Recipe for Survival: A Conversation with Dana Ellis Hunnes:

All the way back in 1971, with the publication of Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for Small Planet, the world began to take notice of the connection between what we eat, who we are, our environmental future, and the sustainability of our food supply.

Since then, the external forces that impact all of these things have brought more pressures to bear. The state of our climate and its consequences, the quality of our food, and how long we live are all going in the wrong direction. Even more problematic is that each seems to be siloed.

Dana Ellis Hunnes, in her new book, Recipe for Survival, takes a more modern and holistic approach in looking at ways to improve our health and at the same time improve the health of our planet.

My conversation with Dana Ellis Hunnes: :

Tell Me A Story: A Conversation with Frank Rose

It’s the power of narrative that shapes every aspect of our lives. We rush to tell stories to our friends and family to validate our experiences. We buy products and brands because of the story they tell us. We vote, make friends, and even enemies, because of the stories that we believe.

Narrative has an emotional pull on us. Sometimes we take away joy, anger, laughter, or sadness. People don’t rush out in large numbers to see PowerPoints, policy discussions, or even most documentaries. But they will react to drama, comedy, or horror. They will like or dislike social media, based on the stories they have ingested.

It all sounds so simple, so logical, but it’s often lost in the cacophony of noise, data, and information that surrounds us.

Frank Rose writes about this in his new book The Sea We Swim In: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World

How Global Migration is Actually Moving the World Forward: My conversation with Parag Kahanna

At no time in civilization have so many forces been at play in reshaping the world. The complexity of everything is growing. Global geopolitical risks are rising. Technologies are impacting everything and creating new anxiety. Climate change is reshaping our very topography. The economic gap within and between nations is rising, and a younger generation feels alienated from being able to control the levers that will shape their changing future. Arguably, this convergence of forces and events is having precisely the wrong effect in parts of the world.

Instead of huddling together to take on these challenges, our anxiety and alienation has made the world more tribal, more fearful, more nationalistic, and we see the worst of populism on the rise. Rather than seeing the world and all this change as an opportunity, too many want to dig in, shelter in place, and simply be angry. How we move on from this is the work and insight of visionary futurist Parag Khanna. Khanna's latest book is Move: The Forces Uprooting Us. 

My WhoWhatWhy conversation with Parag Khanna: 

How Chinese Language is the Core of its Culture: A Conversation with Jing Tsu

The story of how the world's oldest living language adapted to the modern world is one that carries within it the story of how language itself shapes our vision and our thinking. How the quest for progress is often stronger than the pull of history. It’s how a language can literally be reinvented, iterated and adapted, and at the same time carry a country along with it.

That is the story of the evolution of the Chinese language that my my guest Jing Tsu tells in her new book Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern.

My conversation with Jing Tsu: