Talk Cocktail

Although the origins of the quote are a bit murky, the idea that the only way to predict the future is to invent it, certainly seems true in the 21st century. In fact, that future is being invented right now. 
As technology moves from dedicated devices, to virtually everything, soon everything from our pens to our trash to our kitchens to our most intimate desires, will be connected to the each other and to us, in ways unimagined until now. Will that technology be more humane or more intrusive?
David Rose is on the cutting edge of inventing that future and he details it in Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things.
My conversation with David Rose:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

For those that study and write about politics, the holy grail is to find those seminal moments in the nation's public and political life that change everything.  And while the antecedents of those events may be years in the making, they usually create a perfect storm that results in an event that is a kind of tipping point;  one that marks a permanent tectonic shift in the political landscape.  Sometimes we have to let time pass, before we appreciate or even understand those moments. 
The televised Nixon-Kennedy Debate, Watergate, the Nixon’s resignation and the Vietnam war piped into our living rooms are such event.  And, according to longtime political journalist Matt Bai, the implosion of Gary Heart's presidential campaign in 1987, was also such a moment. One that Bai captures, in all its complexity, in All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid.
It was a time when politics became a plotline, when the personal became both political and public, and when Who, What, Where and When became Gotcha.
My conversation with Matt Bai:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

It was actually Winston Churchill, not Rahm Emanuel, who said that we should never let a serious crisis go to waste.
A crisis often creates a great opportunity to face, to talk about, and even sometimes to act upon issues that had been previously frozen
Or, as Donald Rumsfeld once inarticulately put it, sometimes the only solution to an unsolvable problem, is to create a bigger problem.
It could be said that climate change provides such an opportunity.  That in seeking to address the issues of man made climate change, we will have to drill down into the very issues that caused it in the first place. That’s what Naomi Klein does in her new work This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.
My conversation with Naomi Klein:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Some of you may have seen the story recently that marriage is at an all time low in America.  We also know that two out of three Americans are overweight, or obese.  Is there a link between these two issues?
Has our national physical decline and the rise of obesity changed the way we view love and sex, and if so, what are the broad social and economic impacts of that?
That’s what Sarah Varney, senior health policy correspondent with Kaiser Health News, sets out to find out in XL Love: How the Obesity Crisis Is Complicating America's Love Life.
My conversation with Sarah Varney

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

For decades, it seems, we've read and watched stories about suicide bombers in the Middle East. We process the information without emotion, as we do most news stories.  Then 9/11 happened and suddenly suicide bombers took on a new meaning for most Americans.  
With that new understanding, award winning journalist Mike Kelly looks back at a story of a suicide bombing in Israel, that took place in 1996, years before 9/11.  The story, fraught with the humanity and frustration of loss, would have, if we knew better than, presaged so much of what’s happened since….in Israel, in Palestine, and in America.  
Mike Kelly's story is Bus on Jaffa Road: A Story of Middle East Terrorism and the Search for Justice.
My conversation with Mike Kelly:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Whether we are thinking about our smart phones, or HAL in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, we are usually deeply conflicted about artificial intelligence.  Will it be a panacea to enhance the already unique power of human intelligence or, like HAL, will its survival depend on usurping human control
That balance informs both our fear and appreciation of machines and technology and what they both can do. This is the balance that Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom seeks to find in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
My conversation with Nick Bostrom:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Revolutions are often exciting.  The stir change, mobilize ideas, and are often at the cutting edge of excitement.  Yet what happens after revolutions is often the work that matters.  The problem is that it’s hard work.  The cameras are off, the story has grown cold, but this is where the work gets done that can truly change the world.
Arguably the women's movement is such an example.  While dramatic changes once took place, arguably the hard work since has not been quite enough
While the opportunities for elite women to “lean in,” have never been stronger, American women overall today, fare worse than men on virtually every major dimension of social status, financial well-being, and physical safety.
Sexual violence is still condoned, and reproductive rights are by no means secure. Women assume disproportionate burdens in the home and pay a heavy price in the workplace. 
Yet these issues are not political priorities. Nor is there a consensus that it’s even a problem. This is the story that Stanford Law Professor Deborah Rhode tells in What Women Want: An Agenda for the Women's Movement.
My conversation with Deborah L. Rhode:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

The common portrayal of Millennials is as generation that is narcissistic, self absorbed, entitled and demanding.  Yet they are almost 90 million strong and will soon be taking their place in leadership in business, in politics and in almost every other aspect of society.
What will they be like in this new role?  How will they be when they are the boss?  That’s the situation that Lindsey Pollak looks at in Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of Leaders.
My conversation with Lindsey Pollak:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

Kierkegaard said that “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.”  Such is the powerful value of memoir and reflection
Sometimes, though, that reflection takes in more than just the individual life, it becomes a way to reflect on a time, a place, and movement.  Gail Sheehy’s life encompasses all of that.  The mainstreaming of hippie culture, feminism, new journalism, publishing all exist side by side with the touchstones of love, loss and family.  Her story is, in short, the story of the past fifty years. The proverbial grain of sand that captures the history of the time.
Gail Sheehy shares her story in her new memoir Daring: My Passages: A Memoir
My conversation with Gail Sheehy:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

We often say that actions have consequence. So do ideas. And we don’t always know the full extent of those consequences. Just as the science of splitting the atom, changed the nature of geopolitics and may still reshaped civilization, so the ripple effects of certain inventions have consequences and impacts, far beyond what was originally thought or intended.
As we worry about the spread of disease these days, it provides an interesting analogy. Essentially, if we think of certain inventions as Patient Zero, we then see how they spread over vast landscapes and change the world.
It is through this lens that Steven Johnson views the world in How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World.
My conversation with Steven Johnson:

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe