Jeff Schechtman's "Talk Cocktail"

"To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow creatures..." John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty"

Monday, November 25, 2019

Kickstarting a Better World

The great playwright Arthur Miller once wrote that too often “we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Perhaps nowhere is ...

Monday, November 18, 2019

Fake is Sometimes Real

Artificial flavors, fake news, authentic copies, and real replicas. They all sound like oxymoronic gibberish at worst, overzealous marketing...

Monday, November 11, 2019

Only Whistleblowers Can Save Democracy

Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Coleen Rowley, and the whistleblower who let us know about the Ukraine call, are just a few whose actions s...

Why is Science Under Assault, and What We Should Do About?

Even when we don’t realize it, science is part of our lives. Physics, chemistry, biology...it’s all essential to our survival. So why is t...

Monday, November 4, 2019

The Battle of Mosul - The Last Great Battle Against Isis

While many of you can recite the great battles of WW I and II and even the Civil War, the more recent battle that have been fought in the Mi...

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

He is a Being Made of Television

There is not a morning that goes by without some story about the impact of social media. The power of Facebook or Twitter, or Instagram. Wi...

Saturday, October 26, 2019

The Science of Kindness Is Real

In many communities you often see people wearing a button that says Be Kind. In an ever competitive and sometimes selfish world that’s not...

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Why Health Care Is Broken, and How to Fix It...Hint..Medicare for All is Not the Answer

Imagine if you went to buy a car and rather than one price for the car, you had to essentially buy it ala carte. You had to negotiate a sepa...

Monday, October 21, 2019

Deep State: Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law: A conversation with James B. Stewart

The world is a complex place. The news comes at us at hyper-speed and 24/7. All while we have to deal with family, work and life. Therefo...

Thursday, October 17, 2019

Harold Bloom 1930 - 2019

Harold Bloom, who died last week at the age of 89, was one of our great teachers and literary critics. Often out of sync with contemporary l...

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

A Conversation with the Recipients of This Year's Nobel Prize in economics: Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee

Beyond the common denominator of poverty what are aspects of the poor that we just don't understand? We've learned that poverty ...

Monday, October 14, 2019

The End of America's Cultural Hegemony

A look at the news any day reminds us that America is no longer the singular dominant power in the world. This is true vis a vis soft power,...

Saturday, October 12, 2019

The Tyranny of Virtue: Political Correctness Run Amuck on Our Campuses

Once upon a time, we didn’t have to think about political correctness. And we survived as a culture! We self-corrected, we became more sen...

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Just Who is Brett Kavanaugh?

Most of us remember being transfixed, just one year ago, to the hearings from now Supreme Court Justice Brent Kavanaugh. This week, as the ...

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Why Understanding Silicon Valley History is Necessary To Deal With Today's Tech Issues

So much of what passes for history today is one dimensional. We see the events, the names, the places the timeline and the heroes and the v...

Monday, September 30, 2019

Trump's War on the FBI

Today Trump's war is against Congress and the intelligence community. Previously he went to war with the FBI with the same mob boss appr...

Thursday, September 26, 2019

We are All Cult Members Now!

As a nation we’ve certainly gone through difficult times, times that as Thomas Paine said, try men’s souls. We’ve been divided as during the...

Sunday, September 22, 2019

The CIA in the Post 9/11 World

Our attention span grows shorter while the events creating a whirlwind around the world, increase. N. Korea, Iran, China, Russia, Saudi Arab...

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Cokie Roberts

Over the many years of doing this program, I'm sorry to say I only had one opportunity to talk with Cokie Roberts. We talked back in 1...

She Said

In All the President's Men, as reported by Woodward and Bernstein, Deep Throat says to Woodward, in the bowls of a garage, “it leads eve...

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About

Jeff Schechtman: Napa, California, United States; I grew up during the Kennedy Presidency. It was a time when the best and the brightest sat center stage in the nation's psyche. I've always remembered the story, that at an arts gala at the White House, Kennedy looked around the room and proclaimed it "the greatest gathering of talent since Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Without the benefit of such trappings, I've had the opportunity, for the past nineteen years, to have a seat at an international banquet of ideas and history. My radio program provided me a unique opportunity to "travel" around the world and speak to thousands of the most imaginative thinkers and leaders in the arenas of politics, religion, journalism, business, popular culture, academics, science, economics, history, and medicine. During these years, I have taken many people with me on this journey. It has been a momentous time. The trauma of politics, the onslaught of technology, the insights of science, and the changes in the human condition make this a period almost unequaled in history. I'm excited that technology has now made it possible for me to take more of you along with me on this journey.

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