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"

Wednesday, September 28, 2022

We Live in a Golden Age of Ignorance: A conversation with Andy Borowitz

Look at the British press most days, and you’ll find that the government and the royals are being skewered and made fun of. The Brits have a...

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Harvard Is Once Again The Center of Psychedelics: A Conversation with Patrick Schmidt

If our current era is one of politics, technology, and economics, it's fair to say that the 60s were an era where social science, self-r...

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

The End of American Competitiveness: A Conversation with Michael Mazarr

For much of our 246 years, we were a young, dynamic, striving country. Sure, we had flaws, we made mistakes, we took wrong turns, but we bel...

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

How Did The Pandemic Change Us? A Conversation with Katie Hafner

Early on in the pandemic, in the earliest days of the lockdown, we wondered how this was going to change the world. Ironically, it was easie...

Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Why Harvey Weinstein Should Matter: A Conversation with Ken Auletta

In spite of the supposed transparency of the internet age, more and more we live in the age of complicity. Last month we saw it with the tro...

Monday, August 1, 2022

The Trump Roster of Toadies: A conversation with Mark Leibovich

Modern Washington has always offered up an impressive roster of toadies. Yet the Trump administration seems to have offered us a unique per...

Monday, June 27, 2022

Another Love Discouse: A Conversation with Edie Meidav

Sometimes the world makes little sense. That’s why when the right novel comes along, it helps us to look inward at the things that really sh...

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

David Gergen on How Great Leaders are Made

We often look at leadership today as about celebrity or attention. In a time when we have elected a reality show star as President, when cel...

Tuesday, June 7, 2022

Why Anxiety is Good for You!

It seems we live in a society where everyone wants to be protected. We don’t want to hear views we disagree with for fear that it might upse...

Monday, May 23, 2022

Another Way Forward for Democrats

Back in 2002 in the wake of the George W. Bush election political demographer Ruy Teixeira, along with journalist John Judas, wrote The Emer...

Sunday, May 15, 2022

How Wars End: A conversation with Gideon Rose

Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously said that it’s much easier to start a war than it is to end it. Certainly, we’ve seen this up close and pers...

Friday, May 6, 2022

The Misinformation, Censorship and Noise That The Pandemic Gave Us: A Conversation with Joel Simon

While everyone is busy opining on the unknown and probably minor impact of a change of ownership of Twitter, we have literally ignored the c...

Thursday, April 28, 2022

Why the Internet Is Less Safe Than Flying or Driving or Eating: A Conversation with Bruce Schneier

The metaverse notwithstanding, the nexus between what happens on the internet, and what happens in the real, physical world, is disappearing...

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

A Whistleblower Stands Up To China: A Conversation with Ashley Yablon

Think about how different the world is because of whistleblowers. Think about the impact of Daniel Ellsberg, Coleen Rowley, Sherron Watkins,...

Monday, April 18, 2022

The Pandemic Profiteers: A Conversation with J. David McSwane

Even if the details were never reported in real-time, you knew instinctively during the chaos of the early days of the Pandemic, in the wint...

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Is Crypto a Libertarian Dream or a Left-Wing Nightmare? A Conversation with Daniel Pinchbeck

Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, Dows, and the blockchain they ride on are still, in the view of many, the decentralized financial instruments of the...

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Is the Journalism of Old Still Viable?: A Conversation with Brian Karem

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 before. The...

Thursday, March 10, 2022

Corruption is America's Operating System: A Conversation with Sarah Chayes

Historian and journalist Sarah Chayes , argues that we can’t fix our floundering democracy until we face — and fix — our current levels of c...

Tuesday, March 1, 2022

The Battle of Banks Not Tanks: A Conversation with Bill Browder

Beyond the minute-by-minute reporting of the ground war, the Twitter feeds, TickTock images, there are broader and more economically complex...

Monday, February 28, 2022

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 connec...

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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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