Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

By Alan Alda

Society & Culture Comedy

What's Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda about?

Learn to connect better with others in every area of your life. Immerse yourself in spirited conversations with people who know how hard it is, and yet how good it feels, to really connect with other people – whether it’s one person, an audience or a whole country. You'll know many of the people in these conversations – they are luminaries in our culture. Some you may not know. But what links them all is their powerful ability to relate and communicate. It's something we need now more than ever.

4.6

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LAST EPISODE

Heather Cox Richardson: She...

11.28.2023

Two million of us get a letter in our inboxes every morning with a calm, clarifying take on what happened yesterday— from the perspective of a historian, yet written with the intimacy of a friend.

Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda episodes:

11.28.2023 Heather Cox Richardson: She’ll Write You a Letter Two million of us get a letter in our inboxes every morning with a calm, clarifying take on what happened yesterday— from the perspective of a historian, yet written with the intimacy of a friend.
11.21.2023 David Brooks: How to Know a Person Columnist and author David Brooks tells how he’s changed over his 60 something years – in part through the books he’s written exploring how people see themselves and others. He shares the insights he’s gained into truly knowing the people ...
11.14.2023 Marcus du Sautoy: Around the World in 80 Games Enjoy playing games? You’ll enjoy them even more once renowned mathematician, Oxford University professor and avid game player Marcus du Sautoy tells Alan why they so fascinate us. And Alan tells Marcus about his favorite game – one even Marcus ...
11.07.2023 How "Maid" Was Made Stephanie Land’s lifelong passion for writing – along with a college degree she could ill afford – led to a bestselling book and a hit TV series, allowing her to escape the poverty trap ensnaring so many single mothers.
10.31.2023 Frank Felberbaum: Don’t Forget! Not only does he have an astonishing memory himself, but Frank Felberbaum has taught thousands of others, including Alan, how to improve their memory skills – especially for putting names to faces.
10.24.2023 Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda - Season 23 trailer Alan and Executive Producer Graham Chedd chat about and play excerpts from Alan's conversations with some of the guests in the new season, beginning next week. Guests include astronomer Abraham Amiri; memory expert Frank Felberbaum; and actor Leslie Odom Jr.
10.17.2023 Walter Isaacson: Shadowing Elon Musk The acclaimed biographer spent two years in Musk’s company as his subject launched rockets, built electric cars, decided to save humanity by sending us to Mars, became the richest man in the world and bought Twitter – all the while ...
10.10.2023 Laurel Braitman: Writing Wrongs A life full of adventure while struggling with grief led her to what she does so effectively today – helping doctors to level with colleagues and patients through storytelling when things go wrong.
10.03.2023 Carl Safina: Wisdom from a Baby Owl Carl tells how rescuing a baby owl helped him and his wife get through the Covid lockdown – and how it renewed their bond with nature. There’s wisdom in it for the rest of us, too, whose relationship with the ...
09.26.2023 Joe Henrich: How Culture Has Shaped Our Bodies and Brains He’s fascinated by how culture has shaped our evolution – not only changing our bodies and expanding our brains but even expanding our ability to cooperate. And the more diverse a culture, the better its ability to innovate.
09.19.2023 Kashmir Hill: Your Face Belongs to Us That’s the title of a new book by New York Times technology reporter Kashmir Hill. Her book is both deeply researched and downright scary, as spelled out in the book’s subtitle: A Secretive Start-Up’s Quest to End Privacy As We ...
09.12.2023 Matthew Walker: Sleep REALLY Matters Author of a best-selling book called Why We Sleep, and host of the Matt Walker Podcast, he’s become the go-to expert on everything to do with sleep, from how it keeps both mind and body healthy to why we dream.
09.05.2023 Maya Shankar: Beginning from an Ending A brilliant violinist in her teens, her world came crashing down when an injury ended her career even as it was beginning. Remarkably, she turned that loss into a PhD in neuroscience, a stint in the White House and a ...
08.29.2023 Adam Mastroianni: Why You So Often Get It Wrong Do you believe people are worse now than they use to be? That smarter people are happier people? That you know when to quit a conversation? Wrong on all counts, according to Adam Mastroianni, a social psychologist. He’s also a ...
08.22.2023 Nancy Kanwisher: Your Brain is a Swiss Army Knife Nancy Kanwisher has discovered many areas of the brain that are specialized for one particular purpose— like recognizing faces – which is interesting to Alan because of his inability to remember the faces of people he meets. Other specialized areas ...
08.15.2023 Elizabeth Rush: Journey to the Doomsday Glacier She managed to write a lyrical, moving book about her journey to a massive glacier in Antarctica that, if it collapses into the ocean, would cause a catastrophic rise in sea level. Unexpectedly, it’s also a book about her difficulty ...
08.08.2023 Robert Klein: He Observes, We Laugh The actor/writer/comedian has been an inspiration to comedians like Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld. And he’s been inspired himself by greats of the past in the exacting art of finding what’s funny in our daily lives – when observed from ...
08.01.2023 Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda - Season 22 trailer Alan and Executive Producer Graham Chedd chat about and play excerpts from Alan's conversations with some of the guests in the new season, beginning next week. Guests include comedian Robert Klein; writer Elizabeth Rush; and neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher.
07.25.2023 Dan Dennett: Fake People Aren’t Funny Counterfeit people, the seductively appealing Deep Fakes made possible by AI, are just the beginning of what the distinguished philosopher Dan Dennett says is a threat to humanity. This spring, he joined hundreds of other thought leaders in signing a ...
07.18.2023 Steve Sloman and Phil Fernbach: How Do You Know That? Most of us don’t know most things. Yet most of us also think we understand a lot (OK, not quantum mechanics or Federal Reserve policy). We are all living with what Sloman and Fernbach argue is an Illusion of how ...
07.11.2023 Aomawa Shields: When an Actor is Starstruck Torn between astronomy and acting, she has landed in the sweet spot: leader of a research team judging other planets for their hospitality for life, while using the skills she learned as an actor to connect with and encourage a ...
07.04.2023 Alan Lightman: Can Science Explain Spirituality? A physicist whose world has no room for spirits, but who has experienced many eerily transcendent moments – both in nature and in his work – sets out to understand the unexplainable.
06.27.2023 Steve Israel: Disagreeing Without the Hate A member of the US House of Representatives for 16 years before retiring – unindicted and undefeated as he likes to say – Steve Israel knows the value of good communication, and the cost to us all when it’s missing.
06.20.2023 Dan Levitt: You Are Stardust. Really Every atom in your body – and there are more than all the grains of sand in the world – came from outer space, many of them created moments after the Big Bang that began it all. Dan Levitt tells ...
06.13.2023 Adam Gopnik: The Joy of Getting Good at Something Hard The New Yorker essayist explores the mystery of mastery as he tackles skills he believed he could never learn. Including boxing, figure drawing and – in his 50s – driving.
06.06.2023 Brenna Hassett: Why We Are Weird Of all the attributes that make us humans unique – or in archeologist Brenna Hassett’s view, weird – the weirdest of all is our extraordinarily long childhood. In her delightful book, Growing Up Human, she explores the many tricks evolution ...
05.30.2023 Michael Turner: The Dazzling Cosmos When funding for the James Webb Space Telescope was in doubt, cosmologist Michael Turner argued passionately that it would transform our understanding of the origin and fate of our universe. Today, with the spectacular images being taken by the Webb ...
05.23.2023 Daniel Libeskind: His buildings speak for themselves The prizewinning architect has designed some of the world’s most dramatic, daring, and memorable buildings. Inspired by optimism, wonder, music, and light they challenge their visitors to experience them as a story.
05.16.2023 Eric Topol: A Covid Reckoning With the national state of emergency for Covid-19 now officially over, we invited physician and author Topol to reflect on his experience writing a regular online newsletter attempting to counter the misinformation flooding the internet. Called Ground Truths, it takes ...
05.09.2023 Clear + Vivid with Alan Alda - Season 21 trailer Alan and Executive Producer Graham Chedd chat about and play excerpts from Alan's conversations with some of the guests in the new season, beginning next week. Guests include architect Daniel Libeskind; bioarchaeologist Brenna Hassett; and a return visit from congressman ...
05.02.2023 Ken Duckworth: Navigating mental illness Chief medical officer of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Dr Duckworth has written a guide for those with mental health problems that along with advice from experts tells of the lessons to be learned from people and families who ...
04.25.2023 Susan Goldin-Meadow: Thinking with your hands Decades spent studying the way we use our hands when we talk has convinced Susan Goldin-Meadow that not only do gestures help our listeners understand us; gestures help us understand ourselves. They help us think, and as children, even to ...
04.18.2023 Valerie Fridland: English evolves, like it or not Annoyed by all those likes and so’s and you knows, not mention ahs and ums? In her delightfully titled book Like, Literally, Dude, Valerie Fridland argues that we should stop grumping about language tics and recognize that they are inevitable ...
04.11.2023 Dava Sobel: The Women Who Brought the Stars to Earth Starting in the late 19th century, a group of women at the Harvard Observatory pored over hundreds of thousands of glass photographic plates bearing images of billions of stars. It was the beginning of a revolution in understanding what stars ...
04.04.2023 Judd Apatow: Funny, With a Side of Feeling For decades now, he’s been building a comedy empire as writer, director and producer of a string of movies and TV series. Judd Apatow explores his early experiences soaking up the comedy writing of others and how he came to ...
03.28.2023 Kieran Setiya: Facing up to Life Life is hard. But drawing on the insights of philosophers ancient and modern, Keiran Setiya has written a witty and hope-filled book chronicling his own realization that, even with chronic pain, while his life may not be perfect, it can ...
03.21.2023 Nita Farahany: The Battle For Your Brain Her new book takes a deep dive into neurotechnology – the ability to read and record your brain waves. While there are many potential benefits – Nita herself uses a simple device to help control her migraines – she is ...
03.14.2023 Liev Schreiber: The Ukrainian Connection Inspired by his Ukrainian grandfather, Liev has launched a campaign to fund humanitarian relief for the people of Ukraine. His several trips there included a meeting with a fellow actor, now president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
03.07.2023 Alan chats with the bots Mike Farrell makes a guest appearance to perform with Alan the first new MASH scene in 40 years – a scene written by a chatbot. Most of Alan’s other guests are themselves chatbots, including one that falsely claims to be ...
02.28.2023 Kevin Kelly: Help Wanted – AI Whisperers Alan is a little obsessed with chatbots, and he’s become only too aware that these products of artificial intelligence can become seriously – even dangerously – stupid. What’s urgently needed, argues tech guru Kevin Kelly, are people with a particular ...
02.21.2023 Sy Montgomery: For the love of hawks… and turtles Her almost uncanny ability to connect with creatures from rhinos to octopuses led her to a love affair with one of the planet's swiftest and fiercest predators. Meanwhile Sy Montgomery has been in a nurturing relationship with a collection of ...
02.14.2023 Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda - Season 20 trailer Alan and Executive Producer Graham Chedd chat about and play excerpts from Alan's conversations with some of the guests in the new season, beginning next week. Guests include naturalist Sy Montgomery; comedian Judd Apatow; and founding executive editor of Wired ...
02.07.2023 Cassandra Quave: Hunting Plants That Heal A childhood illness robbed her of a leg, but that hasn’t stopped her from trekking through jungles, swamps and mountains in search of medicinal plants. Her hope: that her discoveries may lead to new medications to counter the rising threat ...
01.31.2023 Sara Seager: Is There Life Out There? Pioneering a new way to search for signs of life on planets circling other suns, Sara Seager battled through a devastating personal loss to see her method vindicated by NASA’s powerful new space telescope.
01.24.2023 Pamela Adlon: Getting Better All the Time She wrote, produced, directed and starred in the hit series “Better Things” for five years. Nominated multiple times for multiple awards, she recently directed her first movie. She trades reminiscences with Alan, who’s known her since she was a kid.
01.17.2023 Karen Bakker: The Sounds of Life Her new book lets us eavesdrop on the chatter between creatures – even plants – that our ears can’t detect. And reveals how new technologies, including AI, are opening the possibility of our being able to converse with other animals.
01.10.2023 Daniel Lubetzky: On a Mission to Spread Kindness The founder of the multi-billion-dollar nutrition bar company KIND has rolled out "Starts With Us," a non-partisan movement working to overcome cultural extremism by fostering curiosity, compassion and courage as daily habits.
01.03.2023 Kathy Kleiman: The six women who programmed the first modern computer Built during WWII, the world’s first electronic computer, the ENIAC, was an engineering marvel. But at 80 ft long and 6 ft tall it was mute until it was brought to life by six young women mathematicians who figured out ...
12.27.2022 Thomas Boothby: On a Tough Little Guy With Secrets You need a microscope to see them, but tardigrades aren’t only nature’s ultimate survivors – they hold secrets that may make vaccines more available and help astronauts live in space.
12.20.2022 Alison Gopnik: Making AI more childlike The renowned expert on how babies learn about the world through curiosity and exploration is now collaborating with artificial intelligence researchers to make AI systems smarter by being more like children.

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