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, December 30, 2019

Why Most Health Care is Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Some of you may have seen the story that owning a dog gave you a 27% chance of living longer. Some of that was related to the exercise of w...

Friday, December 27, 2019

William Greider R.I.P.

William Greider always knew that the chickens would come home to roost. Over many conversations, since 1997, he seemed to know and report th...

Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Something to Think About As You Eat that Holiday Steak........

It’s long been an adage that what we eat, defines who we are. That’s never been truer than in our polarized world today and beef and its ma...

Thursday, December 19, 2019

Can America's Military Ever Recover?

We all know that whether it’s a child’s toy or a powerful institution if something is built solid, misuse or the infliction of damage will n...

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

From Useful Idiot to Working Asset

Perhaps our greatest spy novelist of the cold war, John le Carré, talks about what he sees as the appetite for superpower, that still exists...

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

The Model For Taking It To The Streets

Just as we saw in America in the 1960s, as we saw when the Berlin Wall fell, as we witnessed in the Middle East, during the Arab Spring, and...

Thursday, December 12, 2019

Why Quantum Mechanics Matter and Why You Should Care: A Conversation with Physicist Sean Carroll

The great screenwriter William Goldman once said of Hollywood that "nobody knows anything." The physicist Richard Feynman once sa...

Monday, December 9, 2019

What Happens to Ancestry Testing DNA?

It’s no surprise that many fear technology is out of control. AI, facial recognition and robotics are the stuff of science fear. But it’s ...

Monday, December 2, 2019

The Best and the Brightest of America's Diplomats

Clausewitz said that politics or diplomacy was “war by other means.” Churchill put it more colorfully when he said that “diplomacy is the...

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 ...

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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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