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"

Thursday, September 30, 2021

No Cell Service, No Technology and Electrosensitives Everywhere: Stephen Kurczy Talks about "The Quiet Zone"

I suppose even the most ardent technologists have at times wanted to get off the grid...usually that urge doesn't last long. But for th...

Saturday, September 18, 2021

As You Look At The Emmys, Remember That It Is Only Streaming and Entertainment That is Bringing the World Together

It wasn’t very long ago that to see a foreign language film, you wound up in the smallest theater in the multiplex or a little art theater s...

Tuesday, September 14, 2021

The News About the News: A conversation with Martha Minow

For journalism, it may be the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, the national media is more vibrant than ever. The New Y...

Saturday, September 4, 2021

The Myth of "Nobody Saw it Coming"

The more we know about disasters, the more we realize that most were preordained. Covid 19 or Katrina, the current fires in California or t...

Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Democracy Dies In The Chaos of Competing Truths: A Conversation with Robert M. Smith

Survey after survey shows that trust in the news media is at an all time low. And it’s not just the left/right divide. A recent study by the...

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

America Is No Longer A Serious Nation: My conversation with Tom Nichols:

Almost everywhere in the world, liberal democracy is, if not under siege, or at least being tested. Only in rare historical times have would...

Friday, August 20, 2021

Roger Bennett Teaches Us About Soccer AND About America

From Alexis de Tocqueville, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn to John Lennon, it has often taken those born outside of America to help us understand...

Sunday, August 15, 2021

The Second American Revolution - Will it Ever Be Won?

In the 1960s and early 1970s political and social battles were fought by people who were trying to reshape America. Sixty years later, we ar...

Thursday, August 5, 2021

The Ultimate Corporate Delusion - The Story of WeWork: A conversation with Maureen Farrell

If someone pitched the story idea of a guy who was a former baby clothes salesman who then started a company that sublet co-working office s...

Sunday, August 1, 2021

Trump's Final Days: My conversation with Carol Leonnig

If daily news reporting is the first draft of history, books that come out almost contemporaneously to events are I suppose the second draft...

Thursday, July 29, 2021

A Car for the Ages: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings - A Conversation with Earl Swift

While everyone has their own personal list, we could all maybe agree on some of the most iconic cars ever made. The VW Beetle, the 1968 Ford...

Friday, July 23, 2021

Bill Gates Has Always Shown Us Who He Is: A Conversation with Tim Schwab

Two years ago if you convened a focus group to give an opinion on Bill Gates and his foundation, the response would have been overwhelmingly...

Sunday, July 18, 2021

What AI Really Is, Whose Making It Happen and What It Means For The Future: My conversation with Cade Metz

When Hal asked Astronaut David Bowman to “open the pod bay doors,” it was as if our most primal fear of machines came rushing headlong into ...

Monday, July 12, 2021

How We Got To Globalization Today: A Conversation with Jeffrey Garten

In the period immediately following WWII, the United States dominated the global economy. We had won the war, and the economic status that ...

Thursday, July 8, 2021

A Constitution of Knowledge: A Conversation with Jonathan Rauch

Some days it seems that everything we’ve taken for granted with respect to the functioning of America and American democracy is under siege....

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

We Are Our Information: A conversation with Caleb Scharf

We are awash in data and information. So much so that we wonder if it has any meaning at all? But what if the very existence of the informa...

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Amazon, Bezos and a Global Empire

Back in 1953, it was reported that Charlie Wilson, then head of General Motors, said that what’s good for General Motors was good for Americ...

Monday, June 28, 2021

The New Addiction to Outrage: Our American Psychosis

There once was a time when we were, if not united, at least we had a common set of cultural touchstones. Movies, TV, sports, even the three ...

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Reasons for Hope in Rural America: A Conversation with Gigi Georges

In an effort to make urban American understand rural America, particularly since the 2016 election, books about rural America have become a...

Friday, June 18, 2021

A Conversation with Chris Matthews:

I think we can all stipulate that we are at a precarious moment in the relatively short history of American democracy. Even among those not ...

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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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