Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Humans at Our Best and Worst

In trying to understand what makes us tick, people still debate the old nature vs. nurture argument. Yet modern science, medicine, psychology and biology all tell us it’s far more complex.

In fact it’s a little like a variation of the uncertainty principle in physics. The very act of trying to understand our behaviors or the behavior of others, tell us more about the observers and sometimes the way in which the observer is even influenced by others behavior

This complexity is what Robert Sapolsky examines in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

My conversation with Robert Sopolsky:




Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Railroads and Highways and Ports, Oh My

We hear over and over in our domestic political debates about the need to improve America’s infrastructure, that to do so is good for business and in the big picture, good for the economy and a projection of America as a global leader. Certainly, LaGuardia Airport and the 45 years it took to build the Second Avenue Subway in New York are not good indications.

On the other side of the world, few countries have repeatedly taken on infrastructure projects as big as those taken on by China. From the movement of water to the transportation of people, the Chinese have seen infrastructure not only as good for its internal economy, but as a true projection of pride and power. Now, these projects have pierced the Chinese border in the form of China’s One Belt, One Road project. The question is, has China gone a railroad bridge too far?

This is the among the questions that Will Doig asks in his book High-Speed Empire: Chinese Expansion and the Future of Southeast Asia.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Will Doig:














Wednesday, May 16, 2018

The Moral Horror of Our Times

Look at any days news output, and its getting harder and harder to separate fact from fiction. Not because of fake news, but because the real news and the actions of so many cross the bounds of credible behavior.
As someone recently pointed out, after a few recent days of the usual craziness, if someone had submitted the days real events has a script or story idea for West Wing, or Homeland or even House of Cards, , it would have been rejected as too absurd.

The sad truth is that it’s really happening. This is why it’s sometimes necessary to look at it all in the realm of fiction or specifically a kind of meta fiction. This is what Laurie Calhoun does in her novel You Can Leave.


My conversation with Laurie Calhoun:



If Gina Haspel is confirmed, will CIA torture begin anew?

The debate over Gina Haspel running the CIA has, like most things, devolved into a partisan political debate: The usual tribes, the usual sides, and the usual arguments. But if we can only step back a bit, we see that it’s so much more. It goes to the heart of who we are as a nation, as a moral society, and whether we can ever again be that shining city on a hill.

As the nomination becomes closer to a vote in the Senate, we’re going to talk about it with John Kiriakou, who was the first member of the intelligence community to expose the CIA’s use of torture, and as a result, became one of the very few Americans ever prosecuted under the Espionage Act, for which he served 23 months in federal prison.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with John Kiriakou.





Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Moore's Law Does Not Apply To Relationships

It’s become a cliche, but the fact is that in just the past 10 years, almost everything we do has changed. From the way we drive, take pictures, communicate, shop, to the way we seek relationships.

What hasn’t changed is the fundamental underlying idea of human relationships. Connecting, relating and maybe even falling in love. It’s probably a good thing that evolutionary biology is not subject to Moore's Law.

So how do we reconcile the two? How does Tinder or Match or Bumble sync up with our human needs, which have not really changed  all that much in thousands of years? Trying to tie these threads together is Joanna Coles in her new book Love Rules: How to Find a Real Relationship in a Digital World

My conversation with Joanna Coles:




Saturday, May 12, 2018

Globalization and its Discontents

Trump, Brexit, and the worldwide populist revolution are not causes, but symptoms. Symptoms of a wider systemic plague of fear of change, anxiety, and a feeling by people of being part of a world they no longer can control or even understand.

Technology today, rather than being a cause, is merely the host that carries the fear. Not unlike the Industrial Revolution a century ago, disruptive change takes its toll. The difference now is that it all happens at hyper speed, and in full view 24/7. How we deal with it, whether we put those that have been left behind in Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables, or find leadership that will lift up entire countries may very well determine the fate of the world.

Ian Bremmer, the president and founder of Eurasia Group is more on point than most in understanding all this is going on. He explains a big part of it in Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Ian Bremmer:




Thursday, May 10, 2018

How Humans Deal With Change...What We Get Wrong

Think about the things that dominate our world today:

The flow of huge amounts of information and how we use and process that data. The importance of all of this data in feeding the artificial intelligence that will clearly diver our future.

The ongoing creative destruction resulting from both information and technology and the way that is upending so much of what we’ve come to know and expect and be comfortable with.

And overlaying all of this is the very idea of rapid change in every aspect of our lives. We are told over and over again that humans don't do well in adapting to change, especially if it’s coming at us at dizzying pace.

What all of this might tell us, if we listen carefully, is that this brave new world will require whole new ways of thinking in order to survive in it. That just as we have to repriottive our technical still sets, we have to reorder our cognitive still sets to thrive as we move deeper into the 21st century.

This is at the core of a new way of thinking, put forth by Leonard Mlodinow in Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change.

My conversation with Leonard Mlodinow:



Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Freedom, Liberty & America...A Look Back

In his book Profiles in Courage, JFK writes that courage exists “when a man does what he must — in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers, and pressures — and that is the basis of all human morality.”

It’s hard to even think about this in the realm of pubic life in 2018. A time when courage is in short supply, reality is subjective and facts are not the “stubborn things” that John Adams said they were, but merely fungible talking points to gin up the base.

It’s sad then that we have to rely almost solely on history to find examples of this courage and morality. That’s where multiple Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Thomas Ricks tanks us in his joint biography Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

My conversation with Thomas Ricks:




Thursday, May 3, 2018

Dear Madam President

There is a line from the 1973 movie The Way We Were, where Katie Morosky, played by Barbra Streisand, talks about Hubbell Gardner, played by Robert Redford. She says of Gardner/Redford, “In a way he was like the country he lived in; everything came too easily to him.”

And that has been a narrative, albeit, often a false one, of ease and grace that the public often seeks to buy into with respect to its leaders. Certainly Kennedy successfully exploited it, maybe even laid the political predicate for it, in his race against Nixon in 1960. In a way it was even a part of the Obama narrative.

On the flip side, it may have very well worked against Hillary Clinton in 2016. It seems that for Hillary Clinton, nothing came easily. Everything she had ever achieved was, or appeared to be, a struggle. One that played out on the public stage for more than 40 years.

Jennifer Palmieri got to see this up close and personal as Hillary Clinton’s Communications Director, and herself a veteran of many years in politics and in the White House. She brings it all into focus in her new book Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World

My conversation with Jennifer Palmieri:




Why We Have More Time to Have No Time

Isn’t it interesting that the more we have technology to save us time, the more we complain about not having enough time. Before the digital revolution we never heard as much talk about everyone not having enough time.

Just think about how much time we spend setting up our CRM and To do list apps, when a simple list in a notebook might have actually been faster.

And while the technology of everything from dating apps to GPS, may make things more efficient, do they actually limit our ability to see the wider world, and in so doing make us cogs in a wheel that sacrifice our humanity and our sense of wonder. That what author and distinguished scholar Edward Tenner looks at in The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can't Do

My conversation with Edward Tenner:




Wednesday, May 2, 2018

The Fragility of Hope


Woody Allen once said that the world was divided into the horrible and the miserable. The horrible he thought were people with terminal cases, blind people, and the crippled. “I don't know how they get through life,” he said. “It's amazing to me.”

To answer Woody Allen's existential question
, it is usually hope that carries the day. But the form that that hope takes can vary widely. Sometimes, it grows out of faith, sometimes out of denial and sometimes out of science. This is often true for both real cutting edge science, or the placebo that is most Western medicine.

Author and journalist Richard M. Cohen, has long lived with conditions Woody Allen would call horrible. Yet though his writings and his voice, he has not only defined his hope, he has given it to others. He does so once again in his look at stem cell research in Chasing Hope: A Patient's Deep Dive into Stem Cells, Faith, and the Future.

My conversation with Richard M. Cohen: