a gun, or from bullying, but from empathy and social intelligence. As  UC Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner points out, power is not something that’s won, but something that’s earned and given. The problem or paradox is that once we have that power, we act differently; often counter to the ways in which we earned it.  

That what Dacher Keltner call the The Power Paradox

My conversation with Dacher Keltner:

The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation

We throw around the word globalization without really thinking about all of its impacts.  The instant and free flow of goods around the corner and around the world comes with a cost.  The iPhone delivered overnight from China, the speciality coffee from around the world, the stores filled with goods from hundreds of countries.  

Rarely do we stop to think how all of this gets to us. Sure we see or even complain about all the trucks on the road. But that’s only the end of the journey, sometimes the last mile.  Many of items of daily life travel hundreds of thousands of miles to reach us.  Think about all those container ships at every major port in the world.

Beyond this, the story of traffic and of our cars, only compounds the problem.  What successful community is not dealing with the scourge of traffic? 

That’s the hidden story that Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ed Humes tells in his new book Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation.

My conversation with Ed Humes: 

Susan Cain and The Secret Strengths of Introverts

We live in a world of bombast and noise.  Sometimes it seems the volume is turned up full blast, all the time.  A quick look at our Presidential campaigns is ample evidence.

We forget that for leaders, or just average folks, sometimes quiet can have amazing power.  The power of thoughtfulness, of creativity and competence

For young people, trying to find their place in the world, sometimes growing up amidst this cacophony of a boiler factory is not the healthiest thing.  

This is the world that Susan Cain took us into in her bestselling book QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN’T STOP TALKING.

Now she looks specifically at young people in Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts

My conversation with Susan Cain: 

A Surfing Life as Art

The poet William Blake talked about art as “seeing the world in a grain of sand.” I suppose that what he also meant was the ability to move in so tightly on something, that inside of it, we could construct an almost fourth dimension, through which to view the world and our experiences in it.

In a way that’s what New Yorker Staff writer, author and Pulitzer Prize winner William Finnegan has done with surfing.

Living the surfing life alongside the literary life,  Finnegan has reached the apex of that duality in his autobiography Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

My conversation with William Finnegan: 

Are Riots and Insurrection on the Horizon?

Not since the 1960’s have we lived in a time of more public anger.  Today, issues of race, economic disparity, power imbalance and distrust of traditional institutions, have all conflated to bring us to what some believe is the brink of insurrection.

But should we be surprised?  Insurrection, riots, strikes have long been an instrument of policy for the disaffected.  It was a central form of protest in the 17th and 18th centuries and we saw our own examples in the 1970’s

But given the anger, given technology, given the immediacy of communication, what might riots look like today and are they on the horizon.

Joshua Clover, a professor of critical theory at UC Davis, thinks they are. He looks at the history in Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings.

My conversation with Joshua Clover:

Why Physics Matters! - Part II

A Scottish writer, back in 1915, coined the phrase “think globally, but act locally.”  While it was about grassroots movements, it could just as easily have been about our understanding of the universe.

The fundamental laws of physics which govern the workings of the cosmos, are not some abstract untethered set of rules. They have a direct impact on how we live and on the very meaning of human existence.   It has to. After all, it’s the only way we can look out on the vastness of space and time, and ask ourselves what’s it's all about, and what's my place in it.

Few ask these questions and find answers as well as  Sean Carroll, a renowned physicist at Cal Tech and the author of The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.

My conversation with Sean Carroll:

Why Physics Matters!

For better or worse, particularly for those of us here in the Bay Area, we have come to think of science in rather utilitarian terms.  A better phone, a better app, or a better car.

In fact science, especially theoretical physics, is or should be the real lens through which we see the world.  It is our understanding of the larger universe that shapes how we see our place in it and that more than the latest gadget, shapes our times.

It’s why we need to understand that world and why we need guides along the way like Stephen Hawking and Christophe Galfard. Galfard, a protege of Hawking and has just published The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond.

My conversation with Christophe Galfard:

Even Burglar's Prefer the City

Think about our built environment and how much of it is designed around safety and security.  The gated communities, the numbers on top of office buildings, the entrances and exits, garages and elevators. eyes on the street.   

Now imagine seeing our daily landscape through the eyes of someone that wanted to break into our homes and our offices.  Suddenly architecture takes on a whole new dimension. One that my guest Geoff Manaugh conveys  in his new book A Burglar's Guide to the City.

My conversation with Geoff Manaugh:

The Silicon Valley Business Model, Circa 1920

Ask any of the 20 and 30 somethings working in tech in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and I assure they think they are inventing the world.  But the fact is that most, including some that have become household names, are merely leaving footprints in the shadow of David Sarnoff.

David Sarnoff born in 1891, had a visionary understanding of everything from the telegraph to the future of the internet.  And just as Steve Jobs had Wozniak, Sarnoff had Edwin Armstrong.  Not surprisingly, that relationship ended in an even worse way.

That story, the idea of everything old being new again and that history does repeat itself, is at the heart of .The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age, by Scott Woolley

My conversation with Scott Woolley: 

Can You Remember When Bipartisan Public Policy Once Mattered?

It’s hard to believe from the rhetoric coming from both sides of the campaign trail this year, but there once was a time when policy mattered. When candidates on both sides talked about programs and public policy.

Perhaps it was Reagan wanting to shrink the size of government and drown it in a bathtub, or Bill Clinton declaring that the era of big government is over.  The fact is we have stopped looking to government as an institution of proactive change.  While it still may have a role in crisis, as we saw in 2008 and 2009, its larger role, to shape the betterment of life in America, has long ago reached a kind of perigee.

Perhaps the last time policy mattered was during the time of LBJ and the Great Society. A time when bipartisan politics really worked.  This is the era that Randall Wood takes us into in Prisoners of Hope: Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Society, and the Limits of Liberalism.

My conversation with Randall Woods: 

How Family Trauma is Carried in Our Genes

How many times have you experienced an even mild form of depression, or anxiety or obsessive fear and wondered “how you got this way.”  It turns out the answer may have as much to do with your ancestry as with your circumstances.

While today with things like 23andme and the vast array of genetic testing and sequencing we can do, we look for every clue to our health.  What diseases we may carry and what medical dangers we may face.  However, we are yet to fully understand how family trauma, the trauma of distant ancestors, might actually impact our genetics in a ways that affect our mental health.  This is the world that Mark Wolynn reveals to us in It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle.

My conversation with Mark Wolynn:

Patient Zero and the Dawn of Genomic Medicine

We hear it in all the loose talk about health care.  About the wonders of medicine, about how we are living longer and about the advances of our doctors.  The fact is we are mostly still in the dark ages. The standard treatment for cancer today, poisoning the body, is a little like how we once viewed leaching.

As for diagnostics, a huge percentage of today's sickest patient go through a multi year odyssey, just to discover what’s wrong with them… and that’s if they are at a world class medical facility.

But all of this is changing.  We are on the cusp of the brave new world of genomic medicine.  A time when treatment will be personalized, when the brutality of some treatments will be vastly refined and when medicine really will be worthy of the 21st Century and all the highfalutin rhetoric we hear 

Nowhere is this more clear than in the story that Pulitzer Prize winning journalists Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher tell in One in a Billion: The Story of Nic Volker and the Dawn of Genomic Medicine.

My conversation with Mark Johnson & Kathleen Gallagher: 

One Upon A Time, Clean Air and Clean Water Were A Bipartisan Desire

There is seemingly nothing in our society today that has not become politicized. From what bathrooms we use to the soda we drink, to the food we eat.  Sometimes if feels as if common sense and good judgment have gone out the window.

We forget there are some absolutes.  There are some facts that are irrefutable. Sometimes to ignore this, is to do irreparable damage.  One of the areas where this is certainly true is with respect to the environment.

Where once protecting the natural environment was a conservative value, today for conservatives attacking those that seek to protect the environment has become an applause line.

For environmental activists, their extreme views, their disregard for business and property rights have helped to push the reaction on the other side.

In short there is plenty of blame to go around. However renowned lawyer Frederic Rich doesn't assess blame.  Instead, in his book Getting to Green: Saving Nature, he looks for a bipartisan answer.

My conversation with Frederic Rich:

Is American Unity Still Possible?

American history shows us that amidst election season we are often divided.  That partisan rancor is often high and it is a healthy part of the passion of democracy.  But today we seem to have something worse.  While we’ve been here before as a county, we are at one of those historical inflection points where the bitterness spills over into every aspect of life. 

And while history shows us other bitter splits, today, the long tail of the Internet and technology has made us more tribal.  More prone to confirmation bias and only associating with our own tribe.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said we are all entitled to our opinions, but not our own facts.  Today, the proliferation of information, has made everyone feel empowered by their own facts, true or false.

We live in a world that William Butler Yeats writes about when he said that “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The best lack all conviction and worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Mark Gerzon, like Barack Obama thinks he can change that.  He outlines his plans in The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide.

My conversation with Mark Gerzon:  

Girls & Sex

As they have done in so many other areas, the millennial generation has picked and chosen which parts of their social and sexual legacy they want to inherit.  Particularly for millennial girls who were handed a legacy of sexual revolution, increased efforts to promote self esteem, Title 9, several waves of feminism and the ability to Lean In, they have made some interesting choices and compromises for themselves.

Nowhere is this more profound and more complicated than in their navigation of their own sexuality. How this plays out in our culture, how it impacts our daughters and what is says for the future of men women and sex is at the heart of Peggy Orenstein's new book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape.

My conversation with Peggy Orenstein:

The House That Jack Buiit

If I gave you all a quiz and asked you to name five tech visionaries and entrepreneurs in the US, you’d all pass.  If I asked you to name even one visionary entrepreneur in China, the world's largest market, you’d probably come up empty.  If you didn't, you’d probably name Jack Ma, the founder and leader of Alibaba.

The company recently went public in the largest IPO in history. It’s the largest virtual shopping mall in the world and it’s impact not just in China, but in the developing world, is profound and impactful both economically and politically.  

Longtime  businessman and journalist Duncan Clark takes us up close and person with Jack Ma in Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built

My conversation with Duncan Clark: 

When Revolutionary Violence Was Commonplace

It’s funny how history often pokes its head out in the framework of contemporary events.  Remember during the government shutdown a few years ago, commentators said that the radical elements of the GOP were acting like terrorists from the 60’s and 70’s?  We heard similar criticism of occupy Wall Street years ago. And who can forget the President being accused of paling  around with terrorist because of an acquaintance with  Bill Ayers.

That fact is that the idea of direct action, grassroots support and commitment to ideas of social change, no matter how flawed, were an essential part of America in the 70’s 

Inspired by the communist revolutions in Cuba and China and Vietnam, by the actions of the Nixon administration and the war in Vietnam,  a radical group of revolutionaries sought to launch what they believed to be a 2nd American Revolution.

Today, to look back upon it, is to be shocked by the level of violence that the public came of accept as commonplace and how the efforts of law enforcement to stop it, were almost keystone cops like.

Taking us back to this bizarre time in modern American history is award winning author and journalist Bryan Burrough, in his book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

My conversation with Bryan Burrough:  

Liberty vs. The Common Good

The debate that raged between Apple and the Federal Government was on the surface about security, privacy and encryption.  However, in a larger sense it’s about the balance between our liberty and right to privacy vs. what some perceive as the greater good of the nation.

When we put up with the indignities of the TSA, we are agreeing that the greater good of security, check makes certain individual liberties.  When we pass laws about personal vices, about speed limits or about guns or fundamental civil rights, the framework is the same.

In fact, when we look at the history of America, right on through our present day polarization, we see this struggle between individual liberty and the common good as a fundamental debate that links us directly with our founders.

This is the tension that Colin Woodard writes about in American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good.

My conversation with Colin Woodard:

How enlightenment remakes us

For most of us, the pressures of daily life in the 21st Century are intense.  Emails, calls, social media, commutes, every changing technology, all on 24/7.

Regardless of the economic and social discussion from all of this, there is the question of the impact it’s all having on our bodies and on our psyche.  Given how slow evolution moves, can human psychobiology cope with all of this?

That’s why some people practice things like meditation and mindfulness.  But how does that really help?  Dr. Andrew Newberg, has spent his career studying the impact of religion, spirituality and enlightenment on our physical and mental health.   In his latest work How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain: The New Science of Transformation,

 he looks at the power of what he defines as enlightenment to truly remodel who we are.

My conversation with Andrew Newberg: 

We know more and understand less than every before

T.S. Eliot wrote, in 1934. “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” He might have written those words yesterday.

Certainly we’ve never had more knowledge, more information and seemingly less wisdom than we do today. What is the connection? How is it, that the more we know, the less we seem to understand and the less we seem to able to clearly and logically process it?

Does the fault lie in the technology, the speed at which information comes at us, or an evolutionary limitation to process information that has not yet caught up with technology? Or is it simply fear of the new, and fear of the future.

This is what Michael Patrick Lynch addresses in The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data

My conversation with Michael Patrick Lynch: 

What's The Matter With Democrats?

When we examine the roots of today’s chaos in the Republican party, we see that much of it has been caused by the party using and manipulating social issues to hold together Red State voters, while ignoring and even acting counter to their real economic concerns. This was the premise of one of the seminal books of our modern political age, What’s the Matter with Kansas, by my guest Thomas Frank.

Today, Frank argues that the Democratic party is facing a similar situation and is ignoring a whole swath of it’s traditional working class base voters. 

He argues in his new book Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

that the traditional working class Democratic voters, the ones  that drove the Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson coalitions, have been ignored.  That the traditional Democratic Dunkin Donuts/ Walmart voter has been replaced by the Starbucks/Whole Foods voter.  And that o

once again, even in the Democratic party, social issues have been used to  transcended the real economic needs and distress of Americans.

To some extent this has given rise to the Bernie Sanders movement. But more specifically it’s left the door open for a populist demagogue like Donald Trump, to take advantage of this openings on both side of the political equation. 

My conversation with Thomas Frank:

Anne Garrels' reports from Putin Country

A popular desire for authoritarian rule in the face of a changing and sometimes shaky economy. A overheated sense of nationalism, to cover up uncertainty about the future. Scapegoating and military adventurism as a salve for a lack of purpose and policy, a dislike of outsiders and a desire to crackdown on journalists to cover up anger about the changing nature of employment.  Sounds like a certain candidate running for President of the US.  In fact, it is a picture of the rise of Vladimir Putin and Russia, as Russia still comes to grips with the change heralded by the Soviet collapse.

But to fully understand Putin and Russia, it's important to look beyond Moscow, just as it’s necessary to look past Manhattan or San Francisco to try and understand America.

Long time NPR foreign correspondent Anne Garrels has spent decades exploring  the Russia that’s far from Moscow, in what some might call the Russian heartland.

Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russiais her story of twenty plus years of reporting from a town on the southern edge of the Ural Mountains. She reveals a Russia that today embraces a unique combination of Western goods, inherent corruption, and authoritarian rule

My conversation with Anne Garrels: 

The Industries of the Future

Just for fun, pull out or get a copy of the originally published version of the best seller What Color Is Your Parachute. Originally published in 1970, virtually no job that it listed that even touches technology, is even close to the same today.  Remember that came out 46 years ago,  just as the boomers were going into the workforce.

Today’s changes, human, technological and social, are happening at a geometrically much faster pace.  Imagine then what the workplace will look like 46 years from now.

Children entering school today will work in a world that has almost no relationship to today's world.  The jobs, the skills, the workplace and the products will be vastly different.

Given this, how do we plan? How to we teach our kids, shape public policy and prepare for a fourth industrial revolution that will happen, even if we do nothing to get ahead of it.

Alec Ross, one of America’s leading experts on innovation, served as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  He’s the author of The Industries of the Future.

My conversation with Alex Ross: 

Can We Thrive At Midlife?

We've all heard it before. Sixty is the new fifty, fifty is the new forty, etc.

It's all in the service our fear, or dread of aging; of death and the lost endless possibilities of youth. We believed that as we turned the corner onto the proverbial back nine, that a kind of midlife crisis would overtake us.

For a generation of narcissistic baby boomers, it seemed like the logical step. But a surprising thing happened along the way.  Many of those same baby boomers began to appreciate age and its companions of wisdom and calmness

Some boomers actually began to thrive in midlife and that's the story that Barbara Bradley Hagerty tells in Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife

My conversation with Barbara Bradley Hagerty: 

Andy Grove R.I.P. - Our conversation from 1996

Andy Grove, perhaps more than anyone other than Steve Jobs transformed technology, drove the growth of Silicon Valley and shaped the views of so many of the people that run tech companies today.  To say that he was the Godfather of Silicon Valley would not be an understatement. 

Andy Grove, who passed away yesterday,  was one of the founders and CEO of Intel Corporation, where he transformed the role of semiconductors from an obscure part of tech, to almost a consumer product. 

He was also at the cutting edge of the computer and Internet revolution.  Back in 1996, twenty years ago, Grove wrote a book entitled Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.  It's still widely read and respected.

Upon the publication of that book in 1996, I had the chance to speak with Andy Grove.

At the time, WiFi didn’t exist, Hi Speed Internet was still a dream, and networks were reserved only for the biggest of corporations.  But Grove saw that key inflection points were coming.  He foresaw the change they would bring about the creative destruction that would result in the change that has swept the world today.

Here is a little of that 1996 conversation with Andy Grove:

The Math Myth

If we examine why so many students don’t graduate High School, we find that failure to succeed at High School math is often at the core of the problem.  Yet we are told almost every day that STEM and that math are the keys to the kingdom of success in the 21st Century.

The fact is that most jobs, even very good ones, don't require the geometry, the algebra, the trigonometry that we  are forced to lean in High School.  What they do require is a hi

gh degree of numeric literacy, critical and quantitative thinking and the ability to fully understand computation.  

That’s not what we are teaching.  Math Professor Andrew Hacker, took on this subject back in 2012 in a NY Times op ed pieces and the controversy hasn’t stopped. 

Now he’s out with a book entitled The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions.

My conversation with Andrew Hacker

Not Even Strip Clubs Are Not Safe From Corporate Homogenization

The power and reach of corporate America has become a staple of our political dialogue.  Consolidation and corporatization has touched almost every area of our culture.  The Disneyfication of our communities is almost complete. Food,  retail, coffee, service, music, movies and now even sex and our most intimate fantasies. 

Where once strip clubs had unique and individual identities, fulfilling a wide range of fantasies, today even they have gone the way of corporate homogenization.  Jessica Berson has witnessed it up close and personal and in The Naked Result: How Exotic Dance Became Big Business she shares her story.

My conversation with Jessica Berson:

Making Sense of the Meaning of Life

In this age of consumerism, instant gratification and information, it’s often hard to think about something as abstract as the “meaning of life.” The ideas of birth, death, and infinity, which used to introduce a popular television show of the early 60’s, are ideas seldom thought about today.

Yet these are questions that human beings have been asking since the beginning of time. Lee Eisenberg,  who previously looked at our relationship to money in The Number, now takes on these questions with even more enthusiasm than Monty Python did, in his new book The Point Is: Making Sense of Birth, Death, and Everything in Between

My conversation with Lee Eisenberg:

Obama and the Black Community

Last week Elizabeth Warren gave a scathing speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, about the seven year efforts, on the part of Republicans, to delegitimize the Obama Presidency.  From the birther efforts to Mitch McConnell, saying that his goal, from day one, was to defeat Obama.

It’s not possible to carry on this discussion without accepting and understanding race as a part of it.The burden of being America's first black President, can’t even be imagined.

We know from the way this current campaign is playing out, how a large swath of white America has responded.  But how has the black community viewed Obama? Long time journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan takes a look in I Heart Obama

My conversation with Erin Kaplan: 

The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

Today, globalization faces a crisis of its own success.  The international movement of goods, money, communications and ideas has been going on since even before the 12th Century.  However, today the context of that globalization has changed.

Where once driven individuals could change the world,  today the very complexity of the world that globalization has created means that it can no longer exist in an economic vacuum, free from the drag of domestic and geopolitics.

But to fully understand what we might need to do, we have to understand how we got here.  That’s the story that Jeffrey Garten tells in his new book  From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives.  Garten looks at ten people who have single handedly changed the world during the last 800 years.  It’s a kind of biography of globalization.

My conversation with Jeffrey Garten:

Nation on the Take

Money and politics have become synonymous.  Politicians spend that majority of their time raising money, (which they claim they hate) while the cost of campaigns escalates and more money is needed and more money needs to be raised.  And where does that money come from….not usually from small contributions, but from large and vested special interests.  

The result is a system that is inherently corrupt and tilted toward big money.  Even when it is practiced by the most sincere and dedicated elected officials.  

We all seem to know this...what we don't see as clearly is the way in which this simple, fundamental and relatively recent development is responsible for so much that’s wrong with our democracy.   Our wealth gap, political gridlock, inaction on some of our most pressing environmental issues, 

For focusing on this core idea, Bernie Sanders has been accused of being a single issues candidate.  But no matter where you stand on Sanders, it’s increasingly clear that this single issues is the foundational idea underlying the paralysis of 21st century America.

This is the issue that Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman take head on in Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It

My conversation with Potter and Penniman: 

Immigration Creates Heros

It’s funny how history repeats itself.  In the mid 19th Century, partly in response to the Great Famine, waves of Irish immigrants came to America. Most landed in New York, to seek a new and better life.  Then as now, questions of immigration, assimilation and criminal behavior filled the air.  The appropriately named Know Nothing Party  grew up in opposition to these waves of immigration and filled the political dialogue with fear and hatred. 

But fortunately leaders emerged in the Irish community that showed them how to be Americas. One of those was Thomas Francis Meaghar. He would become not just an Irish hero, but an American hero. Sometimes forgotten he is given new life by Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Timothy Egan in The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero

My conversation with Timothy Egan:

Why the Contextual aspect of Health Care can Save Lives and Money

With all the technology around today, doctors still often fail to make the right diagnosis.  Usually not due to any failure of knowledge or smarts, but because diagnostics is often as much art as science.

As such, it requires an almost intuitive and/or subtle understanding of the patient, his or her circumstances and sometimes it’s as much about what is not said by the patient, as that which is voiced.

Drs. Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz have taken these ideas to the next step in their research about art of context and diagnostics.  Their work is revealed in Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care.

My conversation with Dr. Saul Weiner and Dr. Alan Schwartz

Imagine if Bernie Sanders became a right wing intellectual? Stranger things have happened.

Although, incorrectly attributed to Churchill, most of you have heard the quote that   "if you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart.  If you're not a conservative by the time you're 40, you have no brain."  While it’s a little silly, it does go to the core fact that personal beliefs can change as we grow, as we evolve and as context changes.  And while people like Jonathan Haidt have made the case that political belief is in some ways tied to evolutionary psychology and biology, we know from the lives of prominent Americans who have changed their beliefs, that this has it’s limits.

Writer and filmmaker Daniel Oppenheimer in  Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century looks at the lives of six prominent figures, not just whose politics have changed, but wholes ideas, and intellectual core beliefs shifted over time from left to right. In the process, they all profoundly impacted our political dialogue.

My conversation with Daniel Oppenheimer: