POSTHOC Salons LIVE w/ Susan MacTavish Best - Intimate Conversations on Topics of the Zeitgeist

For our last Posthoc salon of 2023 we invited economist Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg into our living room for an evening of conversation and music.  Hilda is an entrepreneur, investor, author and philanthropist. She is the founder and chairman of Strategic Investment Group, an independent investment management firm. For a dozen years, Hilda was the Chief Investment Officer (Pensions) at The World Bank. She’s served on the board of numerous public companies  (US Airways, McGraw-Hill, Harvard Management, General Mills etc) and nonprofits (National Opera, National Symphony). She is the founder of Orchestra of the Americas  which finds diverse musical talent in underserved communities and gives musicians a platform to develop their talents and launch a career playing music professionally in orchestras around the world. Under the umbrella of OA is the Global Leaders Institute, which offers students an opportunity to study for an MBA for the Arts, a degree supporting artistic innovation and social impact. And so we had the most sublime folk music from half a dozen artists throughout the evening from the OA program which you’ll hear throughout the conversation.

This salon fell under the Economics & Human Flourishing priority at Templeton World Charity Foundation and it was supported by a grant POSTHOC received from the Foundation. TWCF funds grants that investigate individual freedom, free market theories, entrepreneurialism and how they relate to human flourishing globally.

We hosted a salon with Substack in LA to celebrate their community of writers and creators, and to meet the company's co-founder Hamish McKenzie, whose interview you're about to hear. We discussed the origins of the company, Hamish's own background as a writer and what about the platform fosters such a unique relationship between creators and subscribers. 

The Age of Prediction salon was co-hosted with Amy Brand, Publisher, MIT Press celebrating the publication of the new book The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk by MIT Press authors Igor Tulchinsky and Christopher Mason. Igor is the Founder/CEO of WorldQuant, a quantitative investment firm. Christopher is Professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Director of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction. Alyssa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, co-moderates the conversation with POSTHOC founder and CEO, Susan MacTavish Best. 

On the music front, Frank Almond performed on his rare, 400 year old violin, and shared the story of its theft and return. Frank held the Charles and Marie Caestecker Concertmaster Chair of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra for 25 years. He has also held the Concertmaster position with the Rotterdam Philharmonic with Valery Gergiev and Guest Concertmaster of the London Philharmonic with Kurt Masur.

This salon was underwritten by the MIT Press. The MIT Press is a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design, and is widely considered the world’s most innovative university press. The MIT Press has been an open access leader for over two decades, publishing hundreds of freely accessible books every year. Known for bold design and creative technology, the Press mobilizes knowledge by publishing provocative works from leading thinkers around the globe for the broadest possible impact and audience.

In this week's edition of the Posthoc podcast we're interviewing Matt Gutman in Los Angeles about his life, experiences and his new book. Matt is ABC News' Chief National Correspondent and his book No Time to Panic came out this week and is currently featured in Oprah's book club. We'll also hear a musical performance from Queen Esther who flew in from NYC for her very first performance in LA - enjoy!

You're listening to the Posthoc Salon Podcast and in this episode we'll be speaking with Emma Cherniavsky, CEO of UNHCR (UK), the UK arm of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. We'll here music from pianist Maria Angel Garcia, who won first prizes and has been a semi- finalist in well renowned national and international piano competitions. This salon is supported by a grant Posthoc received from Templeton World Charity Foundation.

You're listening to the Posthoc Salon Podcast and in this episode we'll be speaking with Emma Cherniavsky, CEO of UNHCR (UK), the UK arm of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. We'll here music from pianist Maria Angel Garcia, who won first prizes and has been a semi- finalist in well renowned national and international piano competitions. This salon is supported by a grant Posthoc received from Templeton World Charity Foundation.

Embracing the Future of Humanity with Art & Science - This salon, tackling the rapid evolution of our relationship with technology, was co-hosted in London with Templeton World Charity Foundation and co-moderated by TWCF President Andrew Serazin.Our guest interviewees will include artist Agnieszka Pilat, who paints large-scale portraits of technology with the help of AI-powered painting-assistant robots. We’ll also be speaking to Michael Muthukrishna, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and author of the forthcoming book - A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of How We Got Here and Where We're Going. We will have two musical performances: Kiran Gandhi, aka Madame Gandhi. Kiran is an electronic music producer, artist and activist, and soul-singer J Warner, who both brought the house down at this salon.

In this episode of the Posthoc podcast, Susan will be doing her third interview with Justin Garcia, Executive Director of The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University about The State of Sex, Love, Gender and Well-Being in 2023 in Los Angeles and Beyond. This is POSTHOC's second salon with Justin; our last one was a public salon in the fall of 2022 with New York Public Radio at WNYC's Greene Space. While that salon primarily focused on New Yorkers, this time around Justin and I will dig in on West Coast data and beyond about the state of love, sex and relationships. Our artist in residence Grace Weber will be performing her new single intimate, and she brought along another wildly talent artist known as Love Moor. You’ll hear both of their songs throughout the interview - enjoy and follow us at @posthocsalons on Instagram. 

Posthoc's latest salon on forgiveness was co-hosted w/ Templeton World Charity Foundation, surrounding their participation in Harvard University's conference “Forgiveness: Interdisciplinary Perspectives." We invited Templeton grantee, psychologist Ev Worthington who has been studying the science of forgiveness for over 30 years and in addition to being a renowned researcher on the subject. His interview with Susan and Templeton President Andrew Serazin is woven into musical performances on the subject of forgiveness by Queen Esther and Ben Arthur of SongWriter Podcast.

In this episode of the Posthoc podcast, Susan interviews Dan Lyons, a New York Times best-selling author who has also written for the HBO hit series Silicon Valley, served as senior editor at Forbes, and has been published in virtually every major outlet from The Economist, NYT and Wall Street Journal to Wired, NPR, BBC and The Guardian. Dan's latest book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in a World That Won't Stop Talking, was featured on the cover of Time Magazine in February.

This salon is supported by a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation as part of their listening and learning in a polarized world initiative. This podcast also features a very special musical performance from jazz-soul artist Koa Ho, curated by our POSTHOC artist-in-residence, Grammy-winner Grace Weber.